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.
Sunset Across the Street
by Simon Bland / 05 Aug 2014
Sunset. 12x9 oil on linen panel. 2014. A sketch of the trees across the street from our house. This is based on a painting of the same scene that I did from life earlier in the year before the grass had greened up in the spring. This time around I tried to paint what I thought would work rathe...
Catoctin View Lane
by Simon Bland / 26 Jul 2014
Catoctin View Lane. 10x8 oil on linen panel. 2014. This is a roadside scene just around the corner from our house, along the back road into our neighborhood. I pass it all the time and thought the look of the dark mass against the light mass would make an interesting sketch. I saved the thicke...
Portrait of Maya
by Simon Bland / 23 Jul 2014
Maya. 16x20, oil on linen. 2014. I used the client's own photos to paint this portrait of Maya. What made the whole thing click was the abstract sense in which there's a cool shadow area in front of a warmly lit background. Since the original photo was taken using a cellphone I struggled to get the ...
Plein Air at Oak Hill, Bluemont
by Simon Bland / 22 Jul 2014
Oak Hill Farm. 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2014. I think this is one of my more adventurous plein paintings of the year: I had to work quickly to get the sky down before it changed too much and rearrange elements in the scene in front of me to make a good picture. All while I stood in a horse pasture ...
Studies based on a scene from Copeland Farm in Hillsboro, VA
by Simon Bland / 19 Jul 2014
In July I painted at a plein air session at Copeland Farm in Hillsboro, VA. The painting didn't survive once I got back to the studio, but I was interested in understanding how I could have approached it differently so I resurrected its basic elements in a series of studies: 1. I tri...
Hay Bales at Dresden Farm
by Simon Bland / 19 Jul 2014
Hay Bales at Dresden Farm. 9x12 oil on linen. 2014. I don't paint hay bales very often, but I was struck by the abstract pattern of the circles and ellipses that these bales made at Dresden Farm in Middleburg. The lighting was more or less in my face (contre jour), which made the contras...
Study for Featherbed Lane
by Simon Bland / 19 Jul 2014
Featherbed Lane Study. 10x8, oil on linen panel. 2014 This is a small study I did in advance of trying to tackle a larger (24x20) painting of the same scene. I wanted to see where the main stumbling blocks were going to be and get a feel for the overall difficulty of the painting. Now that I have it...
Phillips Farm at Waterford
by Simon Bland / 09 Jul 2014
Phillips Farm. 8x10 oil on linen panel. 2014. Another small painting that I worked on over the weekend. I've been sitting on some photos I took at Waterford for a couple of years now and finally decided to use some of them as the basis for a painting. I pushed the treeline high up in the...
More Wheat Fields near Mountville, VA
by Simon Bland / 09 Jul 2014
Wheat Fields at Groveton II, 9x12 oil on linen panel. 2014 I painted this over the weekend just to give myself the chance to play around with a few ideas and techniques. In particular, I tried to keep the painting as loose as possible. The look of the wheat in the distance suggested a more exaggerat...