Day 3 of the Taos Paintout

The Orchard and Taos Mountain
11x14

On day three of the Taos plein air paintout, it was decided to paint an orchard off of Cruz Alta Street.  We met Peg at The Bean coffee shop - cute and homie place with egg cartons decorating the ceiling.  After drinking up their delicious coffee, we headed out to the orchard. We had a few other local artists join us - Ken Daggett and Kemper Coley- and Peg, Dave Coni, Wes and I. The view towards Taos mountain was especially nice and I wanted to hurry up and get the Taos mountain blocked in before the light changed too much- I wasn't very worried about the light in the rest of the scene- so knew I could take my time.  Kemper, Coni and I all painted this view- I thought it was pretty nice. Later that day we drove out to Kevin and Wanda  MacPherson's place to paint Kevin's famous pond from his book "Reflections on a Pond".

Kevin's Pond
12x16

Most of the PAAC members had painted this in the morning and had some upset easels in the wind, I assume from umbrellas tipping them over, so I didn't even try to set up an umbrella, thereby leaving the sun to shine directly on my painting and pallette.  That usually causes the painting to result in being a little too dark but I was pretty happy with the result, although there really are no shadows to speak of since the sun was shining directly on the scene. We pretty much had the run of the place which was nice.  I had painted this exact pond 15 years ago when I was a very rank beginner. Wanda showed us around and was very nice.