Summer Sky, Burger Park

This 10x12 oil was painted in June, 2006 at Burger Park - an open space type of park along Salmon Creek in Greece. It has become one of my favorite painting spots. On this morning I was particularly attracted to the clouds. In fact, after seeing some fabulous cloud paintings by Marc Hanson, I had been waiting for a day with this type of sky. I feel I made a breakthrough with clouds here, as they usually turned out too heavy feeling, with too much contrast (bases overly dark and tops overly light). Here I captured more of the true feeling of these type of clouds - on these somewhat hazy summer days, the clouds are often almost the same value as the sky. Seems so obvious now!

Of course, it took me so long that I sort of neglected the bottom half of the painting...it's not bad, but could be better. Nevertheless, this one also got an award at the June show, and people were raving about the sky.