My Painting: "Hay Bales, Egg Harbor"

Here is the first painting I did after we got our panels stamped.

10" x 12" Oil on RayMar Panel. Copyright 2009

For some reason, they don't stamp the panels for the competition until Noon on Sunday. First thing you do is get stamped and what else? Go paint, of course! Mary Ann and I had discovered this spot either Sunday morning, or the day before. In addition to hay bales, this property had an extensive garden filled with glorious delphinium in many shades of blue, bird houses, statues, and a bunch of colorful stuff for painting! Inside the 100 year old barn - which a few years back had taken a direct hit from a tornado but has now been rebuilt - is an antique shop. We stopped for the hay bales (and a bathroom), and also to ask if we could paint at this site. While the antique shop sits on the original barn floor, the rest of this complex structure consists of rooms to rent!

I took this shot of my painting while it was still on my easel just after completing the painting. There is a lot of glare in the sky area especially, and it's a bit washed out, but it's the only shot of this painting that I got outside the frame.

I painted with Mary Ann Davis and Tom Nachreiner. Tom said he had a spot. We followed him and low and behold, his spot was also ours. Mary Ann and I had discussed painting from the parking lot/garden area, but Tom had noticed this side of it. We trudged our stuff up a small but steep incline at the side of the road and stood in an open field to paint. They stayed side-by-side, catching up; I walked around and decided on this view. So at the end of a couple of hours, this was my first painting completed during the competition. I felt good about it, especially since we needed to have two paintings on the gallery wall by Tuesday evening. My view of this site was totally different from Mary Ann's and Tom's who focused more on the bales themselves. I had a great time painting, and I liked the sense of place and light that I felt I'd captured. I rarely paint clouds, so when it came time to title this work, all I could think of was "I never paint clouds." I left it at the gallery on Monday without a title, and in the end it received the mundane title I'd hoped to avoid.