Great news today! I found out (thanks to painting buddy Walter Porter) that my painting “Secluded Cove” has been selected by Don Demers as a Finalist in the Raymar Art Competition! You may recall that I painted it for my solo show last month in Pacific Grove, and even have a home-made video of the process. It was also featured in the local paper.  Here’s what the judge wrote:

“This painting works because of its vibrant color use and it’s calligraphy. i.e. the type of marks the artist has used in their technique. The feeling of the location was expressed through strong color and the subject was translated strongly by the artist through the use of the artist’s technique. These strong elements of color and technique made a familiar subject the artist’s own subject which transforms it into something new and more exciting.” - Don Demers

Here’s the painting. Wish me luck!

Secluded Cove - Oil on (RayMar!) Linen - 16×20″

I’ve been “tagged” by fellow artist Katerine Tyrrell with “Seven Things”, a sort of blogosphere chain letter. Here are 7 things you probably don’t know about me, and some fellow bloggers I’ve tagged:

1. I met my partner, Mike, on a blind date! Our good friends Ellen and Neil set us up. They both know us well, and hey, I guess you could say it worked out since we’ve been together for 18 years.
2. I have a short attention span, for some things at least. This shows up in my career history. I’ve been a musician, software engineer, high-tech manager, marketing guy, and artist. I’m not afraid to take risks now and then and shake things up. Jumping into something new things usually doesn’t scare me.
3. I’m a collector–not art, neccessarily (although there is that), but lots of things, like making lists, collecting data, and making connections between seemingly disparate things. One of my favorite things to do is to analyze a problem with lots of variables and find interesting connections to solve it. I’ve applied this to both complex software engineering problems, as well as marketing challenges. I like to “connect the dots“.
4. Music is important to me. It was my first artistic, creative adventure, starting at age 7 when my grandmother sent me a guitar from the Sears catalog one Christmas. She visited the following summer, and expected me to play! I did: Green Sleeves (interistingly, attributed to King Henry VIII). I’m listening to Death Cab for Cutie right now. Ahh…
5. What book’s on my nightstand? Usually a murder mystery. Love them. I guess it goes back to “connecting the dots”. I like to analyze.
6. I have a very famous person’s phone number (home and cell), but at risk of loosing this relationship, not going to give you the name! Turns out, this person is a painter herself (that narrows it down!) and she likes my work. I’ve helped her connect with other artists and we’ve had opportunities to just chat about art. She’s an actress. Enough hints
7. My favorite “sin” is sweets. I don’t think I’ve met a piece of chocolate that I didn’t love. One of my favorite places to indulge is Fleur de Cocoa, in Los Gatos, CA. They make European style hot chocalate–which, I believe, is probably just real chocolate melted with some milk or cream. None of that powdered crap. My God. Drinking it takes me back to the Las Ramblus in Barcelona, where I first tasted REAL hot chocolate.

It’s time for me tag some of my favorite bloggers (I realize some have been tagged, but want to recognize them), in no particular order:

• Bart Westgeest, “I Landscape” (Denmark). Bart is an incredibly creative, skillful artist who happens to also be a great blogger. His directness, honesty, curiosity and sensitivity makes him a regular read of mine
• René Beeldendkunstenaar, “René Plein Air” (The Netherlands). Another talented artist who posts really wonderful work regularly.
• Katherine Tyrrell, “Making a Mark” (United Kingdom). I think Katherine was probably my first “blogger-friend”. We discovered each other’s blogs in the early days, and have kept in touch. She’s great at transfering her ongoing search for artistic expression through knowledge, always finding the best resources, websites, exhibitions, etc. A great journey to follow.
• Cooper Dragonette, “Tomato Can Brushes” (Maine, USA). Cooper is the most recent addition to my blogroll. His artist journey is honest and the work always fascinating.
• Frank A. Edwards, “Painting for Life” (Ontario, Canada). Frank is a great painter: fresh color, free brush work, always interesting compositions. He’s generous with his knowledge.
• Michael Chesley Johnson, “A Plein Air Painter’s Blog” (Campbello Island, New Brunswick, Canada). As an artist/teacher, Michael’s posts are always enlightening. He did a wonderful series of posts chronicling a workshop with Ray Roberts, as well as his participation in plein air painting events across the country.
• William Wray, “California Painter William Wray” (Sierra Madre, California). William’s posts are terrifically entertaining and his work is original and beautiful, even if his subjects are often the blight of the Los Angeles area. He finds both beauty and humor everywhere.
• Peter Yesis, “Daily Painting Practice” (Omaha, Nebraska). Peter is terrific at explaining his process, with step by step examples. His work is terrific.
• Linda Blondheim, “Landscapes of the South” (Florida, US). Also a teacher, Linda ends every post with a useful “Painters Tip”. I don’t know how she comes up with so many, years of experience, I guess.

