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.
Phish
by Simon Bland / 29 Jun 2015
Phish. 16x16, oil on linen. 2015 With the studio tour over and done (and what a great weekend it was!), I realized that I needed to catch up on my backlog of work. Over the past week I've been locked away in my studio trying to get ahead with the five commissioned paintings that I've promised to do ...
Lavender Farm
by Simon Bland / 16 Jun 2015
Lavender Farm. 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2015 A plein air painting done this morning at Blooming Hill Farm in Purcellville, VA. It was a lovely day to be painting outside and I couldn't get the paint down fast enough, even with a large palette knife, to keep up with the movement of the sky. While fi...
Coming Up: Western Loudoun Artist Studio Tour
by Simon Bland / 12 Jun 2015
Come and see me on this year's WLAST studio tour. I will be at stop #25: Franklin Park Art Center in Purcellville, VA. I have nearly 40 new paintings for sale in a range of sizes and prices. I'm delighted to be co-located with five other talented artists who have work in an assortment of mediu...
Short Hill Sketch
by Simon Bland / 31 May 2015
Short Hill Sketch. 6x8, oil on linen panel. 2015. The most enjoyable paintings are those that can be painted with abandon. It's difficult to mess up a small sketch because anything wrong can be easily fixed (the tough part is admitting there is a problem). And since they require little time and effo...
Elvan Road Study
by Simon Bland / 25 May 2015
Elvan Road Study. 5x7, oil on linen panel. 2015 This is a driveway off one of the many unpaved back roads around our town which I had not traveled until recently. The broken concrete driveway created a strong contrast with the dark greens of the grass and made a great lead-in to the focal point. I w...
Blue Ridge Leader Article
by Simon Bland / 24 May 2015
Earlier this month a nice article written by Andrea Gaines appeared in the Blue Ridge Leader (a local Loudoun County, VA newspaper). This is a link to the online version:http://brleader.com/?p=17075...
Nimrod
by Simon Bland / 20 May 2015
Nimrod. 11x14, oil on linen panel. 2015 It doesn't start to feel like spring until I have a couple of rabbit paintings under my belt. This is one that was hanging around in our garden the other day. His ears looked like they had been nibbled by his mom when he was a youngster, so I gave them some pa...
Turbulence
by Simon Bland / 18 May 2015
Woodgrove Meadows. 8x6, oil on linen panel. 2015 The sky was cloudy and a storm was starting to develop at our first day of painting at Woodgrove Meadows last year. I tried to convey a sense of the turbulence and heaviness of the sky in this small sketch. The sky was painted with some restraint at f...
North Sky (Large)
by Simon Bland / 13 May 2015
North Sky (Large). 10x8, oil on linen panel. 2015. Two scraped-off paintings in a row shakes an artist's confidence. Determined to avoid strike three, today I pulled out a small plein air study and painted a larger version of the thing. For a fresh look, I limited the working time to about the same ...