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.
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...
Wheat Fields at Groveton Farm
by Simon Bland / 26 Jun 2014
Wheat Fields at Groveton Farm. 9x12, oil on linen panel. 2014 After a near sell out weekend with the Western Loudoun Artist Studio Tour I ventured out again on Tuesday with Loudoun Sketch Club to do some painting on location at Dresden Farm in Middleburg. I was excited to find that their hay fields ...
Tuesday's Plein Air at Innisfree Farm
by Simon Bland / 17 Jun 2014
Innisfree III. 8x10 oil on linen. 2014 Plein Air This Tuesday's outing with Loudoun Sketch Club was back to Innisfree Farm in Marshall, VA for the second week. We had a great tour of the farm in the back of a 4x4 and I got the chance to see the inside of some Purple Martin nesting boxes. This ...
Sunday Morning in the Studio
by Simon Bland / 15 Jun 2014
Innisfree Sketching: 8x10 oil on linen. 2014 For the past 6 weeks I've been getting in the studio every day at 6AM. I have 20 paintings ready to go for the WLAST studio tour and one delivered to Cooley Gallery in Leesburg, VA. With some inventory ready for the tour, this morning I felt I could affor...
Painting on Location in Marshall, VA
by Simon Bland / 10 Jun 2014
Innisfree Farm. 9x12 oil on linen. 2014 I spent this morning standing in the middle of a field at Innisfree Farm in Marshall, VA. It started out quite cloudy and overcast but by the time I was half-way through the painting the sun had come out. I laid this one down fairly quickly and did...
Waterford Gardens
by Simon Bland / 08 Jun 2014
Waterford Gardens. 12x16 oil on linen panel. 2014. I've been working on this painting for a the past month and consequently it has a thicker paint layer than usual. My starting point for this painting was a plein air study that I made a few years ago, however, in a more recent photograph I not...