A carpenter friend gave me a whole stack of beautiful birch panels, left over from a job. It has been hard for me to cover up the wood patterns with gesso so I decided to see if I could get a painting just using the grain. It was a lot of fun to make a landscape–clouds, hills and foreground–mostly from the pattern that was there. The wood accepted several layers of very thin stain so I was able to preserve the grain and accentuate it in places. (The light in the sky came from sanding out the color.) I don’t know whether I’ll try this again but it’s good to play around with something a bit different.
Stained Landscape 12 x 15 oil on birch panel
