Having spent my adolescent years in East Texas, I am always enchanted by the beautiful skies and clouds when I go back to visit. Huge thunderheads, magnificent in their awesome power would bring refreshing, but short bursts of moisture during the summer months. Huge puffy cumulus clouds would fill the sky rolling slowly past in no hurry to get anywhere. In the hot summer sun, an hour or two would show no evidence of the previous downpour.
Here in the San Francisco Bay area, we rarely see such wonder in the skies. Being close to the Pacific, the ‘air’ is usually a non-event. The exception to this is just after a winter storm. Such a day was today. The skies were so beautiful, I rushed about a mile up the hill behind my house, and did a painting.
I painted the entire work in about 90 minutes using a Raphael Kevrin #24, which is an inch wide Mongoose filbert type brush. Hats off to Kevin Courter, one of my favorite local artists, who led me on to Mongoose to achieve a soft touch. You can see more of his wonderful work here.
Below is a snapshot of the painting on the easel. I used an iPhone to snap all the photos.
I titled the painting and this blog post Milpitas as you could see the east bay town of Milpitas in the distance right in the notch of the hill.