Big McGee Lake

The winter session of my painting class ended a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to keep going with my painting. I thought maybe it was a good time to try some high mountain scenery. I looked through some recent photos but didn't see much to inspire me. I wanted some real alpine scenes and I found some from my last backpacking trip in August, 2010, when my friend Gerald and I did a 4-day trip to Big McGee Lake. At 10,500 ft. elevation, surrounded by 12,000 - 13,000 ft peaks, there was no shortage of beautiful scenery, and I took lots of photos. I was hoping to be able to paint something that would capture some of my love of this timberline country.

One morning, I spent an hour or so wandering around the meadows above our camp. I found this little stream cascading down to the lake and fisherman below. I like the painting, but in the upper area of water the vertical streaks don't look so good. They were in the photo so I tried to copy them. I believe that they were reflections of trees on the far side of the lake. I seem to have trouble painting lakes with large areas of dark washes, but I thought if I keep trying, maybe I'll get better at it.

I've always loved these alpine meadows with little streams sunk into the turf. This one was not far above the lake. I like the way it turned out.

The last sun of the day lights up Mt. Crocker across the lake. I made quite a mess of the lake, and went over it too many times trying to fix it. But there is still a lot that I like about the painting. Maybe I'll try again some day.

Here is an early afternoon view of the lake and Mt. Crocker as Gerald and I were leaving to hike back out. I wanted my photo to catch the sparkles in the lake, and that provided a challenge for the painting. This time I finally got a lake looking pretty good with just a single wet-on-wet wash, and I like the result.

I wasn't planning to do more than one or two paintings from this group of photos, but somehow I kept finding more scenes that I wanted to paint. This view is from our campsite in the early morning when the lake was very still. Besides the reflections in the water, I wanted to show some of the foreground with the rocks and scrawny lodgepole pines.

Hayward Scenes

Years ago, I did a painting of a view of Mission Blvd. in Hayward that I liked. That gave me the idea of doing a series of paintings of downtown Hayward. To anyone familiar with the city, this would probably seem like a pretty strange idea. Hayward is a very ordinary working-class town with few interesting landmarks and lots of ugly streets and buildings. But I've lived in it for 38 years and I've become rather attached to it. I like that it is so unpretentious and so typical of lots of American towns.

Here is Mission Blvd. near the Hayward Plunge, painted in 2000. The Giant Burger recently changed ownership and it has been fixed up, but it still looks much the same.

This is the Hayward City Hall on a Cinco de Mayo around 14 years ago. Just to the right of this scene there was a stage set up and young girls and boys in colorful costumes doing traditional dances. Actually Hayward has three city halls. One was built probably in the 30's on Mission Blvd. and lies directly on the Hayward fault. It is still standing, but unused. Another was built in the 60's on Foothill Blvd., a 10-story building that has been sitting empty for years after it was discovered that it was also near the fault and not earthquake safe. The current City Hall, built in the late 90's, is also near the fault, but hopefully was built to be strong enough to survive a quake.

This is the first of my more recent paintings. The Bistro, on the corner of B Street and Main, is just about the only place in town for any kind of night life with live music. It is part of the Green Shutter Hotel building. This is in the older part of downtown that has more of an urban character than the rest of Hayward.

All Saints church, at the corner of Second and D Streets, is a beautiful 100-year-old building that stands out on a hill above the downtown area. I see it as a symbol of the large Catholic presence in the city, with the history of Portuguese settlement and its big Mexican-American population.

The corner of Foothill and A Streets marks the center of downtown Hayward, as is clearly indicated by the new sign structures that now arch over Foothill. For as long as I've lived in Hayward, the city has been trying to revitalize the downtown area, which kind of went downhill years ago when shopping malls across town began to be more attractive to shoppers. Revitalization has had limited success, although there are recent signs of improvement. There is still not a lot going on downtown that would make anyone want to hang out there. I enjoyed the challenge of lots of detail in these paintings, and plan to do more one of these days.

Winter, 2014

Whenever a new session of my watercolor class begins, Ron spends the first couple of classes going over materials and basic techniques for the new students. The majority of the class are continuing students like myself, and we spend those first classes working on whatever we want.

