Columbus Public Art—"Toward Broad Street"

Do you have those "responsibilities" that seem like a dark cloud hanging over your head that follow you around so that you have a hard time enjoying anything else?  This was one of those.  It is a part of a 200-year celebration for our city.  Columbus Public Art 200 is a project that aims to place 24 outdoor paintings at various locations in the downtown/Capitol "neighborhood."  Although there has been much revitalization of our downtown, it still is not the suburban ambiance, if you catch my drift.

I really don't like big cities.  Although Columbus isn't huge, it still numbers over a million in the metropolitan area.  Sights and smells are not like Kansas, Toto, nor is the landscape.  So I was a bit nervous about the "clientele" that might be loitering about.  The other odd thing about this project was the "plein air" aspect: we were to paint a scene viewable from the spot of our prepared surfaces on the side of buildings.  Not my usual cup'o tea, and unfortunately, like the others, I ended up shooting some photo references and working from them in combination with the actual setting.  This led to weirdness because my nice photos were of an afternoon scene with some cast shadows.  But to avoid the glare of sunlight on my west-facing wall, I had to work earlier in the day.  Thus, the scene I was looking at wasn't lit anywhere near the way it was in my photos. 
 

Adding to the "enjoyment" was the requirement that the painting be done in acrylic.  Golden Paints graciously supplied each artist with samples of a two-of-each-primary-color palette and white.  I was thrown back into yesteryear, when acrylics were my medium for producing razor-sharp wildlife painting.  But it's been almost 10 years since I worked with them, having moved on and fallen in love with the sensuousness of oil paints.  But with a bit of praying along the way, the dark cloud has dissipated, and the sun is shining again!