Ruth Soller » Iced Birch Sunrise

My goal for this studio painting was to portray the golden light of a Great Falls, Montana sunrise glowing through the silvery ice coated branches of a large birch tree in our front yard. I worked on this idea several times over the years, and this is my latest effort. I used a pallette knife to paint layers of an abstracted rainbow of colors of oil paint, while focusing on keeping distinct patterns of light verses dark values in the composition.