A Blog About Oil Painting
Welcome to my blog. Here you'll find me rambling on, unassisted by AI, 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.
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...
Painting at the Beach
by Simon Bland / 23 Dec 2015
After several days of rain I made the most of a brief break in the weather and went to paint at the local beach. It's just a ten minute trip from the studio but I can't think of a more challenging environment in which to set up an easel: it was cold, windy, it rained and the easel blew over. I ...
Bunny in Progress
by Simon Bland / 22 Dec 2015
Bunny (WIP). 14x11, oil on linen panel. 2015. It's been a while since I finished any new work so I jumped the gun and posted this one before completing it. This is done from the customer's own photograph. This first layer is painted directly over a (dried) raw umber block in and was done in one sess...
Setting up the New Studio
by Simon Bland / 09 Dec 2015
I'm almost done moving in to the new studio in Ballard. This is a shot I took when I was halfway through. The studio has north light windows and I've put in some daylight LED bulbs above as work lights. I'm not sure their color rendering index is going to be great, but I think they will work when co...
Relocating
by Simon Bland / 24 Nov 2015
As you may know, my wife and I have recently moved to Seattle, WA. I will be taking space in a new studio starting in December at which point I will resume my normal painting schedule.My email address, web site and phone number will all remain the same. You can get in touch with me at any time via m...
Cottonwoods
by Simon Bland / 19 Oct 2015
Cottonwoods. 11x14, oil on linen panel. 2015. Today's paint out was at Great Country Farms in Bluemont, VA. This will probably end up being my last plein air of the year. This is one of the few locations (perhaps the only one?) in Loudoun County that has stands of cottonwood trees, so I made the mos...