I worked on this paintings a couple of days, again trying to implement some of the ideas I learned in Ovanes Berberian’s workshop.  Had fun with this one. In the end, I liked the sense of light, but wonder if I should simplify it?  Is it too busy?

Hillside Light - Oil on Linen - 12×16 - Click to Enlarge 

Fellow art blogger Katherine Tyrrel (”Making a Mark”) is planning a trip to California, and asked me about painting locations.  I started putting together a list (spots from San Mateo County to Los Angeles County) and realized what a great blog post it would make!  So, the project is snowballing a bit into something that everyone can contribute to (through Comments).  I’m including maps, with instructions to get to my favorite spots, as well as some sample paintings I’ve done at those spots.

This project screams to be a “mashup”, and I actually wrote a spec for such a thing quite some time ago, but alas, painting comes first!  By “mashup“, in this case I mean a “Web 2.0” application that would layer Google Maps with blogging.  I would love the ability for artists to identify a spot on a map, and create a blog post with comments about the spot.  A “Location Blog”, or LocBlog.  Wouldn’t that be great?  There was one application out of Spain that did something like this, but it was focused on photography.  They liked the fact that I expanded it to art.  Can’t recall the name of the site, if you know, let me know.

Here’s a sample of what I’m putting together:

Great news! I’ve just learned that this competition has accepted two of my paintings for their show August 10 - September 17, 2006 at at the Morro Bay Art Association. I will not be able to make the reception, but it is Saturday, August 12, 7-10pm.
Here are the paintings accepted:

Last Light, Eucalyptus
Oil on Linen, 16×20

Beach Town
Oil, 9×12

Today, I choose a subject where I could exercise some control, subtlety. In the water, I focused on slight shifts in warm/cool colors.

“Simple Seascape”, Oil on Linen, 8×10

A good way to judge whether your values are correct, is to look at your painting in greyscale, as shown below. This “reads” well in black/white, so I feel the values are on target:

Since I was not allowed to photograph Ovanes Berberian’s demos, a few artists have asked me to show them the process using one of my own paintings. So here goes!

REFERENCE. (ON LOCATION) First, here’s the reference photo. I have to get a body of work that represents the San Francisco Peninsula for the Peninsula Plein Air Invitational at Filoli, so yesterday I spent the day on location. It’s a plein air event. It was a great, sunny day, although a bit windy. This reference photo shows what I had to work with. For those of you that live in the Bay Area, this is a little canyon Ron Schlorff and I stumbled upon between La Canada college and La Canada Road. It’s a nice spot. This photograph isn’t great, but basically there was a nice collection of greens and warm land colors to capture. The foreground bushes are a blue-green, contrasted with the warm gold-greens of the mid-ground trees, and the far background trees would be pushed back further with a blue, gray color with close intervals between shade and light colors.

DRAWING. I began by sketching in the outline and movement of the big shapes, using a combination of Sap Green and Alizarin Crimson. At this stage, Ovanes stresses the balance between shapes. All great paintings start out as great abstracts. If the painting isn’t interesting in this form, it won’t be painted, no matter what you do. I liked this abstract design (basing on what was before me, but altering as necessary), so I continued.

TONE. Here’s the wash stage. Ovanes would fill the canvas with bright washes, running one into the other. His would be even more loose than this. He does not pay attention to local color, but does vary warm and cool notes. The idea is to leave the wash showing in spots to create vibrations with the thicker paint on top. I could have kept the sky blues cleaner, and in the end that prevented me from getting the sky as luminous as I wanted. When I got back to my studio, I had to pull out the Manganese Blue, a VERY powerful blue that really illuminates.

DARKS. Next I layed in the darks. Ovanes’ variation between warm and cool darks is much more articulated in this stage than I’ve achieved here. He blends a lot, but keeps the colors clear in spots. He looks for opportunities for lost/found edges where shapes of the same value meet. When I say his darks are “articulated”, it means in spots there is great, pure color, yet surrounded by subtle grays.

PALETTE. Here’s a view of my palette, towards the beginning of the painting. I use an 18×24 hardened acrylic palette painted a mid-tone gray beneath. If this size is a bit small, so I’m building a larger one for my studio. The idea here is to use LOTS of paint (”Paint like a millionaire!”), and create interesting strings of colors, beautiful grays. Don’t mix more than two different colors adjacent to each other. I’ll have to take a picture of my pallete on other paintings, or further along, because it gets much more interesting than this. Hope this gives you the idea.

