Painting in Iowa

Last week I attended a plein air painting workshop in Iowa with Vermont artist and instructor, Andrew Orr. Andrew is a wonderful artist whose work I've admired through his blog for some time (http://andreworrstudio.blogspot.com/). It was grueling work, but I have to say that if I intend to paint en plein air I'd better get used to it. As was explained, the best light can generally be found early in the morning or later in the evening. So we woke up every morning by 5:30am and were out and ready to paint by 7am. At this time of year, it would probably help to get out even earlier. We would break for lunch and an afternoon siesta, and then head out again from about 5-8:30pm. Those evenings were especially difficult. I felt like I was being eaten alive by the bugs! I did find out that a common midwest remedy for keeping gnats away is Absorbine, Jr. (go figure). I learned so much from this workshop, and can't wait to continue to put it to use! Here is one of the paintings I worked on this week. This one is 16x20. Most of the work we did were smaller studies.