Why a farm and a car? Who knows?

I really have to get around to cropping that white bar out of this image...

Anyways, I like painting skies. There's something about the free-form nature of clouds, light, and air that accommodates my way of working. It's probably the easiest link of my visual memory to my hand. The same could be said about the way that I handle landscapes, but that's more basic, I think.

This piece was the result of my snagging some wooden shingles from my house in Easton and just pumping out a large volume of pieces in a short amount of time. More than that, it was one of the later pieces of the "shingle" series. By that time, my water (which I usually neglect) had become muddy from failed india ink attempts and my poor care for my steel pens (I'm one of those jerks that just rinses it in my water cup, instead of buying de-ink solutions). While working on this piece - with the understanding of what was happening to my color because of the muddy water - I came to enjoy limiting the range of colors and brightnesses I could achieve. I ran with that for a while, but have since come back to enjoying the options provided by having clean water and a limitless supply of colors at my disposal. Go figure.

I wish this image was a little larger, so you could appreciate the surface I worked through. It's about a foot and a half tall, to give you some sort of perspective on its scale.


Take care,

Andrew