Afternoon Glare on Rutland Water

Oil on board, 7.5 x 10 inches

 
I painted this one last August en plein air, and polished it off yesterday. The sky changed very much in the two hours I was on site, so by the end, the light had changed hugely. In these circumstances, it's almost impossible to carry on, because you will have two pictures in one. There was no sparkling light at all on the water at the end, so it was very different. Time to pack up and head for the studio with aide memoire of a photo, which, in this case, I didn't take, so memory had to do!

Langstrath Beck

 Oil on Board, 7.5 x 10 inches

Experimenting again using a reference photo, this is similar to one I painted a few years ago from a different angle. I really loved painting the main tree with the wet, standard oil paint. It's a bit tight in places, but the overall result I'm reasonably happy with. Work in progress...

Reflections near Tixover

Oil on Board, 9 x 12 inch

I painted this one en plein air and finished it off in the studio. It's a mixture of my old familiar style and new, looser mode of painting. I think my new method will prove easier to paint en plein air, and I can feel a new chapter beginning...

Stormy Sky over Farmstead by Lyddington

 Oil 7.5 x 10 inches 

Still experimenting with my looser method of painting, which I'm really enjoying. The entire landscape was done with a large flat, quite different to my modus operandi, but great fun.

Addendum - I wasn't convinced about the brown ploughed field in the forground, so I changed it to a stubble field, which I think improves matters - see the two versions above!

Evening Hack, near Glaston

Oil 9 x 12 inches. 

I painted this one a couple of weeks ago out in the raw, if a very warm September evening can be considered 'in the raw'! It was a bit of a struggle with the light changing all the time, but I wanted to capture that lovely, golden light as evening comes. I finished the painting off in the studio. This is a slight mix of techniques, using a large, flat brush to paint all the trees, but I switched to my trusty 1" decorator's brush to paint the foreground roadsides - this is a very quick method and although the effect is a little more photographic then painterly, perhaps, it works, is fast and helps to give depth to the painting, rather than being all painterly, or less fully described.