Slough House Revisited

Slough House, Late Afternoon, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

This is an old farm along the Jackson Highway just east of Sacramento. This area used to be all hop fields once upon a time, but that's all gone now. Besides the buildings pictured here, the Slough House also has these neat twin hop barns (of which I've never been able to do a satisfactory painting), but they're  being torn down. (Perhap it's already gone by now - I haven't been over there in months)

I've painted from this angle a few times before, both on location and from photo references. Painting this on location can be a bit scary because you're set up on the shoulder of a highway where big trucks speed by at 60 miles per hour. No view is worth risking one's life, but plein air painters live dangerously, ya know?

This one is done from a photo, and the idea I had primarily to do with manipulating the "soft perspective" in the foreground. The photo itself shows nothing but flat dirt with no discernible directional lines. I wanted to introduce some indication of perspective in order to create a sense of scale, and to play with composition.