So it begins-with a landscape?

The first step was quite a surprise. My studio mate Sharon Nakazato and I went to Baxter Road nearby to try out plein air work as a test for a future plein air date for charity. We wanted to see what supplies we would be missing and how it would work, so we went to nearby Baxter Road, a beautiful pastureland where horsemen and women ride and people walk their dogs. Fields and trees, hills and dales. We found some hay bales a ways into the back fields and set up. I tried painting with watercolor the view. I wanted to abstract it, but kept getting caught in the description of the landscape and going representational. OK so maybe we do the abstracting back in the studio…

In my first class with Dan Becker I showed him the watercolor and I turned it sideways and said I wanted to start from there. So I did, on a big canvas. Here’s the watercolor and my derivation on canvas:

Here’s the 24″ x 36″ canvas I painted from the watercolor:

And, as I am a fan of cropping the best composition and area I like, here’s the detailed area I decided to go with as the first composition:

So this is my starting place. Where I want to be is another thing entirely, but I’m on the path…

I know this is very Diebenkorn-like, and I like that quality, but I don’t want to paint like Diebenkorn. So I take what I like from this and what I can learn from what I have done and I go from there. Dan recommended I work on a few canvases simultaneously and work larger. He said he could tell that I am more comfortable working large (how did he know I used to do 6-8′ canvases in art school?). So I bought myself 6 36″ x 48″ canvases and started three new ones, using this composition as a starting place for one of them. I had been working with map imagery in my printmaking and am interested in the lines and the topography from them, so I wanted to add that element, so I roughed in one of my new canvases:

And another:

And I added the topographic element to it:

Now I was working with different ideas and forms and techniques, areas that I liked….