Refugio Vista

In my attempts to teach myself to paint outdoors, Plein Air, I decided to tackle this scene. It is a view looking across the Santa Ynez valley with a ranch for my focal point. I consider this to be one of the 2 plein air pieces I have done that truly worked well. What worked great about this scene was capturing the light of midday, or morning actually, without even trying to. I was trying to just paint the scene in front of me and without my knowledge I painted the light! Sounds stupid but that is hard to do and somehow it happened by me just concentrating on getting the scene on canvas.

To me, that says something is starting to work inside of me without me really trying to make it work....the eye is a wonderous thing when you let it do what it does best without your interupting it!. Maybe this is why people paint outdoors in the first place, the natural light of nature will show up in your work....which is totally cool!

Here is my setup and view out there...not an expensive pochade box, my Dad made this for me so you can't beat that price! I should have taken pics right from the start but got into the painting and forgot I had the dang camera sitting right there in the truck. Duh!

And here is the finished piece.....

Anyway, I think it came out pretty well and I'm proud of this one. I will probably do a larger piece because this is a pretty typical scene here in the valley on a sunny day. It also has the combination I like in a painting, some distant structures, distant blue mountains and dark trees. The contrast of that combination is too cool.