November 2016

I didn't do much painting through the summer. There were several trips out of town, but that's no excuse. I could have brought my painting supplies with me. I guess I was lacking inspiration. That's one reason I keep going to Ron Pratt's class — it pushes me to paint something whether or not I'm inspired. The following paintings have all been done since the class resumed in September.

We spent five days in the Mammoth Lakes area in September, and the first day of class I chose to do something based on a photo that I took there. One day we hiked up to Arrowhead Lake, and found this beautiful spot for Darby to play in the water. Now that he is eleven years old, he doesn't want to chase a stick into the water all day, but he is still up for a few times. I always find painting water quite a challenge, but I think I did pretty well with this one.

Our first class project was to paint something for a holiday card. I had painted a snow scene with a little stream a few months ago, and thought I could do something similar and add in a group of three bucks from a photo that I took when we were horse camping in August. It came out all right, but I wasn't completely satisfied with it so I decided to try something else.

Last February we had a family weekend in the snow near Bear Valley. One day while the grandkids were busy sliding down hills, I walked up to the top of the hill to see what I could see and took a photo of the view. I used it for this painting by adding some color to the sky, which was mostly gray, and putting lights on the little tree. I think this is the one that we will use for cards this year.

Now that I have been in the painting class for several years, I am finding that some projects keep repeating. Every fall we have done something with fall colors and aspens or birches with white trunks. It's a lesson on the use of masking fluid with watercolor. I guess I am getting a bit tired of this kind of thing. I didn't get very excited about it, though I went ahead and painted it anyway. It's not one of my favorites.

Then we did another fall scene, with an old mill. I got much more into this one because I liked the photo that we worked from. It had lots of pretty leaves in the foreground. Ron painted it as a distant scene without the foreground leaves, but I wanted to try to get them into my painting. It was a bit more challenging to do it that way, but I think I did it pretty well. It's my favorite of all the paintings I have done recently.

July 2016

When my painting class ended in early June, I intended to keep on painting, but it didn't happen for a while. Much of my attention was on a trip I took in mid-June that took me far from my usual routine. My old college friend, Greg proposed that we go together for a weekend at the Fur Peace Ranch, a guitar camp run by Jorma Kaukonen, lead guitarist with the Jefferson Airplane. I flew to Kansas City, where Greg lives, and then we made the long drive to southeastern Ohio. We spent three days learning to play country blues with Steve James, an excellent musician and a funny guy.

It seems that I was destined to get more involved in music this year, because a few weeks before the trip, I got together with Larry Murphy from my painting class, his wife Cheryl, and a friend, Lynn, to play and sing together. For a few months now, we have been entertaining the folks at ACEB, an alzheimer's support facility in Hayward. Every couple of weeks we spend an hour playing and singing for them.

When I finally settled down and started painting again, I had a hard time coming up with an inspiring subject. I try to tell myself that good artists paint anything they can find around them. I think of Van Gogh painting his bedroom. But without some kind of image in my head that appeals to me, it's hard for me to get started. One day on the way home from taking care of our horses, we stopped at a tiny fruit stand on North Livermore Ave. It seemed to say something to me about things I love about our California environment, so I snapped a photo with my phone. When I got ready to do some painting, I felt pretty rusty and felt like I needed to do something relatively easy that I could throw away if it didn't turn out. It's not one of my best, but at least I kept it and put it here for you to see.

I seem to be drawn to scenes with grass and rocks and tree trunks, and for my next painting I chose a photo that I took hiking on the Ukraina Trail here in Hayward. I did the painting quite fast and loose and I like the results a lot.

The trail is a nice three-mile loop starting at Stonebrae School, and leads to a very interesting historical site. Agapius Honcharenko was an orthodox priest in the Ukraine in the mid-nineteenth century, who was persecuted by the Russians, forced into exile, and ended up with a small farm at the top of the Hayward hills, where he and his wife lived from 1873 until 1916. He continued to publish political literature which was smuggled into Russia, and he held church services in a nearby rocky grotto. Nothing remains of his farm but his grave and an historical marker, but the trail is a pretty walk with great views across the bay.

June 2016

For our last class of the spring session, Ron came up with a photo of an older man working on a wood carving, copied from a calendar. Actually I think he was using something like a soldering iron to burn a design into the wood. Since it was our last class and everyone brought food for a potluck, we didn't want to spend too much time painting, so the idea was to do it in an hour or less. Sometimes we find that some nice things happen when we try to work faster. The work tends to be looser and maybe more unified because we are covering larger areas at a time. I think that worked for me in this painting and I am quite pleased with the results.

