Facebook and Instagram

Just a quick update that most of my new work will be appearing on my facebook page and Instagram feed moving forward.  So please come visit me there!

www.facebook.com/dibbleart

https://instagram.com/dibbleart/

I look forward to sharing more great art together!

Painting Trip!

This past week a few friends and I went on a painting trip to the Teton area. We started on the Idaho side, spent time in the Grand Targhee, and then over to the Teton Ntl Park side.  These are the five best pieces I did, and there are others which will never see the light of day again, thankfully. Even those, however, were so instrumental in helping me grow.  While I like a lot of things about these five pieces, and feel they're a result of me trying new and uncomfortable things artistically, there are things about them that definitely need to be changed as I develop them into larger pieces.  Can't wait!  Special thanks to the folks at the Pine Creek Ranch and Camp Loll for their amazing hospitality.  We literally couldn't have done the trip without them.

Midway Plein Air event

Here are five pieces from the Midway plein air painting festival/competition in late June/early July.  Midway is such a beautiful spot, it was really fun to be up there painting for a few days (albeit in the heat wave).  All of these are 8"x10", and there's obviously a barn theme:)  The bottom piece of the hay bales won an award and sold, but the others are all available. 

Dad's milk shed

I painted up at the farm last week and did this piece of the old milk shed that dad rebuilt a few years ago.  It now houses tools instead of milk, but he did a great job with it. The pale yellow was a nice choice and plays well against the red barn it faces. I really enjoyed trying to capture the warm and cool shadow interplay. Enjoy.

Recent Paintings

Here are two plein air pieces from the last few weeks. One from up Hobble Creek Canyon, and the other from the Ogden Plein Air event yesterday. Enjoy!

Springdell Painting

Here is a piece I finished last week up Provo Canyon.  I'm considering making it into a larger piece. 

Painting progression

Here are the progression photos from my painting this morning in Midway.  Hopefully it helps to see a little better the process of creating a painting (my process, anyway). Enjoy!

Hobble Creek plein air

For my Friday morning painting I drove up Hobble Creek last week to where the road ends and then up the dirt road for a few miles. There was a great outcropping of rocks that I was excited to paint.  It was raining, as it has been for weeks, but I was still able to set up and paint without too much trouble. 

I have included a photo of the rock I was looking at as well as a photo of what the painting looked like when I left the canyon. The final reflects changes I made to it in the studio when I returned to try and bring more clarity to it.

Plein Air in Monterey

This past week I attended the National Plein Air Convention in Monterey, CA.  It was fantastic, and in addition to amazing presentations by the likes of George Carlson, Len Chmiel, and T.Allen Lawson, I was able to paint some amazing locations.  I haven't really painted the ocean much, so it was fun to get some experience with that.  I can see why ocean painters have some intense blue-greens (prussian, phthalo blue, etc), it's nearly impossible to capture those colors with a normal palette.

New Drawing

Here was the figure drawing from last night's session at Casey Child's studio (thank you to Lauren for modeling!).  I used vine charcoal for the entire thing, which I usually don't do.  It's finicky, but fun.  Anyway, I feel like portraits are one of my weakest skills, so it's good to do more of it.  Not always comfortable, but good.

Two new plein air paintings

Here are two recent plein air pieces done in the past month. The cloud piece was done along the Provo riverbottoms trail, the barn was up the South Fork of Provo Canyon.  Enjoy.

Let's try this again...

Nearly 8 years ago I did this painting of the San Rafael Swell, and it has languished unsold in galleries ever since, and I'm tired of looking at all of the mistakes.  It was the best I could do at the time, but there's an upcoming art show that I want to enter, and rather than buy a new frame, I thought "I've got this huge framed elephant of a piece, I should just paint over it!"  So I went back to the original photo ref and tried to reinterpret it with a little more experience as a guide.  The bottom piece is a loose color-key painted this morning in Photoshop, and I tried to really focus on the different types of light (i.e. direct light, fill light, bounce light, etc), light direction, and local color. I'll use the key as reference as I move forward to paint over the old painting. Fortunately the original was painted when I was very timid about thick paint, so there shouldn't be too much of a problem going over it, and the super-warm tone of the original will be very vibrant as an underpainting. The show drop-off is late March, so I'll need to be speedy, which is good and will force me to look at the big picture and not get caught up in details, which is always death to a painting.  I'll post the re-painted piece in a few weeks!

Recent drawing

Here is a drawing I did recently from life.  Enjoy!

Today's offering

It has been far too long since I've posted anything!  Oh well, let's be honest, the art world hasn't been waiting with baited breath for my every post, so I think we're ok.  Here are two recent plein air pieces.  The stream piece was done this morning, and it was great to get out. Both of these were done up Vivian Park canyon near Provo, UT.  Enjoy!