I”m home from our brief trip to Massachusetts. Never even saw Mattapoisett center!  We had a nor’easter on Christmas Eve and it was miserable. But a beautiful day on the Cape at my sister’s on Christmas. And a good time visiting with my mother.  We stayed overnight on the way home near Milford, PA, at the top of the Delaware Water Gap.  While eating breakfast, the sun started coming up over the frosted trees and it was beautiful.  The camera wasn’t handy so I just looked at it and tried to remember the shapes of the orange and colors and values of the surrounding sky and trees. This morning I decided to play with my new Pastel Premiere paper and do a painting from memory.  I like doing this every now and then — it’s a great exercise in color usage. I knew I wanted to stick to blues–no purples!  I used only soft pastels and Giraults for this and didn’t do any drawing on the paper. Just laid in shapes with the side of a blue Girault. I played with cool blue violets and warmer blue greens in the bushes in foreground, and I used some of the same blue green in the sky. I also introduced some warm browns in the foreground to relate to the orange at top. I think it adds balance to the picture. The orange is from my box of Blue Earth oranges. I also used a few of the new Mt. Vision storm grays that I got for Christmas. They are more for clouds and I look forward to using them more.  I enjoyed building up layers on the paper, putting down rough pieces of Unison and smoothing them with Girault. This is a great paper for doing this kind of abstracted work.

Happy New Year to you all. I hope that 2015 will be a healthy and productive year for all of us!

Frosted Morning Sunrise, Pastel Premiere, 380 Italian Clay,16 x 12