the fox went out on a chilly night

8x10 oil on canvas board

Another Maine scene.  I thought it needed something so I put in a Red Fox which normally comes out about the time portrayed in this scene.  Foxes are usually considered very smart and canny, but they are really just extremely cautious.  One can image that the little red house is a chicken coop that the fox is going to raid, but in fact, I think it was a pump house for water.

Central Lovell, Maine

8x10 oil on board

This is a painting about the light.  It's early fall and the sun is setting.  We were visiting a friend who has a house.  It's the same place that the country fair was (see below)

The Squash Lady's House

8x10 oil on board

sold

In Maine there a woman who only sells squash and only in the fall.  This is a view of her house with a pile of pumpkins.  On the other side were many piles of different pumpkins, squashes of all types and varieties.  

In this picture I decided not to be frightened of thalo green and blue pigment.  Someone said that these pigments were "weapons of mass destruction".   They have a very strong tintorial power, meaning very little goes a long way, and tend to get into every other pigment and dull them because they stay on your brushes, particularly at the base of the hairs, probably because of the particle size of the pigment.  They are hard to get off your hands.   They are hard to use and hard to clean up, but there's no other way to get that bright green except thalo green and cadmium yellow maybe killed a little bit with cad orange.  The blue is unique also.  It helps to use pure turpentine to clean up and not odorless mineral spirits (OMS).  Turpentine has much more power to dissolve pigments.  Solvent power is measured by something called the KB value (Kauri-butanol value).  OMS's KB value is 28 and real turpentine is twice that.  Turps  evaporates fast into the air causing harmful vapors and also is absorbed through the skin whereas OMS isn't.  So it looks to me that, if you are going to use thalo pigments, you use turpentine.   So you have to use careful procedures like gloves, ventilation, etc. which many people do anyway even with OMS and not turps.    I only use it to clean the brushes when I'm done, swirling them around in a fairly narrow necked jar and then putting the top on fast.