This is the second study of views from the area around Buena Vista Park.  This is actually from the “Scent Garden” of the Park Hill condos across the street from the park, looking South-East.  The distant hill is Corona Heights.

In this painting, I concentrated on contrasting the natural elements in the top third with the man-made structures below.   I’m having fun, figuring out how to play with these geometric shapes to make interesting patterns.  I’m not sure the values in the foreground are quite right (probably too light, as they’re in shadow), but I think there’s an interesting juxtaposition of shapes and colors.

Pink House - Oil on Linen - 8×10″

I’ve startred a series of paintings of views from Buena Vista Park, in San Francisco. This was my first attempt. I’m having fun figuring out a new subject, as I traditionally don’t paint architecture. I’ve found painting it a chore–the perspective, scale, etc, all has to work or it will detract from the painting. It seems easier to me to be more expressive with elements of nature, where adding a limb here or there to a tree makes little difference.

In this scene, I was attracted to the light hitting just the top and parts of the side of the building, as well as the fun abstracting the distant buildings into (largely) random horozontal and verticle brushstrokes. I’m happy with the way the painting reads. More to come!

Buena Vista Park View #1 - Oil on Linen - 10×8″

One of the ongoing challenges I am working on is a balance between colorism (pushing local color) and tonalism (photographic accurate value and color). A technique I have been using to mix very accurate color I call “brush in front”, which relies on accurate color spot mixing promoted by Charles Hawthorne and Henry Henche (see the text “Hawthorne on Painting”). This method differs from how I (and most artists) usually judge color, which is strictly be relative relationships of one color to another. This is just another approach, either can work equally well.

Here’s how it works

1. POSITION YOURSELF: Find a scene to paint that will allow you to set up your easel so that the light is behind you, and never directly in front of you. Set your easel up so the your canvas is in the shade. This usually means you’ll have to angle your easel at a 45-90-degree angle from the scene your painting.

2. BRACKET YOUR VALUE SCALE. In general, the range of pigment values from black to white isn’t sufficient to represent nature’s light range, which causes us to make some compromises in a painting by working within the practical range of pigment. In general, I find this technique best suited to subjects where the value range fits–but how do you know?

I test for a match by comparing the lightest light in the scene against white paint and the darkest dark in a scene against black paint. Dip the back end of your brush with white, then black, and compare, making sure that you compare the sun-lit side of the pigment on the brush (not the shadow side) to the scene. Place the brush in your line of sight between you and the part of the scene you’re comparing. For example, for the seascape below, I dipped the back end of my brush in white and placed it in my line of sight between me and the foreground white-water waves, which represented the lightest color in the scene. Normally, white is light enough for a landscape scene and black is not dark enough, but close. Realizing that the darkest darks in an outdoor daylight scene represent a very small space on the canvas, I don’t worry about it, but instead make adjustments for the values around the darks to compensate.

3. TEST COLOR SPOTS. With your canvas and easel in the right spot, and having tested the range of your pigments with the scene in front of you, you’re now ready to mix paint! I still work from dark-to-light. In the screen shot to your right (click to enlarge), I mixed the color of the rocks just below the white wave. I keep mixing until the color on the brush (remember, the lit side of the brush, not the shadow) matches the color spot in the scene. Usually, this involves starting with a larger pile of base color that comes close, and then adjusting–typically with complementary colors to gray the base color, or warms or cools to adjust the color temperature.

Even on this small pochade easel palette, I will attempt to keep base colors intact, and branch out color strings from there. A “color string” is a base color modified warm, cool, or complementary, but of the same value–this last point is important. If you want to get vibration in your painting, place these slight variations of color adjacent to each other, but keep the value the same. Only do this in areas where you want the eye to go, the center of interest, etc.

Samples

Here are two paintings done recently using this technique. The first is the seascape I did when taking the screen shots above, the second from the recent Gold Country Plein Air show. I tried to limit the number of color spots to focus on, in this case, just 6: the sky, ocean water, wet rocks, dry rocks, sand and foliage. To add some interest (eg, foreground rocks), I used color strings of warm, cool and complementary colors. One thing that surprised me in this painting was how dark the sky ended up, but in the end, I think it reads well (click to enlarge). It also surprised me (somewhat) how important grays are, and how many of them there are in a scene. Save the color for where it counts.

In this sample, the color variations in the foreground foliage were very, very slight. I think there are some nice color harmonies going on here.

