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Showing posts from July, 2017

Meet Up Group

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Check out my new Meet Up group for painting and sketching in the Great Basin. I'll be in South Lake Tahoe the first week of August. https://www.meetup.com/Great-Basin-Plein-Air-Painters/  Also a new Facebook page to go with it, where I share my explorations of the Great Basin:  https://www.facebook.com/Great-Basin-Plein-Air-Painters-105666293452755/ It's a long process, but this is all part of how I do research for a potential Volume 2 book on the Ecological History of the Great Basin, which would be a companion volume to A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California (Heyday: 2010). Field sketching in the Wee Pah Springs Wilderness Area on Timber Mountain, Nevada. Plein air painting on Sonora Pass CA in the Sierra Nevada. A lot of snow in June 2017!

Mountain and Desert Travels With Paintbox: Part 1

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The past month I've been trying to bring the paint box along with me more on trips and pause for an hour or two at certain spots to paint a landscape or a study of a part of a natural feature. Since I live in the Nevada Desert, any sort of travel means I have to drive through some beautiful countryside, so I have been determined to paint more of it (and sketch it too). In this 3 part series I show some of my methods and the resulting open-air oil paintings. Twenty or so years ago when I took my paint box outdoors to do oil studies it was this large and somewhat clunky old paint box: This served me well over the years, and it held everything I needed, but it was large and heavy--too heavy really to take on a hike. I usually sat on a chair or on the ground and set this paint box on the ground near me or on a table--no tripod in those days. Today there is a large array of small, light-weight, and well-designed paint boxes of all kinds to choose from. Many come wit