I’ve been taking a little break from encaustic recently and giving myself some time to work on landscape paintings in oil. With that extra time, I finally finished a big one that I have been working on, on and off, for months. Honestly I can’t remember when I started it.
Many years ago I took a plein air painting class and one of the days we were somewhere in rural northern Baltimore County. In this class I would paint a little oil painting that looked like the scene in front of me, more or less. And then I would take it back to my studio and keep painting it, but completely change it. Abstracting it out. It was a lot of fun.
I did that with this scene. You can echoes of what’s happening in the above painting, below.
This small painting has since long been sold. But I always wanted to return to the photo reference and actually paint the landscape, as it was. Finally did it. The paintings are so very different. Interesting exercise to do both renditions with the same place. I am glad that after 12 years I finally returned to it!