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My teenage years occurred in the 1970s, during which I listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin - whose legendary concert playing ESP has been described as "tight but loose." This is an excellent goal for me as a painter. By tight, I suppose I mean diligently attentive to the rules and by loose, well...rules are made to be broken. I'm not huge on details other than to capture enough of them loosely so you, the observer, can intuit they are in there somewhere.

Recently, the Wednesday Night Paint Group has established some "fun" nights, in which we together paint the same or similar still life and then do a group critique. This has afforded an excellent challenge to deliberately paint "tight but loose." The first time we did this involved flowers. Working in watercolor, my approach to the drawing was to use an old trick: I'm right handed, so I drew the image with my left hand, then let all the weird resultant inaccuracies remain. Then I painted away in a big 'ol wet on wet watercolor jamboree (watercolor lends itself much more readily to loose than to tight).   The resulting painting (Poppies and Thistle) is as tight and loose as one can be.

The next fun night involved a bunch of bottles, thrown together. This time I sketched without ever lifting my pencil from the paper (another old trick).  Big bottles end up small, thin bottles end up wide, and so on and who cares? The end result:

Not a masterpiece to be sure, but whimsical and light.

This next one was not a group exercise. Rather, I purposely wanted to capture the fury of a waterfall against the delicacy of trees just beginning to leaf out. Crabtree Falls in Nelson County, Virginia, is the tallest vertical drop cascading waterfall east of the Mississippi River. This painting shows maybe 2% of it at the very bottom. I hope you agree that it is tight but loose.