Barriere Farm Touchups

5x7 Oil on canvas unframed $100.00 shipping included

I thought I would repost this little painting because it was

sitting on my desk and a couple of things bugged me. One
is that the green field on the hillside was "coming forward"
as it was the same colour and value as the flat field. The
other was the barn roof. To stay true to the exercise of
quick studies, I could only let myself change it if I promised
to do it with only a few strokes. I like both the changes.
The bit of blue in the field seems to push it back and I like
the roof brighter. What do you think?

Red Barn Near Barriere

5x7 Oil on Canvas

I loved how this little farm was nestled at the base of this
hillside. It's also fairly near the river so these huge willows
grow everywhere. I'm beginning to see a pattern in the
buildings I'm drawn to. There is something about a barn
that I can't resist. Maybe it's the family stories about the
challenges of homesteading or maybe it's the memory of
my cousin's barn. She had the biggest reddest barn I have
ever seen. Tragically it burned to the ground a few years
ago and the are just too expensive to replace now.
I wonder if the nostalgia would be as strong if I weren't a
city girl?

Fraser River Near Clearwater

2010 © Tracey Mardon 5x7 Oil on Canvas

This is a little study of a scene near Clearwater, B.C.
It is one of my favorite chunks of the drive to the
West Coast from Edmonton every summer, the colours
are always wonderful, whatever the weather. My Panasonic
Lumix has an aerial photo option that I find really useful
for taking photos while zooming along at 110km, in the
passenger seat of course! They are often amazingly clear and
even when they aren't, they evoke a memory of the scene that
is sometimes just as helpful.

White Barn at Windermere

5x7 Oil on Canvas

I love this barn, I'm drawn to it every time I drive by.

And when I'm painting it, it makes me think about one

of my favorite painters. Her name is Laura Daniel and

she teaches at the museum in Austin Texas.

The Bend at Windermere

8x 8 Oil on Gallery Canvas in Floater Frame

$200.00

I love how the N. Saskatchewan makes lazy turns along

the way. This is from a photo I took just south of the

Windermere Golf Course on a beautiful late afternoon

last summer. The sky and water were just shimmering.

5 Sheds near Okotoks

Oil on 24x24 Gallery Canvas

I came across these sheds as I was coming back from a workshop at the Leighton Centre last year. It seems to be a common thing to have 5 red sheds and I love the feeling these simple farm buildings evoke in me. My grandfather homesteaded in Saskatchewan and I've heard so many stories about the challenges of building a life from bare land.

Linny D. Vine found she had the same feeling about grain elevators and from her west coast studio she paints the most wonderful serendipitous elevators interspersed with the coast scenes you would expect.

This painting is now available as it will now be painted in a large horizontal format for the collector. If you have any interest, please drop me a line.

Prairie Lakeland

A friend asked me to explore painting a prairie lake scene with canola fields in a diptych format on 24x24 canvases in floater frames. I liked the idea so I did these two 8x8 studies to play with it, having never painted a diptych. Two issues that showed up pretty quickly are palette control and keeping the horizontals lined up. When I'm working on the larger ones my plan is to put my two easels side by side and paint them simultaneously. I'll also premix large puddles so that I can paint both without remixing.