Carol Berry, Early Morning Hayfield. Oil, 11 x 14 inches. ©2008.

This hayfield is near Emily Provincial Park. Summer weekends used to find me jumping in my car before breakfast to go take landscape reference photos. I forced myself to paint this in one day, encouraging myself to get into the habit of painting, signing, framing, submitting, showing and selling. This resulted in me having no paintings left, as I sold all my small landscapes at Don Valley Art Club (DVAC) art shows. 

Since then I’ve refocusing my art goals. I am painting small plein air studies and I joined two plain air painting groups. I am in the planning stages for a larger landscape painting (24″ x 48″) to be painted indoors. It will be interesting to see how my emerging plein air painting techniques might inform my studio painting technique.

In the past year I’ve learning how to manage WordPress, Blogger, Feedburner and Twitter. I now manage two blogs, one for the Don Valley Art Club and and this one. A more creative offshoot if this is that I’ve started a sketch book for the first time, inspired by the Urban Sketchers blog.