Starting over on some Texas birds; Finishing Snow Geese for Jens

29 Apr Starting over on some Texas birds; Finishing Snow Geese for Jens

Posted from Seattle, WA on April 29, 2023. Delia and I made a short trip down to New Mexico in the last half of April. I’m limited to paintings that are 18 x 24 inches or less down there so I went back to work on the Texas paintings.

On the last day down there I made a movie about them, here it is:

(27) Studio Rundown April 23, 2023 – YouTube

Here’s the Skagit Snow Geese painting. Jens was brilliant I think to point this out as a painting with real potential that just needs a final revisioning effort. The idea isn’t to add, not any new principle subjects but new sub-flocks in the distance, especially in the NW quadrant which is now empty. It’s great for paintings to have relief from congestion and a place to rest, but to have almost nothing in the NW quadrant without a clear reason seems never to have worked in this painting, which has been fully market-tested and not done all that well. However, I also am fixing the prespective in the fields, which had been off, and more work and a “road” will be installed. I love the core of the painting, the barns, Baker and the geese and I believe this painting could gain a constituency, although it took Jens Klinner to point this stuff out.

A nice woman from Fort Myers, Florida kindly ordered two hummingbirds of Costa Rica and I realized it was time to print this poster again, as I am no longer using the offset-litho version. This painting brings out the re-working gene in me, and that’s pretty easy anyway, so I’ve been workng furiously on it, although the differences don’t jump out. I will work one more session tomorrow and republish this; this is what it looks like currently.

This painting came out of the Jens Klinner Shuffle. Jens asked me to look through the stacks of old and never-finished paintings and see what was there. It has been a bit of a life-changer and this is one of the paintings I became re-enamored with. The Cougar was walking on a railroad track, that didn’t work for me so I am in the process of changing it to a log across a wetland. We were up in the Middle Fork recently and found plenty of logs across wetlands to photograph for ref.