August 23, 2014
Last week, I did a little sketch of a local blueberry field. The little sketch was too small to really tell me if another particularly intriguing but dangerous composition might work, so I also did a quick quarter sheet watercolour just to try out ideas on a slightly larger scale.
I wanted to actually be sitting in the field, surrounded up close by the big blue berries, but I also wanted the painting to move into the distance. It would have been safer, but in my mind more boring, to set the entire painting either up close or in the distance. Because the berries were fully ripe and blueberry fields don’t produce every year, I went back the next day to start a large oil painting.
It was great to be able to reach over and gobble down berries! The following day, when I again set up in the blueberry field, I was dismayed to see that the harvesters and the trucks were all in the field. Luckily I got a second day in before the harvesters reached me and chopped me and the painting into little bits. I was able to finish this painting in the studio.