Leaves

I realized three things from my last post. First, my old iPhone does take not the best of photos. Here is hopefully a better image.


Second, I never included anything that gives a sense of scale for you to realize that this is a big painting.


Finally, to put that in perspective, here is a detail of the leaves that I will be painting for the foreseeable future.


More to come...

-jb.

One Month of Painting

Large paintings are like marathons. Or, like the philosophy of Dory from Finding Nemo. The point is, you just have to keep painting.


These photos were taken over a period of one month.


The working time between these two images is just over 40 hours.


Aside from not getting frustrated at the grinding pace, the main challenge is keeping the foreground tree lines clean.


They are defined by the negative space of the green, and after each small section, must be scraped back into existence using a razor (especially the smaller branches).


This way, there are channels for the trees in the background paint which in the end will create a flat painting, contradictorily making it appear more three dimensional.


But the nice part in this long stretch of painting green is finding the areas that I missed (either aspen tree or leaves) and filling them in, either with yellow or with the absence of paint.


And yes, filling in the last of the green was a wicked exciting day!


-jb.

The Road Home

Aside from the curious habit I've picked up of beeping when crossing a state line, one of the true gleeful moments of a long roadtrip is seeing your starting and ending point etched in green and white. It promises a long shower and a familiar bed in not to short, or, depending on the size of your hometown, at least finite order.


But my favorite part of getting home is walking into my studio after a prolonged absence. There is a smell in that moment that could be the most calming in the world. If I could bottle it I would, instead I can only offer you the painting that greeted me.


And due to my woefully delinquent blog posts, you may or may not see it tomorrow one month and change more complete!


-jb.

Santa Fe, NM to Linville Gorge, NC

When the highlight of 1,500 miles in 36 hours is seeing three blades of a wind turbine loaded onto giant trucks making a right turn off the byway onto the highway, all I can say is, boring!


Then again, I wasn't exactly taking the scenic route, Arkansas has a lot of trees, and FYI, Tennessee is a long state driven lengthwise. But the the end point was worth it, camping with great friends in an ancient gorge deep in the Appalachian Mountains.


-jb.