5/7/07
Yesterday was another painting day. I went to E. P. Sawyer Park and continued the landscape I started a month ago. One of the dangers of painting [i]en plein air[/i] in sunlight is that, once the painting is taken indoors and viewed in typically poor interior lighting, the whole painting looks much darker. Some paintings I’ve done in years past looked like bright sunny scenes while sunlight was on the canvas, but when viewed indoors they’ve looked like an oil paint version of those night scenes that were actually filmed in daylight using special filters in old movies.

I tried to be conscious of that while I was painting, and it worked, although I’ll need to make a few adjustments. There are a couple of areas I need to brighten. I also want to work on the sky a little. However, I could stop right now and call the painting done. I’m quite happy with it. I’ll do a little “tightening up,” but it looks good. I’m especially happy with the tree limbs.

I was painting in a weedy area that bordered woods. One really nice thing about painting in such surroundings (and this is one of my favorite things about fishing in an isolated spot, too) is that the wildlife comes out around me. Painting is a quiet and relatively motionless activity, so lots of little critters come and go and don’t pay much attention to me. The underbrush was so thick, though, that it was often hard to figure out what I was seeing or hearing.

There were all kinds of interesting bird calls, and things rustling through the leaves. Squirrels and chipmunks and mice. I saw some huge bird of prey, probably an owl, flying up into the trees carrying something in its talons.