For close to 20 years, I have tried to capture a really good view from Whiteside Mountain near Cashiers. It's a great location for painting, because the perch is so uniquely situated. it's off the main trail, down between two large boulders and out over a rock face hundreds of feet in the air.
Some time ago on a little site called Cowbird I described the geology and the experience of painting at this location. Here is the link (you have to use the navigation arrow to move right and see the text). And here is the image. I like its fresh and loose feel and the sfumato edges of the distant mountains.. But I wish it were a landscape format. It also is tilting off to the right a little too hard, made worse by the off kilter photo.
Here is the view looking out to the east.
Here is an early stage and a final on an earlier version, now lost to the storm. These have nice soft treatments of the tree cover and interesting exposed rock faces, in the distance. But the horizon line was way too high in the scene and the nearby rock faces resembled waterfalls, as my curmudgeonly neighbor back home reminded me.
More recently, I began a scene out there and brought it home to finish. Instead of doing so, I set it aside for a considerable time and finally picked it up about a week ago. I'll skip the step by step and just say I tried to find a balance between the two prior paintings, freshness and perspective effects. Here is what I ended up with.
