Pictures of Pictures

Good morning, hope this is a start of a great weekend for all of you. I see Ben is off to New Mexico. Have a good trip Ben and hurry back.

Ever since I can remember, I could pick up a pencil and draw a picture of something. I wasn't great but you could recognize what I was drawing. As I got older, that skill seemed to get better. I remember once when I was in grade school, I had an assignment to draw some insects. I got an "F", because the teacher thought that I had traced them. Same thing happened later that year (or the next, memory fails me) when I was assigned for homework to draw a certain bird.

Drawing with a pencil was easy, but never pursued it. I made my living at engineering design which is nothing more than drawing pictures of mechanisms or structures. Doing that for long hours every week, there just didn't seem to be any reason to "draw" anything extra.

OK, I am semi-retired, which means that I am only tired 80% of the time and closing in on 90%. Anyway, I have some free time now and decided to take up painting. After checking out the different media available, I found out that oil is the easiest, acrylics next, and water color the hardest. I don't know where finger painting fits in. . .

So, I decided to take up oil painting. I did a couple of so, so paintings and found out that putting acrylics under the oils helped fill in the details. Anyway, my oil painting days were numbered. My wife could not stand the smell in the house. OK, I solved that problem by switching to acrylics. That is when I verified that it was definitely harder than oils. Of course, that could be just for my style.

I am not a very good painter, as you will see. For example, I am now working on a painting of the Texas south west desert with a longhorn cow (Benita?) in it. I pencil sketched the cow by looking at a picture that John Wells had posted of Benita. The pencil sketch looked just like the picture I was using as a model, but when I tried to paint it, it did not turn out to well.

Another thing I can not do is people and animals. People are impossible for me and animals are a little better, but I am sure you could find better animal pictures hanging on elementary school walls drawn by first graders.

I have done, I think, about 14 acrylic pictures. I am going to show you 6 of them today and would like for you to be critics. Also, let me know which one you like best and which one you think is the worst. That will help me with future paintings. In a future blog, I will post some more for you to judge. All of these paintings were done with acrylic paint on 11" x 14" canvas.


This painting I call "Dock on Lake". It was inspired by memory of the Appalachian Mountains:

This on is titled "Mimosa" and is a view from my yard this Spring:

This one is titled "Mushroom-Morning Glories" and was from my property. Do you notice that my titles are short and sweet?:)

The title of this on is "Road to Dawn" and is a figment of my imagination:

Do you think that you can guess the title for this one? Will tell you what it is below the picture.

The above picture is titled "Mushroom". Complicated names aren't they?

OK, the last picture is my favorite of all I have done. It was from a pictures that I took of a field in North West Pennsylvania. A trip back in time. When I was a young kid, fields like this were common.

Those small bunches of hay (or straw) at the bottom of the stack were on every stack in the field. I wonder if that is just that farmer's design or trade mark of if it serves a purpose?

I will post some more for your critical eye. Please vote on the best and the worst.

Well, I did some wondering and wandering today. Some paintings were from my wandering around and some just from my wondering. . .