More Spring 2014

The second project for my watercolor class was a flower garden. The idea was to start by using masking fluid to mask a few flowers to be white ones, then add a few blobs of color for more flowers and mask flower shapes over them, do the same again with some other colors until we had lots of colorful flowers, all masked. Then the background, which was mostly green, was added, and finally the masking removed to reveal an almost finished painting. It was fun to do, and I think mine came out pretty good, but since I'm not much into gardening, the flowers are all imaginary, and there is not much connection with reality like I usually try for in my painting.

In between class projects, I did a couple of other paintings of High Sierra scenes which have a lot more connection with reality. Both of these are from photos taken on a 2008 backpacking trip with my friend, Gerald.

This one is of Pioneer Basin, which was our ultimate goal of the trip. We spent the morning of our third day of the trip in the basin, Gerald doing some fishing and me wandering around taking photos. It is a very beautiful area, a string of small lakes near timberline at 11,000 ft. I had fond memories from when my dad and I visited it nearly 50 years ago. I like this painting a lot. I can see in it the powerful high country light, the cool, thin air, the silence.

This one is a little meadow just below Ruby Lake, which we passed on our first day of hiking. Clouds were starting to build up over the incredible 13,000 ft. ridge behind the lake. I really like the way this one came out too.

Recently, Maureen and I went to see the Georgia O'Keefe exhibit at the De Young Museum. It was of her Lake George years, and included her giant close-ups of flowers, and some abstract work. Afterwards, I kept thinking that I wish I could paint stuff like that, and maybe I should try to put more abstraction into my painting. As you can see from the above paintings, it didn't happen. I seem to be stuck on realism, at least for now. But I'm going to keep trying to let new ways of seeing get into my artwork.

Spring 2014

We've been quite busy the last few weeks, but I still got around to doing several paintings. I did this one for our friends Christina and Mike, and it is the two of their horses that they brought on our yearly horse camping trip last September. On the left is Aurora, a beautiful blue roan mare. Roan horses have a mixture of light and dark hair that makes their coat kind of shimmer. It's not easy to capture that effect in a painting or a photo, but it was worth a try. On the right is Wiz, Aurora's son, a buckskin gelding. They are both really nice horses, and we enjoyed being with them. I find painting animals to be a lot more challenging than most other kinds of subjects, but it wouldn't be as much fun if it was easy.

The first assignment of the spring session of my watercolor class was to paint some Plumeria, a Hawaiian flower. This was an exercise in using masking fluid. It was based on one of Ron Pratt's photos. After masking the flowers, the green background was done as a wet-on-wet wash. Our teacher, Ron, left his background as a blur of greens, but I couldn't resist adding some darker greens to make some stems and leaves. I'm not familiar with this flower, so I can't tell whether my painting looks anything like the real thing, but I like it anyway.

It seems that I'm not done with my urge to paint scenes of the high sierra. And I'm not done with trying to capture reflections in lakes. This is from a photo that I took in August, 2008 on a backpacking trip with my friend, Gerald. It is early morning at Ruby Lake, at about 11,000 ft. in the Rock Creek area between Mammoth and Bishop. Once again, I ended up with a lot of muddy colors in the reflection, but I feel like I did better than previous attempts at this kind of scene. I have several other nice photos from this trip that would be fun to paint. In fact, I've already started on one of them, and you may see it here soon.

I know that some artists and photographers don't like to specify the exact locations of their landscapes because they want people to focus on their art, not the place it represents. They also don't want their special places overrun by people trying to copy what they have done. I don't feel that way. As one who has had a lifetime obsession with maps, specific places are very important to me and I want to share them with others. I feel that so many people today have very little contact with the natural world, and if I can encourage someone to get outdoors and maybe get a bit sweaty and dirty, I've done a good thing.