A Blog About Oil Painting
Welcome to my blog. Here you'll find me rambling on about all sorts of things related to art in general and oil painting in particular. There's even a recipe for dog cookies hidden away somewhere.
Like the rest of the site, this section is still a work in progress and I will be making it tider and easier to navigate in time. There is a lot of content, so using the buttons below may help you to get around. Newest posts are shown first.
A Windy Day
by Simon Bland / 22 Jan 2016
A Windy Day (plein air). 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2016 Today, while our old home on the east coast is forecast to get 24"+ of snow, I managed to get out and paint on a beautiful, partly cloudy day at one of my favorite spots on Golden Beach in Ballard. I'm still trying to get the hang of the sea an...
Kid Stuff
by Simon Bland / 21 Jan 2016
Sea Study. 5x7, oil and cold wax medium on linen panel 2016 When I was 5 or 6 I went through a period of painting nothing but boats on the ocean, usually with a small island thrown in for good measure. I'm not sure why I felt this was such a compelling subject, but I suspect that it had something to...
Some Forgotten Studies
by Simon Bland / 16 Jan 2016
In my studio I have a stack of sketches and studies. It's essentially a pile of doodles and ideas, things that I've hung on to in the anticipation that they can eventually be turned into real paintings, or things that might be helpful as I work on something further down the line. I created these stu...
Clam Bay Studies
by Simon Bland / 10 Jan 2016
Clam Bay Study. 8x10, oil on linen panel. 2016 This small study was a way to experiment with a different approach to the blue-gray colors of the seascape. Using a palette of black, alizarin and yellow ochre, I proved to myself that it's possible to paint the coastline without using a blue. &nbs...
Gloucestershire Old Spot
by Simon Bland / 06 Jan 2016
Gloucestershire Old Spot. 20x28, oil on linen. 2016 It's becoming a tradition that I start off the new year with a farm animal painting. In all honesty, I haven't seen any farm animals in Seattle yet, but I have enough reference photos from Virginia to let me do this for the next several centuries. ...
Capitol Hill Seattle
by Simon Bland / 01 Jan 2016
Capitol Hill, Seattle. 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2015 This is the view from one of the windows in our apartment in Seattle, painted on a re-used linen panel that had been worn smooth by the sanding and re-priming. The abstract idea is a cityscape as a landscape: the field of buildings in place of a ...
Charcoal Sketch of a Gloucestershire Old Spot
by Simon Bland / 31 Dec 2015
Gloucestershire Old Spot. Charcoal on paper, 11x24 (approx). 2015. In this sketch I'm working on the layout for a painting of a pig I met at Ayrshire Farm in Upperville, VA. Sketching it out like this lets me see the image without any of the clutter in the photograph. The abstract idea is to have a ...
Sunset
by Simon Bland / 30 Dec 2015
Sunset (cell phone pic of the painting). 5x7, oil on linen panel. 2015 A cloudless sky at sunset seems to dwarf the land and I am always drawn to the continuum of the color changes in the sky. The contrast of the warm sky against a flat landscape feels like something worth trying to capture. I came ...
More Beach Painting
by Simon Bland / 29 Dec 2015
Bainbridge Island (plein air). 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2015 Today I managed to get back to the beach for my last plein air effort of 2015. It was less windy than the last outing but still fairly cold. After my experiences on the first outing I made a knotted bag that can be filled with stones to k...