November Stillness

One of the uses of outdoor painting is development of reference material for studio paintings. Using sketches done at Gray's Lake, a park not far from my home studio, I painted "November Stillness" during the past couple of weeks. The sketches are a uniform 9x12, or about half its size, so there is considerably more room in this piece to study the fall and filtering the autumn light through changing foliage. The grasses are yellow-gold along the shore of the unruffled lake. 

"November Morning," oil on canvas, 18x24

A hard wind had blown through leaving the air still, the trees mostly stripped of leaves, and the surface of the lake smooth as a mirror on the day that I sketched on the bank. The air was crisp and the sun warmed my face while I painted. It was the last day of a season of delightful painting.