"Wind in the Pines" is a pastel painting, 28x22".  It was painted over an old pastel I had started and lost interest in.  With pastels, you can only apply a certain amount of material to the surface before it won't stick anymore or you begin to pull up the bottom layer.  That limited my options for content, since I needed to accomplish the piece with very few strokes.  I took this picture of a silhouetted pine tree in Pisgah National Forest back in the early 2000's.  I have always loved the shapes and lines of the branches.  The tree, however, was entirely backlit and thus a very flat dark shape.  That was uninteresting to me so I improvised light hitting the trunk and branches.The result is textured with lots of movement and visible strokes of the pastel, again letting the medium have a prominent role.  Happy Thursday!   

Autumn Breeze I & II are 15x22" mixed media collages on watercolor paper.  They started out abstract with a vague linear underpainting and random pieces of collage paper applied, actually with a vertical orientation instead of the horizontal one you see here.  I let them sit for a while to see what they might tell me about where they should go.  Sometimes that takes a while and then one day, I suddenly know exactly what I want to do.  I realized the shapes of the paper reminded me of leaves blowing around in the wind.  When I rotated the images, the brushwork in the background became a forest with light dappling through.  From there, I used acrylic paint to define and explain the backlit leaves with their veins and shadows.  The result is not highly realistic but an impression, letting the materials themselves have as much presence as the imagery.  As you can probably tell, I really enjoyed working on these.  Happy Tuesday!