Back from Boston

I returned this past Saturday from a five-day painting intensive with artist Ann Christensen. It was a very worthwhile thing to have done - I think it has already had a big impact on how I paint. The funny thing was that though I thought I wanted to simplify my style (hers is very spare, with very effective use of color), this latest effort is anything but simplified. Thinking about it, I feel that what I really wanted to get rid of was a fussy obsession with detail that I don't have the technique to pull off. I tend to get bogged down in trying to paint realistically, and I really appreciated Ann's approach, which I felt liberated me to be more impressionistic (since that seems to all I can do at this point).

So I am putting to use some of the techniques she taught me, but in my own way. This sketch was done wet-to-wet, very loose, very quickly. The larger scale painting is proving a bit more difficult to pull of - I'm having to re-work it much more than the sketch. Maybe that's only to be expected.