i flew out of the frozen north Wednesday and landed in perfect southern Florida weather.  It’s been five days now of balmy, breezy, sunlit days.  I have a hard time remembering what it was like to struggle through snow drifts and peek around mountains of plowed soiled ice stuff.  My hostess yet again is Mary Crawford Reining.

Painting the blazing colors of the tropics was quite an adjustment.  My palette here is limited to the eight tubes of  Michael Harding oils that I ordered from Dick Blick for delivery to Mary’s home before I got here:  scarlet red, yellow lake, aquamarine blue, French yellow ochre, sap green, magenta, white–and in a bow to the region, ptalo turquoise.  Perhaps due to that limitation, I was painting too dark.  Every day, I’ve had to go back over most of my prior paintings and add more yellow or white.  Weird.

This location is only a few blocks from Mary’s house.  It’s part of a golf course.  I set up just past the “no trespassing” sign.  I don’t have a title for it yet.  You can’t really tell its a golf course, so I hesitate to refer to “golf course” in the title.

In this one the lit portions of the grass were too dark.  It took two rounds of adding yellow to reach this point.

This is a Friday painting, therefore posted here a little out of order.  My tube of turquoise came in handy!  This spot is in Goodlands, a small fishing community still unspoiled by development.  The baby blue heron came to explore the area for fishing potential while a parent hung around across the canal, making sure the youngster didn’t get into trouble.

I had to lighten the sky in this one, as well as de-greenify the grass, which had started out a jarring shade of emerald.  The baby heron also got inserted the next day, using as reference a video I took.

It’s title “Little Visitor”.  Is that wrong, to title a painting by reference to an element that was never in there when I was painting on site?

Huh?  Sacred Geometry is the inspiration for this graphic design.  Every Thursday, Mary participates in a group of women who explore the various configurations of sacred geometry, using compass and ruler to plot a Tree of Life,  a Flower of Life, and other complex ideas, then color in the spaces to reveal abstract symbols with spiritual significance to the artist.  Mine, seen above, has no significance.  I aimed for a pretty pattern of complementary colors.

This was my second painting, perhaps my fave so far.  We went out behind Mary’s house to catch late light on  the abutting golf course.  We had to work fast.  The lavender and peach colors in the sand trap lasted maybe five minutes.  This is the only of the paintings so far to be unmessed around with the next day.  Fast seems to work best for me.  While working on the two dominant trees, I tried to emulate Tommy Thompson, the artist who was a member of the Canadian Group of Seven.  It’s title is “Sand Trap in Late Light”.  Duh!

Yesterday, Saturday, I did two more paintings.  I need to consider whether more work is needed on them before I post them.  Maybe tomorrow.  ‘Til then?