Country Side Walk

Country Side Walk

gouache  6" x 8"

please contact me if interested

I'm continuing to post the small studies from our winter in Ecuador.  I'll also start posting my plein air and studio work that I've been working on back home in Colorado.

One of our day trips while in Cotacachi, Ecuador was to the Condor Park, or Parque Condor, outside of Otavalo.  This park is an endangered bird rehabilitation & rescue center for the endangered Andean condor as well as raptors & owls;  there's even a golden eagle that was donated by a European zoo.  The park hopes to release the birds back into the wild, when possible.  The birds that cannot be released are kept at the park and are part of the daily educational bird show.  Many of the birds are released to fly during the show.  They are lured back with food, although one of the birds was gone a very long time!  The Park is situated with great views of Cotacachi & Imbabura volcanoes.

We took a cab up to the Park, but there were no cabs when we were ready to leave.  So, we started walking the 4 miles back to Otavalo.  It was a beautiful walk through the country side with crops of corn or furrowed fields on both sides of the dirt road.  

Fields Of Green

Feels Of Green

6" x 6" gouache 

please contact me if interested

I mentioned in a recent post that for our trip to Ecuador I decided not to take all of my oils and to try gouache.  This was a bit of a challenge as I am an oil painter.  But, I could carry everything in a small satchel (I'll blog about that soon), I didn't need an easel, a trip-pod a drying case a backpack.   I prefer oils..I love the creamy mixability that they have.  I'm more familiar with the colors. But, for size, ease of carrying, set up and drying, this was easy.

I decided that I needed to practice mixing greens with the gouache colors I'd brought and realized that all of the fields of corn in northern Ecuador screamed "green" every where I looked.  I love the landscapes painted by Richard Diebenkorn.  They are big simplified shapes of color.  He was my influence for the series of corn fields that I painted.  My focus was on the shapes and varieties of green.