This is, obviously, a picture left over from my Summer 2024 period.
It’s not for sale, unfortunately. I already know who I’m going to give it to.
Tag: the natures
Paintings of the Drive Home
I’m continuing with the “quantity over quality” approach. This is partly inspired by an artist whose work I found on Pinterest, often with the tag “a sunset a day.” He does lovely impressionistic cloud paintings. However, I think he may be putting more time into them than I am.
What I do is, notice the sky around 3 or 4 p.m. when I’m driving myself and my offspring home from school across the windswept Idaho plains, take a mental picture, and do my best to reproduce that mental picture over the next few days.
Both of these are 8×10.
The one on the top is cornfields; the one on the bottom features fields that have been harvested, then harrowed, then planted with something green again before the winter.
Another 8×10: Big Southern Butte in a dirty sky.
The Tetons at Evening
Done from a photo.
I was there, I took the photo, then I came home and did the painting.
Quote from a manly man
Zach arrived on schedule. He stood about six foot two, lean and wiry from triathlon training and mixed martial arts, thirty-five years of age, bearded and chewing tobacco. After losing his bid for mayor’s office, he’d taken up fighting for money, a common enough career path.
The Whisper on the Night Wind, by Adam Shoalts, p. 17
Another Mediocre Painting
The inspiration: Logs and rocks visible under water at Jenny Lake.
The execution: The first painting I’ve ever done entirely with a pallette knife.
Yes, yes. Underwhelming, I know. I have so many ideas and limited time, so I have decided to go the route of prodigious quantity over quality, based on the theory that if you churn out enough quantity, your quality will also improve eventually. Actually, I have seen this principle operate in my son’s paintings. However, in this case the quality is more potential than realized.
I have seen amazing, photorealistic paintings of pebbles under shallow water by professional Western artists. I’d love to return to that theme some day, when I have weeks or months to spend on it, and do a better job. Bucket list.
Botany: Plains Prickly Pear
I know I’ve blogged about these plants before, but please enjoy these pictures of them as seen at Citadel of Rocks.
Botany: Speargrass
I did not need to look this up in my Falcon Guide to Central Rocky Mountain Wildflowers. Husband identified it, and kids immediately started throwing it at each other.
Idaho Wildflowers headscratcher: Silvery Lupine?
I first assumed this was a yucca, but the leaves are all wrong.
I looked up these leaves with the help of the Google machine, and it suggested Silvery Lupine.
Sure enough, here’s a more typical-looking example of the flower from the same trip.
I can only conclude that the freakishly tall and white silvery lupine is an unholy hybrid of lupine and yucca.
Here’s an in-between-looking specimen.
Botany is hard.
Idaho Wildflowers: Creeping Oregongrape
“The bright yellow flowers give way to a grapelike cluster of purple berries with whitish coating. In the fall, some of the leaves often turn bright red, orange, or bronze.
“The tart berries make a refreshing, lemonade-like drink and fine jelly or wine. The yellow inner bark was used by Native Americans as a yellow dye and as a medicine with many applications.”
(Falcon Guide, p. 121)
Update: Idaho still smoky
As of the taking of these pictures.
