Pine Creek Valley Paintings, #6

I am slowing down on the producing Pine Creek Valley paintings, in part because I am working more on the human-made structures.  Unlike landscapes, buildings and bridges demand  left-brain activity, less feel and flow, and more measuring and sweating to get them into acceptable form. I know this, of course, because I paint urban landscapes all the time. But I am still always surprised when I have to redo the roofline 5 times before it approximates reality.

Of course, some of my faithful readers will know also that I am not much interested in painting “photo-reality,” the monocular, stable, camera-eye view of things. But when I’m painting from photos rather than on-site, I don’t have much choice. Monocular it is in print, and so the monocularly-viewed roof line has to look like it’s part of the scene rather than wrenched from my wandering eye. It will be a few days before I’m ready to reveal any human aspects of the Pine Creek Valley scene.

However, I do have a couple new landscape that I’ve painted. The first is an early draft, not yet revisited with a fresh eye. Yet I’m already rather fond of it. I have always loved birch trees – the brown kind has tender bark to chew on, and the white kind made great message writing materials when I was playing at being a Susquehannock Indian. Even now, that I’m grown and 3000 miles away from where I hid birch bark notes, the crows gather in their nightly caucus at the tiptop of the European birch tree just down the block.

In north central Pennsylvania, the white birches make their statements across the hills, particularly in autumn and winter, as the leaves drop from the trees and white becomes its own color

Autumn Along the Crick, 12 x 16″, Oil on Board, 2009.  $100

I also have finished what I’m thinking is the last of the Gorge pictures, those panoramas of the mountains from Leonard Harrison or Colton Point. I say “thinking” because I’m also toying with doing some abstracting of these scenes, which might end up here too.

But here’s the last traditional landscape of the Pine Creek Gorge:

Pine Creek Gorge 3, 12 x 16″, Oil on Board, 2009. $100

Remember all proceeds from the sale of these paintings go to the scholarship fund for the Jersey Shore (Pennsylvania) High School. The fund will be administered by a 501-C3 agency in Williamsport, set up specifically to manage relatively small amounts of foundation money. In this case, the base amount our class of 1960 is working toward is $25,000, which would fund $1000 scholarship for a student’s further education.

At some point, soon, I’ll have a page set up with all the paintings currently available on it. The class of 1960 is planning an auction for the paintings in our home town, sometime next summer, but as they say on E-bay, “if you want to be sure you get it, buy now!”  Just contact me. –June

Tags: oil painting, Pennsylvania, Pine Creek Gorge