Along Highway 29

18x36 Oil

This is a studio painting I started a couple months ago thinking it would hang in one of 2 shows I had opening in December. I got to a certain point on it and I got stuck, which happens. It's not a matter of how to finish it, but the best way to finish it. So it leaned facing the wall of my studio for a few weeks. Then driving back from Michigan to St. Paul I hit a stretch along Highway 29 west of Wausau when the light and scenery was very similar to this painting. I didn't have a camera with me (I know!) so I just kept making mental notes on the color of everything and completed it in a few hours a couple of days ago. It's freeing to work from your memory and painting so much from life over the last 12 years has given me the foundation for it.

Menominee River

11x14 Oil

I did this painting a couple of days after Christmas while I was still visiting my family in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This is the Menominee River which is the border between Michigan (on the right) and Wisconsin (on the left). It was a relatively warm thirty degrees with very little wind so I was able to spend a lot of time on location tweaking all the various shapes locking into one another. A bald eagle was soaring over the river for a while, I did see some tracks that looked canine and a little too big to be coyote, a wolf?