Plein air, with limited palette

Resurrection Church Tower, oil on canvas on board, 9" x 12"

It seems like everywhere I turn the past few weeks I have seen articles about the benefits of painting with a limited palette. As an exercise, it can have great benefits in helping a painter learn to see values and tones, and to focus on temperature changes more accurately. Anyone who has seen my paintings knows that I don't just love color, I need it. Lots of intense, full-power color. This limited palette thing is a strange language for me.

So this morning I set out to find a composition in my home town. I settled down in the side yard of my church, Resurrection Community Church here in Glenside, PA. I squeezed out permanent white, yellow ochre, ultramarine blue, and alizarine crimson. It was a struggle, as I kept looking for the lemon yellow and cadmium red. How else can I capture the intense, bright summer sun hitting that church tower? But I did enjoy the challenge, and will return to this exercise, even though the result is a less Deb-like painting.