"The Red Door" Wins The Grand Prize At The Chalk Walk/Plein Air Festival!

This last weekend, I participated in the 2010 Chalk Walk/Plein Air Festival in the Hyde Park Village area of Tampa, FL. This was an awesome experience. My oil painting, "The Red Door" won the plein air grand prize.

(The term "plein air" means I painted fresh on the spot without the aid of photographs. The artists were not allowed to take their paintings home each night to work on so the judging was based just on what was produced in the field.)

I couldn't be happier. The fact that the prize was a nice fat check made all the hard work getting the painting done in time worth it (not to mention putting up with this South Tampa heat!). I'm over the moon!

The event started on Friday, May 7th at 8:30 am but I was not able to start painting until that evening due to family demands. I started around 6 pm. I only had about 2 hours of light left but that was better than nothing. Luckily, I had already scoped out the area I wanted to paint in the previous week. Here's a shot of the house that first caught my eye.

I specifically didn't want to be around all the hustle and bustle of the center of the Chalk Walk activity. I was drawn to the beautiful bungalow style homes in the surrounding neighborhood.

In this house, the red door (which you probably can't see in this photo due to the time of day) was very attractive to me against the gray color of the rest of the house. The trees surrounding the house also excited me. I knew that I had to add a tree in the end...it would be my show stopper.

The tree turned out to add an organic element that played against the geometric structure of the painting. If I had more time, I wonder if I'd add elements of the big tree......

Here's a shot of me getting serious on the last day. Yes, that's a knife in my hand. All in all, I think I worked for about 10 hours on the painting over the course of 3 days. (Friday-2 hrs, Sat.- 6 solid hrs, Sunday -2 hrs.) I had to finish up around 11 am Sunday to qualify for the judging. That was good because it forced me to stopped fussing with the details and little brushes. I couldn't afford to be afraid of making a mistake.

Because of the time constraint, I got out my painting knives and went to work AND got it done! What fun!