Although I posted images of this on my Instagram feed, I thought some viewers might be interested in knowing more of the backstory.

On trips to visit family in Kansas, I drive through the Flint Hills, and it's a landscape I find inspiring and compelling. As a college student at the University of Kansas, I most frequently saw the hills from the turnpike as I drove between campus and the Wichita area. My trips from Omaha may still include a leg on the turnpike, but more miles are spent on county roads, stopping in small town cafes, and appreciating the beauty of the hills with walks in areas such as the National Park Service's Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve or the Nature Conservancy's Konza Prairie.

On one of those trips, I hiked and took photos at the national preserve. After returning to studio, I was eager to start a painting based on the photo.

photo taken at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. The small building is an old schoolhouse.

I had a 12x30" panel that I thought would be fun to paint as a vertical view with all the sky above the old schoolhouse in the prairie.

I got the major areas blocked in and set it aside for a few days. While I liked the gradation of blues and golds, I didn't think the cloud shapes were working, so I changed it.

It stayed like this for weeks while I worked on other things and yet it nagged at the back of my mind, and I was just completely bored by it. So I covered it up:

And then painted over with looser strokes and a little more color -- purples in the sky, greens and rusts in the foreground.

it's all a bit looser now and I like it better. There is some subtle variation in the sky where you can see underlying texture. I incised a few more lines into the foreground, smoothed some of the color transitions in the mid ground and buffed the sky portion to give it a bit of sheen and to highlight the visibility of the texture. I've moved it now from the working side of my studio to the display area. Come on in to see what I think is the now-finished version!