Here is a slightly different piece, for me, a commissioned horse and rider portrait that grew into a western scene kind of image.  The reference supplied featured horse and trainer, along with a couple other riders, working some steers at a training facility down in Florida.  I loved the scene but felt the background could be approved upon and we decided to swap it for a scene more typical of a west of the great divide landscape, for the background.
Back in my days as an illustrator, it was commonplace to combine a variety of sources to create a single image, and so this piece was a bit like old times.
Commissions are sort of a cross between my earlier career as a commercial artist, and my current, creating fine art paintings.  I enjoy both and find the similarities far out way the differences between the two.  
I look forward to taking on more interesting and challenging commissions in the future; whether they focused on a person, animal, home or particular landscape, or even all of the above!

It's been a whole year since I made the big jump and moved up to my new home.  In that time, I have walked, biked, pedalled and drove down many of the roads and trails that run throughout this beautiful region, always looking at what is before me with my artists' vision turned up high!  After too long of a delay, I have finally started to get at some new work based on my new surroundings.  Although a whole year with four seasons has passed, it feels like much of my time here has been in a wintery setting, with deep, velvety snow blanketing the earth and anything else it can adhere to.  
The starkness of this scene, boiled down to the sharp contrast of dark and light, with a slash of the blue mountains across the horizon, caught my attention and compelled me to return to it in a painting.  Now that I am finally painting this region, a number of other striking compositions are underway in my studio and hopefully will showing up here in short order!