Playing Favorites: fields of dreams

Barbara Kleinhans
http://barbarakleinhans.com/root/Index.htm

This is one of my paintings from 2004 titled "Back 40". Back 40 refers to the 40 acres of famland behind the barn on my family's homestead in Wisconsin. At this time I had been transitioning not only my painting style from brushes to painting knives but also my color palette from rich jewel and earth tones to a palette using mostly warm white and raw umber. After completing a number of paintings in white and umber, it was very freeing to fill a canvas with bright splashes of cadmium red and yellow ochre. What appears to be an odd shaped blob of red in the center is actually the barn with the surrounding fields falling off to each side. This composition came about subconsciously while I was painting. It wasn't until I had completed it and stepped back to study it that I recognized what I had painted.

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Roxanne Stout
http://rivergardenstudio.typepad.com/

Scenes of a Summer Past
Acrylic
5''x10''

This painting was done on a black box, I was intrigued by the frame insert on the left side and wanted to fill it up with a landscape and to have a compliment on the right. I love to paint fields, especially when they are covered with dry grasses. Yellow ocher, indian yellow, red orange, sienna and sage are all favorite colors. In the painting on the left the magenta represents wild foxglove and the shrubbery wild aspen. The painting on the right is my impression of a hillside filled with lupine. These flowers fill meadows and open areas for weeks at a time in the summer near my home. Wild lupine even pop up in my garden, not as showy as cultivated lupine but the flowers have a more delicate beauty.


Follow Your Heart
Acrylic and paper mediums
14''x30''

This is how I picture France to be. My brother moved there with his wife two years ago. She is a native of France and I love how they followed their hearts to make their home so far from where they had lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I am visiting them this summer and so I am also following my heart. Arches are very important to me. I think of myself as quite spiritual, although I don't go to church often. To me the arch represents a window to the world, a beautiful frame that points up to the heavens and forever captures a scene. My husband and I have inherited several beautiful old stain glass windows that were salvaged from old churches in San Francisco. Many of them have this arch.


Yellow Sky Before the Rain Comes
Acrylic and paper textures
24''x36"

The buildings and homes I paint are very simple and unassuming, as if their main purpose is as a vista point to watch the changing skies. Where I live we are a high enough elevation that sometimes as the sun goes down, the water and meadows have a yellow glow or "meadow light". I really enjoyed piling on the textures here, and my paint was very thick and creamy. I blend right on my canvas and re-work my paintings over and over until they seem to be, finally, finished.