Stock Pond - Reference Photograph & Introduction

One of the pleasures of landscape painting is giving yourself permission to wander. Sometimes that means taking a dirt road without knowing exactly where it will lead. That’s how I found this scene near South Fork, Colorado. The road took me to a higher elevation where I came across this simple composition: a small stock pond in the foreground, aspens and pines in the middle ground, and distant blue mountains fading into the background. It’s not a complicated subject, and that’s part of what appealed to me. Sometimes a simple scene can make a very satisfying painting. This one seemed especially well suited to a smaller canvas, and I thought it would be a good subject for us to paint together.