North Bluff. 5x7, oil on linen panel. 2016
Today I took a bit of a different turn in my sketch-a-thon. Because I had other things that I needed to get done, I was only able to get a couple of sketches finished.
I revisited some of the scraped-off field studies that I did yesterday, working from a combination of memory and the notan sketches I had done on site.
Things didn't go so well at first which turned out to be a stroke of luck: I ended up pushing the foreground paint around with a painting knife and losing all the detail that I'd tried to paint. When I made a loose smear of a blue gray across the top of that I felt like I finally had something.
This is exactly the kind of thing that I wanted to get out of doing so much sketching - a freeing up and a way to look differently at something I've done many times in the past. This is only a small painting but, in a way, it represents a big step forward for me.