“Overcast”

Oil on Canvas

7 3/16 × 5 13/16”

2026

After struggling to find a subject for a few hours I finally came upon this scene and I really wanted to capture how blue the mountains look sometimes. Plein Air painting (French for outdoors) is a really tricky thing, you want to go out and create an amazing painting but sometimes the hardest part isn’t literally applying the paint to the canvas, sometimes the hardest part is finding a subject to paint. I was really struggling to find something to paint on this day and I was actually returning to my car in defeat because I couldn’t find anything I wanted to paint when I saw this scene. I always love how the mountains turn blue or purple when they are far away. Also I wanted to do a painting on this, rare for Salt Lake, overcast day because overcast sky presents a different challenge for the artist. It takes away clearly defined shadows, which I often use in my paintings to portray clearly defined shapes. Overcast light also makes it so that you can see the local “true” color of objects. It was really fun to paint and I love how it turned out.