Late Afternoon January Light (oil on canvas, 2010)

My painting process involves mixing up a palette of colors, from the three primaries and white, for each painting before I begin to actually paint. This can take anywhere from 2 to 16 hours, sometimes spread out over multiple days. I spent three days mixing colors for this painting and then my son got sick and I was confined to the house with him for four days, until I in turn got sick, a sinus infection and then bronchitis, which laid me up for almost a week (I'm still coughing, almost three weeks later...). By the time I got back out to the studio to work, all of my colors had dried up and I had to start over. The subject for this painting is the twin barns on the old Anderson farm, almost directly behind my house on the Canadian border. I painted these barns in the fall a few years ago, when the field in the foreground was filled with a bright gold canola, just about to be cut.