MIDTONES to LIGHTS to ACCENTS (DARKS). Work in mid-tones as long as you can, where the colors are generally at their peak strength. Then work to highlights (lights) and accents (darkest darks) to finish and bring the painting together. When I got the painting back into my studio, I worked the sky on the right a bit more, and I added some “sky holes” to the mid-ground trees, to make them “breath”, and to add some needed ground color to that side. This is the painting I ended up with, “Peninsula Hillside“, 16×20, Oil on Linen. It will be submitted to the upcoming plein air exhibition at Filoli in August.

Update: To get on the email list to attend a Ovanes Berberian workshop, contact Ray Morrison:

BERBERIAN WORKSHOPS

1838 YALECREST AVE

SALT LAKE CITY, UT 8410

Email ray@trioeditions.com

This has been an exhausting week, but I learned a lot. The painting on the left is my last effort, which I think is a big improvement over the week. Click the image on the left to see details/enlarge. I’m going to add a few things (eg, light reflected off the bottle), but it’s near done. Ovanes was very happy with the color harmony and painting overall of the milk jub and the lower right fruit. Ovanes did feel that the table top was too warm; the green cup was getting a little chalky; and the blue and green container in the back was a bit too broken.Perhaps over the next weeks, depending upon interest (enter comments if you’re reading this blog!), I’ll include screen shots of how I’m applying his process, showing things I wasn’t able to photograph in his studio.

We were supposed to paint ouitside this morning, but it rained so Ovanes took us into his studio for a slide show. We then painted all afternoon at a small lake part of the Snake River.

The slide show was great. In addition to showing us other masters the he admires (Sergi Bongard, J.Sorolla, etc), he actually showed us his earlier work, much of which he felt embarrassed about. This would be akin to Robert DeNiro showing the public video of his school play. This takes guts.

I noticed–and he pointed out–quite a few changes in his evolution. First, his latest work has much looser brush strokes. Somewhat softer/blened, but overall more sophisticated and confident. Second, his early work was overly literal, not as interpretave as it is now. He paid more attention then to local color, rather than varying color to reach a higher artistic interpretation/objective. Last, his color harmonies were less sophisticated. He pays much more attention now to the vibrations created by warm/cool color variations. Of course, even back then he could have painted any of us under the table!

After the slideshow, I stuck around to view the art for sale in his studio. I was on a mission, with Mike’s okay to buy.

Luckily, he came back into the studio just as I was narrowing down my choices. Without telling him which I was interested in, I asked him to point out some favorites. Thankfully, I’d chosen 3 of the 4 he named (out of 20+) in the room, so I felt my taste was on target. It was wonderful to hear him talk about each piece, and what he saw in them.

In the end it came down to two:one, a reflective early evening light painting of Tuscany; or a light-filled, vibrant painting done in hawaii. Thinking about Mike and my collection, I realized that most are of the quiet, somber variety, so I went for the happy painting. It’s truly an “artist’s painting”, since it’s unfinished, suggestive, makes you think. I love it, and hope Mike will too. I’ll ask Ovanes tonight if I can post it online.

I then spent the afternoon painting the nearby river. Finished two 8X10’s, one of which is shown to the left (”Idaho Sky”).
We have a demo tonight, so will likeky be watching Ovanes paint until midnight again. This is the life!

Still making progress. I’m learning a lot from Ovanes, such a generous teacher.

Today I focused on the area he asked me to work on: “raw color” (include more sophisticated grays, I need to build up to the color). I was able to create the strings of pure color and grays on my palette, but I think less successful doing the same on my canvas. He does mix a fair bit on the canvas, whereas I tend to like to place a stroke down and leave it, to avoid creating mud. Somehow he’s able to mix on the canvas without creating a muddy mess. He commented that he generally doesn’t mix a third/forth color in that process, and so avoids this problem. In any case, he pointed out in his first demo how you need neutral grays to provide a dim stage for the pure colors to really “pop” as the star attraction.

When he got to my canvas at the end of the day, he saw improvement in color, but found my brushwork disjoint, broken. I realized I wasn’t mixing enough on the canvas, so will focus on this tomorrow, when we move from his orchard to paint on the Snake River, just down the road from his studio.

Hopefully, more progress then. Speaking of hope, Kumquat called to let me know my painting of Angel Island Harbour sold today! I’m on my way and Mike gave me the okay to buy an Ovanes painting. I have my eye on a couple, one sunset, the other of a series of hilltop villages in what is probably Provence, but could be Italy. Cheers!

Today was divided between painting still lifes in the Apple orchard and a nightime demo in his studio.

