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.

October 2015

I'm back in my painting class and as I expected, our first project was to paint something to be used as a holiday card. Ron chooses to do it in September to give everyone plenty of time to figure out how to get it printed and sent out. Since we had just returned from our Mammoth trip, I didn't have much time to think about a subject, but I remembered that last year I had downloaded several online images as potential cards, and I liked this one of two horses and a rider in the snow. The image was of a painting, but I just searched again and I can't find it, so I'm sorry that I can't give credit to the artist who inspired this.

I finished the painting of the horses in the snow halfway through my second class so I started another one. I have lots of photos from our Mammoth trip that could become paintings, but I chose to do one of a little cabin at the site of the Mammoth Consolidated Mine. Old buildings always appeal to me and I wanted to give some of the feel of the eastern sierra lodgepole pine forest. I think I got it pretty good.

The next project for my class was supposed to be a fall scene. Past experience told me that Ron would probably work from an image that didn't do much for me, so I found one of my photos from a trip we took in the late 90s. We spent a few days camped just outside of Durango, Colorado, and did some hiking in the San Juan Mountains. The aspens were so beautiful. My photo was a wide-angle portrait format, so I just added trees to the sides to make it even more wide-angle. It makes the woods look more open than they were, but I wanted to include some of the clouds and distant mountains. I think it turned out pretty good.

September 2015

 We spent five days in a little cabin by a lake at Mammoth Lakes, so I missed the first day of the fall session class of my painting class. I'll probably be painting some scenes from our trip in the near future, but I needed something to paint for the second week of my class, and I chose a photo of our cat, Sunny, on one of the patio chairs in our back yard. She spends much of her day there, keeping a eye on the birds and sleeping. Sunny was a feral cat at the barn where we used to board our horses. We adopted her about 6 years ago, and it took lots of time for her to get used to living with us, but now she is very relaxed and affectionate. I wanted to focus my painting on her rather than the background, so I let it fade to white paper around the edges. I had never tried that before, but I think it worked out quite well.

August 2015

We recently spent 8 days camping with our horses at Jack Brook Horse Camp near La Honda. We have been going there every year for something like 8 years with two other couples and their horses. We skipped last year because they scared us off with warnings about water restrictions, but we found out later that the restrictions were not so bad. This time I didn't bring any painting stuff because I figured that I would rather just relax when I wasn't riding or doing camp chores. I could paint from photos when I got back home. One day we drove to Half Moon Bay to buy a bale of hay and then stopped in Pescadero on the way back. I noticed this nice little house set back from the street and took a picture of it with my phone. A few days later when we were back home and I was looking at my photos for something to paint, I thought that it would be a good one to try. I think it turned out pretty good.

Actually, the first photo that I chose to paint from the camping trip was one of the redwood forest just a short walk from our campsite. I sketched it out and then was reluctant to start painting because I had a lot of doubts about being able to paint what I wanted it to look like. So I painted the little house first and after that I felt ready to try this one. I am quite pleased with the results. I find redwood forests incredibly beautiful, but capturing that beauty in a photo or a painting is not so easy. There is usually a great deal of contrast between the very dark shadows and the sunlit highlights, and the scene is filled with thousands of messy details. I've found that to paint it you need to do a lot of simplifying. For some reason, after doing most of my paintings in landscape format for the past few years, I chose to do two in a row in portrait format. I'm not sure why except that both of these scenes needed to be done that way.

more July 2015

In looking back through my photos for painting ideas, I found lots of nice shots from our trip to Utah and Colorado last summer, but one especially caught my eye. We had been exploring Dinosaur National Monument and had taken a side road where one of the features was a cliff face with some petroglyphs. I hiked up a short distance from the dirt road to see them, and noticed that the view across the little valley was quite pretty. The scene didn't all fit into a single photo, but one of the advantages of painting over photography is that is easy to rearrange a scene to fit the paper.

When I entered one of my paintings in the current show at the Hayward Foothill Gallery, it came as a surprise when they asked me to volunteer to sit in the gallery for a couple of shifts, but I agreed to do it anyway. I signed up for a couple of Thursday mornings, figuring that I could use the time to do some more painting. So I sat there painting at a small table and had practically no interruptions. I realized that showing my art at local galleries is not getting it seen by a lot of people. That's OK, I'm not in it for fame and fortune anyway. I chose another scene from the same day at Dinosaur. We hiked into Hog Canyon, a beautiful little box canyon which started out with meadows and flowers, and soon became a narrow slot in the cliffs.

For my second Thursday at the gallery, I chose another shot from last summer's trip. This one was on our way from the tiny town of Maybell, Colorado to the Sand Wash area to look for wild horses. The dark clouds became a downpour while we were exploring remote dirt roads, and we were lucky to get out of the area without getting stuck in the mud. I knew that the dark clouds were going to be challenging, which is one reason I chose to try. Much of the painting ended up overworked and muddy, but I like it pretty well anyway. It may be worthwhile trying it again some day.