Suggesting Motion in Landscape Paintings

Schneider's Willows, 2010, oil, 9 x 12.

While photographing Bill Schneider's workshop on composition in his Illinois studio (www.schneiderart.com), I took a couple of hours to paint a large willow tree next to a pond in the back yard. I designed the arrangement of shapes to suggest the movement of a gentle breeze that was coursing its way across the lawn through the trees and causing the branches to brush along the surface of the water. I'm writing about Bill's five-day class for the fall issue of Workshop magazine (www.artistdaily.com).

Bill studied with Daniel Gerhartz (www.danielgerhartz.com) and has a large collection of his work on display in his home. It was fascinating to see so many of Dan's figure paintings in one place, and I was in awe of the way he uses a few strokes of thick paint to define the elaborate figures, costumes, and backgrounds of his paintings.