Hillside Color Study - Oil on Linen - 6×8″

Both paintings are available–since they are studies–for $100 each (Pacific Grove is SOLD). Email me if you’re interested. If you try this technique, send me URLs to your images and I’ll update this page, enter comments with your own experiences and observations.

Gold Country Plein Air was the kick-off event for what will be at least five plein air paint-outs I’m scheduled for this year, including: Telluride Plein Air (June 28th-July 4th), Jewel by the Bay (July 17-20), Valona Plein Air (July 28-August 5th),  Estes Park Plein Air confirmed yesterday! (August 25), and San Luis Obispo Plein Air (not yet confirmed, October 1-7).

This nice thing about Kris’ show at The Vault is it’s non-competitive, and all the artists get along really well. It’s a nice annual reunion.  Several are in the upcoming Telluride show, including Paul Kratter and Douglas Morgan.  Paul was able to give me some tips at dinner the other night.  It’s probably the most prestigeous show I’ll do all year, so I’m a bit in intimidated.

Here’s one last painting from the show, one that I decided not to enter (three have sold, by the way!).  This one’s growing on me   I don’t know about you, but when I finish a a painting, it’s very difficult for me to judge it.  I guess you spend so much time looking at the “trees” in a work that you don’t see the “forest”.  Anyway, this is available to my blog readers only, let me know if you’re interested. If I sell this for a couple hundred, I can break even on the trip!

Pinecrest Lake - Oil on Linen - 8×10

Today’s event was a public paint-out on the grounds around Mountain Springs Gold Course.  It seemed a bit out of the way to me, but ended up being surprisingly well attended.  My guess is there were between 60-100 people there.  Most were collector/ameture artists, which was great, because they asked very good questions (not the typical, “how long does it take you to paint that” query).

I did sell one today (”Golden Hour“), so that was a nice surprise when I came back to the gallery.
Here’s today’s setup.  Perfect weather, no wind, 68 degrees C.

Today’s painting (of course, I couldn’t digitally scan as it’s wet, so the quality of the photo is just okay. I’m happy with it!

 

Mountain Springs Hillside - 8×6″ - Oil on Linen

A couple of participating artists, Kathleen Dunphy and Charles Waldman.

It’s still raining here this morning (supposed to clear, keep your fingers crossed), so I spent the morning fixing the pond in “Mountain Springs Sunset”, and also framed the first three to deliver. Kris (the gallery owner) called this morning. Since it’s raining, she’s setting up still lifes in the gallery, so unless it clears, I could post a still life later. I do want to make it to the Tuolomne River sometime later today.

Here’s “Mountain Springs, Sunset”, with the pond re-worked:

Mountain Springs, Sunset - Oil on Linen - 11×14

Great morning! Clear, wonderful. Headed up to Pinecrest to paint the late. A bit of a drive (30 miles, and I needed to be back in Sonora for the artist’s lunch), but well worth it. Why? SNOW! At that elevation, yesterday’s rain that produced pain brought today’s gain. I love painting snow…the color of shadows, light. Remember that Sorolla and Sargent both painted white objects quite often, be it a woman’s dress or sheets on a bed. White can be so much fun to paint–it’s the most reflective color, so you’ll see a bit of everything in it.

Here’s the first painting of the day, a small snow bank (melting fast). My fingers were pretty numb by the end, but I’m happy with the result.

Pinecrest Lake Snow Bank - Oil on Linen - 11×14

My second effort was back on Mountain Springs. I joined Mike Bagdonas, Elio Camacho and Reif Erikson. It was great to paint with a group, sharing jokes, painting horror stories, the usual. Elio had more equipment than I’ve ever seen. He was really prepared TO PAINT, but less so for THE BUGS. Look at this close up of his painting. Yikes. He had at least a hundred small flies stuck to his painting. Said he was going to spend tonight getting them off. Can’t wait to see the end result, as the painting was just covered.

Here’s my painting of the day. Of course, I had to be do the opposite, so while everyone painted the pond, I looked back up the hill to the dirt road we drove down on. I love the red-orange dirt of the Sierras. Copper content, perhaps?

Road to Mountain Springs Pond - Oil on Linen - 8×10

Mike described a great location on the Tuouomne River, with raging white water, Sycamores, etc. Sounds great. ‘Till then.

Well, the day started out sweet, with Dottie’s special “Peaches & Cream” French toast. Nice. It was good I ate a nice big breakfast, because I slept much of the day! It rained all morning, so I stayed in, read a book in bed and napped. I love naps

It did clear up later in the day, and I was able to get a bit of the sunset. It rained partly through, so finished later.  I’m not sure about the pond.  It was there, but I think it may detract to much from the sky, the center of interest… That pond may disappear soon.  What do you think?

Mountain Springs Sunset - Oil on Linen - 11×14