It’s time for a more enjoyable kind of fire season! It’s time to light them…

While I was setting up this pop-up, I was mostly afraid of sparks. We’ve all seen camp chairs with small, melted holes scattered across them. Also, I built a great bonfire. It was perfect for a sledding party, but way too hot to set paintings around!

In the end, none of these paintings were ruined.

Trying to coordinate the fading light with the dying fire while still being able to see the artwork was tricky. I shot these pictures on two separate days. The light from each day, at the same time, was very different. The first day was darker, and I liked that better.

I can’t say this pop-up turned out exactly the way I had planned on in my head, but it was an interesting mad dash to see what would happen.

I like using these pop-ups to keep things interesting for myself. I have more ideas for seeing my paintings in new ways within the mountain landmarks I’m familiar with.

A lot of the figurative subjects I paint are set in outdoor scenes. It’s a step further to gather my ideas outside the context of living in the moment, taking those ideas home to abstract them, and then recontextualizing them within the context of nature.

In my painting, I’ve been working on my dark color formulas for base paintings. It’s a little bit of a throwback to my Bob Ross painting VHS tape days, when he would mix his dark colors from a large variety of colors without using black. It’s also something Stephen Quiller discusses in one of my favorite books about color, Color Choices: Making Color Sense out of Color Theory.

Filling in my subjects with certain lighter colors, mostly from gouache paints, and then using deeper, darker base colors creates an almost space alien feel for me. These paintings are middle-of-the-night mysterious.