I made some progress today. Yesterday he commented that my color was too “raw”. He thought my values were strong, my paint application a little disjoint. He asked if I sold my work, which I took as a good sign

A number of us followed him from critique to critique to learn and watch as he transformed a mediocre study into a wonderful painting in just a few strokes. Wow.

The nightime demo was incredible. He painted on a light-blue toned canvas that I’m guessing was 48″x60″, huge! The still life set up was incredibly complex, with perhaps 24+ objects. I brought home a DVD of the demo.
He began by outlining the general composition with short linear strokes, eventual including elipses representing plates, fruit, vases, flowers, etc. He must have drawn millions of elipses because each was perfect.

Unlike yesterday’s demo, he didn’t start with a watercolor-like wash of local color, but instead went right into painting ala prima. He started with rich, articulated darks, blending edges carefully between adjoining colors.

He worked all over the canvas, but generally started from the center out. He even went back-and-forth between dark and light. He really focuses on blending on the canvas to get the color to bend to his liking. He demonstrated this on my own palette the next day, when he started with one pure color and created derivative strings of warmer/cooler versions, again by mixing the next color in the color wheel (generally), creating harmonious grays.

He worked on this huge painting, bringing it near finish (with one 10 minute break) between 9pm and midnight. The transformation of the painting was beyond words, bringing several artists to tears (the most experienced among us, by the way). Based on how I and others reacted to the demo that night, the more experience you have, the more you appreciate the difficulty of the beauty he created. I know what you’re thinking, I “drank the coolaid”, and perhaps I have. You had to be there.

Again, sorry, but he didn’t allow photography in his studio, so nothing here.

What a beautiful day in Idaho! I arrived at Ovanes’ studio to find cheerful Vickie Reece (Ovanes’s assistant) had set up wonderful outdoor still lifes in the orchard surrounding his studio. They were perfect juxtapositions of shapes, colors and values. The dappled light from the fruit trees made the subject both challenging and inspiring.

After we painted outdoors a while, Vickie invited us in for a demo in Ovanes’s studio. The first thing I noticed–other than the inspiring art on the walls–was his palette, filled with a full spectrum of colors piled high. I’m guessing there was about one full cup of each color!

We were asked not to photograph in the studio, so I’ll do my best to describe his method.

PREPARATION:

• MEDIUM: 1/4 Linseed oil, remaining split of Gum Turpentine and Damar varnish (yes, it smells, work in a well ventilated room or better yet outdoors!). Ovanes explained the importance of this medium: to avoid muddy color, you need the under painting to dry quickly.

• CANVAS: three coats of acrylic Gesso. The more porous the better to absorb the toning and under-painting

• PAINT: Classic Artist’s Oils. Mix linseed oil as necessary to achieve a uniform consistency (of mayo).

The steps I describe below are my own interpretation of his process, Ovanes didn’t enumerate his process.

STEP 1: OUTLINE GENERAL SHAPES. Outline the big masses, paying attention to a pleasing distribution of positive and negative spaces.

STEP 2: TONE THE CANVAS. This is an interesting phase. He covers the white canvas completely with very thin washes of rich color (approximate to the local color of the object), avoiding firm edges, lots of blending, very loose and watercolor-like (including runs/drips). Alternate warm and cool colors. Don’t worry about the true local color at this point. Use no white.

STEP 3: UNDER PAINTING. Start with rich, juicy darks, keeping as thin as possible. Exaggerate the color. Again, think warm/cool, and place colorful grays near your most intense colors. I noticed he painted his darks with vertical stokes, and areas in the light with horozontal strokes). Create warm/cool vibrations with the toned canvas beneath. Other than alternating warm/cool, he said to keep the colors harmonious, but didn’t offer a more specific color theory. He discribed “happy accidents” of color that you’ll discover.

He stopped at this stage. As I see more complete demos, I’ll update this post/blog.

Later in the afternoon, he walked around to each of us while we were painting to offer a critique. He seemed to like my work (asked me if I sold my work!) Then offered advice. He liked some of my color harmonies (see still life, left), but felt the study was a little to broken up, perhaps not solid enough. He felt my flowers were missing some cooler shadow colors (which I added), and felt I should have included some of the background in light.

I–and others–then followed him from critique to critique to learn from others’ work. He was very generous with his time.

Ovanes and Vicki were very gracious hosts. If you get the opportunity to study with him, do it!
After class, I went to the nearby snake river boat slip–where I later learned Ovanes paints many of his paintings. I did this landscape study of the late night sun through the trees (click to enlarge).