Golden Bough

Here in Iowa the weather has finally turned to wet, cold and grey. For the moment at least there won't be much outdoor painting. So instead work is moving indoors with larger landscapes in the offing and a new cityscape or two already in the works. 

In our country most people live in cities and towns yet artists still paint pastoral landscapes with ponds and trees and animals. For me, a city boy, the streets and buildings are more interesting. You can pose angular and rectangular against the more unruly natural world--trees on a street for example. Cityscapes can be explorations of differing shapes, round and straight, angled and curved, and so on.

Hoff, "East Locust Street, Autumn (study)," oil on panel, 12x9

The golden leaves of street trees caught my eye last month, their glow enhanced by the blueness of the sky and the darker pavement and buildings. The street was busy with cars, but the most interesting part of the scene was branches and leaves against the severely rectilinear human constructions. The city is Des Moines Iowa, which has bridges between buildings (called skywalks) that make downtown more pleasant in the cold months. This study will be the basis for a larger work now that the weather is beginning to close in.