It's a New Year!

My big plan for the end of 2011 was to wrap up several projects and start 2012 with a cleaner studio and fewer things on my calendar that take me away from painting. The plan fell apart when we had two bouts of unusually bad weather in CT and then, of course, the holidays which consume some time but are wonderful family events. So today I return to the plan. A week or so ago, I cleaned out a considerable number of digital photos and tossed them away, recovering about 2G of space on my computer. I could easily toss another 2G, but just yesterday I received an e-mail from someone asking me to paint a small piece from his photo (but will reference a photo or fifty that I took years ago). Computers are great! In about a half hour I was able to give him a positive reply and now have a small project to focus my attention on. Among other things accomplished at the beginning of this new year, I have cleaned and burned paintings that were never going to be completed. These watercolors were nice enough for me to keep for reference, but not nice enough that I wanted anyone to see them, and were a storage problem. I have another batch ready to go . . . almost. And, I tossed another giant bag of stuff I picked up at trade shows. Best of all, I went out in the cold twice and painted. The colors were wonderful although muted. It was difficult to settle into a subject, because the more I looked, the more became interesting! I settled on a BIG red, red barn with white trim for the center of interest, patches of green green grass, tree groups tinges with yellow ochre and russets, and periwinkly mauve distant hills. A bit cliche, but always good practice.