The Arizona landscape is quite different from the powerful mountains of Colorado, yet is still stunning and beautiful, especially in the late afternoon glow.  It's dry, warm, yet brilliant at the same time.  It's this time of year that I start thinking about how nice it must be to spend 'winters' in AZ...but also how nice it is to not have to live there in the summers. 

At first glance, it might just look like a muddy mess of swirls and twirls of paint.  I started a new art class a few weeks ago called, Experimentation with Paint, taught by Jordan Wolfson.  It's a lot of fun to learn to paint in a completely different style than ever before and in some ways it reminds me of my early days of painting with fingerpainting where I just painting through feeling the paint and the paper rather than purposefully placing each stroke on a canvas.  In this painting, we started with a simple still life and just 4 colors: black, white, yellow ochre and red.  We blocked in the shape and then used cross-contour lines to create a feeling of space.  Painting space?  Connecting shapes?  Feeling the movement of a still life?  I tried it all, and above is what resulted.  Pretty cool for a still life, I think.