Riverside fall colors and a pair of pears

Along The River Shore
9x12 inches - pastel on Wallis paper
© S.Johnson

Today's painting done along a section of the Animas that I've painted along four times now, although only   one of the other paintings has made it onto the blog...

It's the final hurrah for fall colors here in southern CO.  The storm that passed through the past couple of days did much to accelerate the leaf departure from the trees, both along the river and along our street.  Having been cooped up inside for the past 2 days due to the storm, I was grateful that it was sunny in the mid-50's so that we could get outside and paint!  Today, Pat and I were joined by Rosemary, another pastelist, who paints with the Friday plein air group.

I've done paintings on Wallis that I was quite happy with, but this isn't really one of them.  I have decided that I just find the surface to be too aggressive, and I don't find the ability to add many layers to be desirable.  In fact, it adds significantly to the painting time because of the need for an underpainting and it really chews up the pastels, resulting in lots of smearing when I try to lightly scumble another color on top.  This is good to know, and since Wallis is pretty $, once my existing pieces are used up, I won't buy it again, unless I have some breakthrough moment with it.

Yesterday, I started a studio painting from one of the fall color reference photos I took recently, but it was a grind right out of the blocks, and while I know the scene has merit as a painting, I'll probably revisit it with oils.

There are these delicious red D'Anjou pears in the house now, so I decided to do another mini 10-minute challenge painting before they are all gone, which will be soon:

Pear Pair
6x4 inches - pastel on Artagain