It's been a busy few months, with working full time, painting, and traveling I don't know which way is up! One of my recent trips was down to Tubac to spend a week with the Plein Air on the Santa Cruz painters. What an awesome week it was!
This was my first experience painting "in the open air" as plein air means. It's quite a departure from my studio painting where often I would labor for hours and hours on a single painting, fretting over getting every detail right. I'm still learning how to paint loosely and was not entirely successful sticking to painting something that I like within a couple of hours.
This is "Cottonwoods", which I think is my most successful plein air painting, in that I didn't mess with it in the studio after my work outdoors.
I didn't finish my other paintings outdoors and when this happens, painters usually return to the same scene to finish on another day, but I didn't have the opportunity because we were on to the next fabulous site. So I finished them each evening in my guest room transformed into a temporary studio. Not to say that I'm not happy with the results, but I found myself devolving into fussing over details once again.
I really need to practice plein air painting more, so I joined up with the Sonoran Plein Air Painters that weekend in Tubac for a paint out and sale. I'm amazed that I produced this painting, "Casa Maya", in less than 3 hours!
