Here's a painting that was very much inspired by a painting by someone else, which had a mountain in the background, and a windowsil with an antique coffee cup in the forground. the mountain in that painting was based on a sketch of mount Triglavom in Slovenia, by someone from the early 1900's. I liked the painting and wanted to try a version of it as a stained glass window, but didn't have any pics of the origainal painting to look at, so I just made up a scene with some mountains and trees.

a few months later when I was starting to think about what kinds and colors of glass to use, I realized I had never tried to make a night-time sort of landscape in stained glass.. so I did two versions with chalk pastels... decided I didn't like the dustynes of those pastels so I tried oil pastels... that was fun, so I figured I'd try it with paint as well. but I was not sure if I'd like painting, so I painted a small version of it first. this one here was the small version, and because of a difference in my original pattern I drew up for glass, and the size of the canvas, this version is slightly stretched out verticaly.. I'm still happy with how it came out though. sitting and staring at it, I'd almost swear that the trees that are further back are actually bulging off the canvas; and the brushstrokes in the sky all sort of radiate out from the moon, which makes the sky look slightly different depending on the angle of the light hitting the painting. once I started working on this I started to wonder why there was a cup of coffee left on a windowsil at night.. I might do a series of paintings or different things that, when put all together in context with each other, tell some kind of story that gives a reason why the cup was left there... or maybe not.

One odd thing with this painting was that I wanted to stay fairly close, as far as layout, to the stained glass pattern I had drawn... but that pattern was of different proportions than the canvas panel I had, so everything is slightly stretched out verticaly. But I don't think that's really too much of a problem, just makes the coffee cup into something that most people say is neither a normal coffee cup or a tea cup.