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In the fall of 2020, my wife, Tammie, and I spent the afternoon walking the beautiful trails at Holly Recreational State Park in Holly, MI. It's our favorite time of year to take our walks in. The leaves had incredible color and I took a lot of photos as inspiration for future studio paintings. The photos that I was eager to paint from the most were the ones where Tammie was on the main trail with dappled sunlight all over the ground, partially lighting her, as well.

 A couple years ago, I did this knife painting based on one of the photos. I titled it In Her Own Thoughts. It's a 20" x 20" on canvas painted with painting knives.

I wanted to capture the wonderful moments of taking a walk on a beautiful sunny fall afternoon. Surprisingly, there weren't a lot of people in the park that day, so it felt like the woods belong to us. I enjoyed taking photos of Tammie walking in and out of the peeking sunlight shining through the trees.

I remember painting this rather quickly and with lots of energy. I wanted to simplify the trees and shadows, turning the painting into almost an abstract, yet still have the sense of light to it.

To help accomplish this, I used a variety of knives. I did most of it with my medium to larger sized blades, saving the small one solely for the figure of Tammie and the area around her head to help make it the focal point.

The color is pretty saturated with some of the reds and yellows applied straight from the tube without any mixing other colors in them. I surrounded the bright colors with lots of subdued fall colors to make them look even brighter.

This was an enjoyable painting to do and I like looking at it when my wife hangs it up in the house when she decorates the inside rooms for fall.

I'm currently taking a painting class at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center with landscape painter Edward Duff. I'd taken his class before in early 2022 and learned a lot from him. His work is tight, elegant, and has a meditative and contemplative mood in his beautiful, sometimes haunting, landscapes depicting water and clouds.

Since Ed is a brush painter, I'm returning to painting with only traditional brushes as well. For my first painting, I re-visited this same scene using a different photo reference I took on the same hike. Although, I did want to capture some of the bright fall colors, I made more of an effort to try to have them more subdued and naturalistic. I used no colors straight from the tube. The brightest colors were toned down with their complementaries to neutralize and gray them down. I also tried to pay a lot of attention to edges and temperature. Rather than quickly make brushstrokes all over the place, I was more conscious of how I was making them. 

I titled this painting Autumn Symphony. This is a 16" x 20" oil on panel painted with traditional brushes.

Looking at them together, it's like they were done by two different artists. Which isn't surprising since I took two completely different approaches. Although I wanted to give the feeling of scale and how small the protagonist is compared to the large trees in the forest, the paintings convey two complete different moods.

I've since worked on a third autumn painting for the class based on a photo I took last year in Yellowstone park of aspens in full fall color. Although it wasn't in the photo, I added leaves actively being blown off the limbs to add movement and energy to the quiet scene in the photo.

This time, I experienced some frustrations with this painting, mostly results of not being able to get clean colors in my sky holes and in the trunks and limbs of the trees. I ended up solving those issues by applying the colors with my trusty painting knives.

I titled this Undressing. This painting is a 16" x 20" oil on canvas, and is combination of traditional brushes for most of it and painting knives for those color touches at the end.

These pieces definitely have me in the mood to do more autumn-inspired painting. In my neighborhood, the trees have started turning color and I foresee some plein air paintings being done in the next couple weeks. I'm even hoping to do some plein air painting of fall trees in areas of Michigan outside of the cities I'm near to. It's my favorite time of year to travel throughout my beautiful state of Michigan. There could be new paintings posted soon, so please check out and follow my Facebook page for the updates.