Early Morning

16 x 16   Oil on Panel

I never knew my grandteacher, Frank Vincent DuMond, but my teacher, Frank Mason, would talk about him and how his love of nature affected his painting. "Don't make the greens in your landscape look like arsenic" he would say, "it should look like something a cow would want to eat." He didn't want any harm to come to the cows, or to the birds. "There needs to be air between the branches of your trees so the birds can fly through them" he would tell his students. One day a student brought in a painting to be critiqued. It was a landscape with a large tree in the center and some odd black dots under the tree. "What are those dots at the bottom of your tree?" DuMond asked. "Oh," the student replied "those are the birds that couldn't fly through my tree".....