Maureen and I had recently been to the DeYoung Museum to see the David Hockney exhibit, and on the way back to our car we walked past Stow Lake. I thought the scene would be good for a painting, so I took a few shots with my iPhone. At the first class of the winter session, I made an attempt at painting it. It wasn't too bad, but I wasn't satisfied with it and I had an hour or so of class left, so I started it again and finished later at home. I was having a hard time getting the lake to look like I wanted, and I almost messed up the second attempt too, but I was able to lift off some of the paint and start again, and it finally came out pretty good.

Whenever I'm out hiking, I love finding interesting rocks. For one Wednesday class, I really felt like painting some rocks, so I looked through my photos and found one from a hike on Pleasanton Ridge. I feel like this is one painting where I got lucky. The washes all came out pretty much how I wanted and it is now one of my favorites.

While my mind was still on rocks, I decided to try another one. This was from a photo taken on Dinosaur Ridge, a hilltop just north of Castro Valley in the EBMUD watershed. These rocks are sandstone with lots of fossil seashells embedded. I thought the shells were too small to paint, but I still liked the look of the rocks. I was not so lucky with this one, and at times thought it was too messed up to finish, but I somehow managed to fix it enough that I'm OK with it.

I missed a couple of classes because I was in the hospital having bypass surgery, and when I came back, I worked on this class project — a Mexican house from one of Ron's photos. It was not an easy picture to work from, with flat lighting and lots of detail. But I'm fairly pleased with how mine turned out. One thing I learned is that I shouldn't have tried to paint every rock in the stone wall.

This was another class project. Once again it is based on one of Ron's photos. In the photo, the stream was nearly invisible because it was mostly in shadow. I did a lot of thinking about how to make it show up, but it luckily came out a lot lighter than the banks which worked out well.

Spring - Summer 2013

I'm going to try to bring this blog up to date, but first I want to add some older paintings from last spring and summer, when my interest in painting was revived after many years of dormancy.

This hummingbird was my first painting that I did in Ron Pratt's class. It was an exercise in using masking fluid.

I believe this was the second in-class painting. It was from a picture of a Hawaiian waterfall on a magazine cover.

This Mexican seacoast view was from one of Ron's photos. I believe it is Puerto Vallarta.

Another in-class painting. This is from a photo of a vineyard near Murphys.

 When the spring session of the class was over, I wanted to keep up the momentum that I had going, so I began working from my own photos. This one is from Anza Borrego, which we visited on a trip earlier in the year.

We enjoyed watching a couple of horse races at the Alameda County fair, and I tried to take some photos to catch the action. My photos weren't much good, so I went online and found a much better one to paint from. I was hoping to show some of the power and speed of the race.

At the Oakland Museum, we enjoyed watching the koi in a lily pond just outside the entrance. I wanted to recreate the scene in a painting. I wasn't completely satisfied with the result, so I tried it again using masking fluid for the fish. It came out better in some ways, but the fish with hard edges didn't appear to be under the water, so I like this one better.

This one is a typical view from one of our trail rides in Garin Park. Maureen is riding our horse, Zach, and our friend Sara is on Vedra in the lead. I was riding Rio, who is often content with following the others, so our view is usually of the rear ends of the other horses.

This is the cabin near Big Sur that we go to usually at least once a year. It is a beautiful, quiet spot in the redwoods a couple of miles up a canyon from the coast.

This is our horse, Rio, the one that I usually ride.

On a hike at Mt. Diablo, I came across these rocks that I thought were worth a photo. I wanted to paint the scene, but felt that it could use something extra to make it seem more wild. I found a picture of a coyote online and he seemed to fit right in.

On another hike on Pleasanton Ridge, I came across these cows all lined up as if for inspection.

On the beach at Pescadero, we came across this flock of gulls. I managed to separate the gulls from the background with masking fluid.

We spent a week camping in the Sierra in August, and we went out to Hot Creek near Mammoth Lakes. This is the view from the road near the creek.

We camped at Twin Lakes near Bridgeport, and this was the creek near our campsite. I wanted to capture the colors of the creek as it went from shade to sunlight, but didn't quite get it. I still like the painting, although it is hard to tell that most of the orange area to the right is also water.

This is the meadow near our campsite in late afternoon. I combined parts of a couple of photos to get this composition.

Friends of ours have a ranch in the hills near Livermore, and on it they have two donkeys, Guido and Dolly. I framed this painting and gave it to them and they were very pleased with it. They now have it hanging in the ranch house.