William Elston is a painter based in the Seattle, Washington area.

Elston’s wide range of landscape and cityscape subjects all bear a common fascination with the character of light in different times of day, seasons and atmospheric conditions. He carries his exploration of these changes forward with a nuanced control of color and value.

I particularly enjoy the contrast between those compositions in which he compresses his values to portray muted light, rain or mist with those in which he expresses a full range of light and dark.

Even his brightest colors are carefully restrained, taking their apparent brilliance from their relation to surrounding colors rather than from high-chroma tube colors.

Elston’s website has fairly extensive galleries of his work in both landscape and cityscape, though many are too small to get a real feeling for the painterly nature of the work visible in some of the larger images.

His website’s home page functions as a blog, on which you will often find larger images, as well as work in progress and step-through sequences. In addition, he has a plein air blog, Notes from the Field, a Painter’s Workshop, focusing on new pieces and works in progress, and a personal elstonblog.

His website also offers a set of resources, with links to artist websites, galleries, blogs of interest and other destinations.

Elston teaches regular classes in plein air and studio techniques, as well as offering online instruction. He will be conducting a Plein Air Workshop Demonstration in Spokane on June 20-21, 2015.