May 2016

In my class, we did a painting based on a photo that Ron took in New Orleans of a musician playing a clarinet in a doorway. Ron says his playing was really good, but I guess that doesn't have much to do with the painting. Most of the class cringed when they saw what our subject was going to be. We all have something of a block when it comes to painting people. Besides, I knew that I often have trouble with dark colors, so a black man was even more challenging. I did have a few problems with it but I think it came out OK.

After that, we worked on a scene from another of Ron's photos. This one was the view from Nepenthe, a restaurant on the Big Sur coast. Maureen and I usually make a stop there whenever we are in the area, so I am familiar with the view. I finished the painting in class this morning and sat for a while adding little bits here and there, but then decided that it would be best to leave it be. It seems that one can always see places in a painting where more could be done, but more is not necessarily better. One of the things that I like about watercolor is that it can show a lot of freshness and simplicity that can be lost by spending too much time on it.

April 2016

 I find that when I paint my own ideas rather than those of my painting class, I often get better results. That's what happened this time anyway. I really like the class and all of the people in it, and Ron is a very good teacher, but sometimes I just need to do it my way. Maureen and I go out to Livermore nearly every day to see our horses and I enjoy the scenery as we cross the big undeveloped valley north of 580. I had been noticing a barn along May School Road as a potential painting subject, and one afternoon when I stopped to get a photo, there were also a couple of sheep grazing nearby in the wet field. I am quite pleased with the result, and I think it is one of my better paintings.

In my class, we worked on a springtime scene with poppies and green hills. The background is based on one of Ron's photos from Sunol Regional Wilderness, and the poppies from another photo. I recently went hiking at Sunol and enjoyed many scenes like this, so this was fun to do. I had done several paintings with poppies before and remembered that I had wished I had made the grass darker so that the poppies would stand out more, so I did that in this painting and it worked quite well.

February 2016

 

We did a class project which was based on a photo of a big wave. It involved a lot of masking for the white foam areas, including some splattered on by flipping the end of a brush. My masking fluid is nearly white and hard to see, so I got a bit carried away with the splatters, but I like it. I wanted the white spray to stand out against the blue sky, but my first wash was too light and I kind of messed it up going over it again. It makes it look a bit stormy, which is OK, but not what I intended. Sometimes you just have to make the best of your accidents and mistakes.

Then we did another project which was a beach scene at Carmel, from one of Ron's photos. I seem to be having trouble starting paintings with the sky. This time I accidently got a blob of dark brown on my brush and streaked it across the sky. I washed it all off and started over, and it came out pretty good. One of the things I liked about the photo was the reflections on the wet sand, and I like the way that turned out.

I finished up the Carmel beach scene at home, and at the next class, everyone was still working on the beach. Maureen and I had just spent a long weekend with our kids and grandkids playing in the snow near Bear Valley. I looked through the photos on my iphone and found one of a little creek in a snowy forest. It's a simple layout without much to it but snow, water and trees, but I like it.

January 2016

As last year's holiday season approached, there just didn't seem to be time for painting. The fall session of my painting class ended mid-November and then one of my classmates, Joe Annunziato, talked me into showing some of my work at a arts and crafts show at Crow Canyon Country Club. I put a lot of effort into getting a bunch of paintings matted and framed, and I decided that finally I would try to sell some of them. The show was a good experience — some good and some not so much. I got to meet a lot of people and heard a lot of praise for my work, but I felt out of place in the country club environment and no one expressed any interest in buying anything. After participating in several shows now, I realize that the business side of art doesn't really excite me, and I could do without it for a while.

My painting class started up again the first week of January and for the first class I painted a scene from the ranch near Livermore where we board our horses. It is a beautiful location north of town where there are miles of open ranch land and rolling hills. I kept noticing this little run-down house all alone against the hills and took several photos of it. The painting is mostly big wet washes and it didn't take very long to do. I feel that it is not one of my best, but it got me started painting again.

For the second class, the idea was to do something faster and looser than usual. We worked from a photo of a bunch of eucalyptus trunks. Ron encouraged us to kind of go wild with colors which was fun. Eucalyptus bark actually is quite colorful if you look at it closely. The assignment was to do something in less than an hour, and that's what I did here.

The last couple of classes have been devoted to a winter river scene. Ron supplied a photo that he took of the Stanislaus River somewhere above Arnold. The photo showed ice along the shore but not much snow, but it was easy to add more snow to the painting. It is the kind of scene that I enjoy painting and I feel that I did it quite well.