Showoff

This piece was inspired by a small work completed on location in Los Osos, CA.  The original 9x12 painting won Artist's Choice award in the San Luis Obispo Plein Air event, and was a fairly abstract piece that was constructed of a multitude of fan-like shapes, and the painting had many quick, gestural abstracted strokes in it.   While the larger work is more developed than the plein air work, I tried to maintain the same feeling in the loose gestural strokes, particularly in the foreground and mountains, and created a more developed focal point at the trunks of the stand of trees.  Working in this large format turned out to be quite challenging.  To make my "right brained" strokes  look natural involved a surprisingly great number of repeated efforts.  I completed at least three versions of the piece, and then wiped out large sections each go-around, before I was satisfied with the result.   It turned out that the effort involved in making the final piece look "effortless" was the hardest part of all.