Mountain Study

"Mountain Study," oil on panel, 6x8

When you live here in the upper Midwest, you don't see mountains. There are big hills, even distant vistans, but no true mountains. Most of Iowa is rolling or flat plains. One of my personal exercises is to imagine other landscapes and other climes. Clearly, either photos or previous travels, or both, have been useful. 

In Mountain Study I was interested not only in the trees and colors but in depth. To suggest distant mountains meant light values and virtually no identifiable edges, with distant colors going bluer and bluer and more and more pale. Studies like this can translate into believable works on a much larger scale.