This past weekend was the Southport Plein air Paintout and what a wonderful weekend it was!
Though I go painting outside fairly often, I had never participated in a weekend  paint out, so it was a real learning experience as it turned out.
 Southport, if you are not familiar with it, is a lovely little port on the North Carolina coast about 45 minutes from Wilmington and really very close to Oak Island. My son Will first took me there when he was living in that area and I thought it looked like one of those coastal towns in New England. Therefore,  when I was sent the invitation to participate in a paint out, I decided to do it.
 The nice thing about this event is there is no jurying process and no fees taken from sales and very little competition which is fine with me since I really dislike all the emphasis on awards and competition. One should be painting for different reasons than awards. Personally I would rather have someone buy my piece rather than garnering an award that is subjective anyway.

  I was lucky in that I have a student who let me use her vacation house on Oak Island and my friend Diane came with me which was fortunate since I have a lousy sense of direction and probably would have gotten lost several times without her navigation skills.
  In any case we arrived on thursday in the mid -afternoon and though other artists started painting then, I decided to check out  the town to see what i would paint on the morrow. Great idea, you say which is what I thought, but in retrospect I should have started painting then because only friday was a  lovely day. I painted a view of the pilot house which had lovely light on it.

morning light

I was happy with the way this one turned out, and actually someone bought it at the wet paint sale on saturday.

later I painted this wonderful old pin oak with a view of a lovely white house with neat gables. I really liked the juxtaposition of the tree and the gables. It took me a while to do this one as it was pretty complicated as you will see when I show you the result.

Juxtaposition

I learned a lot from this event and painted out of my comfort zone- I;ll show you the last painting I did in a future blog.