A couple of weeks ago i went to the river because I wanted to take some photographs of fog. The photos didn't come out very well so I decidet to try a painting and change the colors a bit and the mood. Out came a painting where the fog is about to lift soon and leave a beautiful sunny day. In reality the fog stayed for a couple of more days and left us grey and cold days.

There was no source picture for this painting, it was painted from memories of time spent in the northwoods of Wisconsin; I wanted to depict a very soggy, wet, morning.

I've painted a lot of foggy marshes, but not usually on a vertical format. This is the left side of a photo I took somewhere in Michigan. I used cerulean blue, Hooker's green, yellow ochre and burnt sienna. The first stages were wet-into-wet with a wide brush, the final touches were on dry paper with a dagger-striper brush for the weeds.

Here in Vermont, the snow often lingers right through April. These are images seen just north of Woodstock and are painted on Richeson 140 lb. cold press paper with Isabey 6227Z brushes. I use the liftable colors: Aureolin, Rose Madder Genuine and Cobalet Blue in the sky and mountain. Soft edges are created either wet-in-wet or with a lost-edge technique. The foreground is in Indian Red and the staining triad of Quinacridone Gold, Permanent Alizarin and Winsor Blue (red shade). Despite Edna St. Vincent Millay's quote that; "April is the cruelest month." I find the colors this time of year entrancing. The balance of soft and hard edges everywhere coupled with delicate grays never cease to entertain me.

I painted this in June of last year, in the middle of our rainy (a.k.a. typhoon) season. We have a huge frangipani tree in front of our house, and it is abloom with white flowers all year round, rain or shine. I thought it would be nice to paint its waterlogged condition in watercolor. What better medium, eh? And it was fun to paint all those water drops too.

This is a portrait of Mallard, a rough-water kayak and my faithful companion on many forays into blue water. I was leaving the Coast and Mallard was going on to a new owner, but I wanted one last trip, which I planned as being in the sun. Unfortunately, I ended up running from a squall that blew in, and finished the portrait with the rain starting to fall on the paper.