January 2020

I've started a new painting class, taught by Monica Satherthwaite at the San Lorenzo Adult School. It's turning out to be a good class. Monica has a different approach than Ron's class. Instead of having everyone paint the same subject by following the teacher's demonstration step by step, she encourages the students to find their own subjects. While much of the class are painting whatever they want, she works with small groups demonstrating various techniques. Every class begins with a half hour of quick study, a silent time when everyone does a quick sketch or painting, usually of some kind of still life. Like my previous class, it is a nice group of mostly older people, many of whom have been there for years.

There are many aspects of Monica's approach that differ from Ron's. One is that she asks us to work with a limited palette which she specifies as follows: Scarlet Lake, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Yellow, Lemon Yellow, Thalo Green, Thalo Blue, Ultramarine, and Violet. It is taking me a while to get used to working without some of the colors that I used to depend on, and learning how to mix substitutes for them. After setting up a new palette with these colors and a bit of practice, I decided to see what I could do with this scene from a photo that Maureen took a couple of years ago at the place where we often stay at Mammoth Lakes. I am quite pleased with the way it turned out.

One day a few weeks ago I went for a walk in the bayshore marshes just south of the San Mateo Bridge approach. There were not as many shore birds as I expected, but I did get some photos of an egret, and decided to paint it in my class.

On another day in class I started working on a scene with Maureen riding Zim on the Goldenrod Trail near the barn where our horses live. I wanted to show the light coming through the trees, and I think I got some of it at least.

November 2019

Every fall, my painting class does an autumn scene with masked white tree trunks and lots of color. I had done a lot of these, and I didn't get much inspiration from the photo that we were supposed to base our painting on. I found one of my own, and image from the internet of a creek in an aspen forest. This was a lot more fun than the class project would have been.

The last project of the year was a scene with the aurora borealis. For this I also found an image online, and tried to paint it. I tried to follow Ron's example and paint most of it in two layers. After that, I still wasn't satisfied with my painting, so I tried to add a third layer, and that just made a mess. I had given up with it, but at the last class I didn't have anything else that I wanted to paint, so I started over, intending to just do something quick to pass the time. This time I painted all of the color and dark sky in one quick wet-on-wet pass. It turned out better than I expected and all it took to finish it was to add some spattered opaque white stars and some dark trees. Maureen liked it better than any of my other recent paintings, so we used it to have a holiday card printed.

A few days after that last class, I received an e-mail from Ron saying that he had had some problems with the administration for the recreation district that hired him, and he was quitting the job. For the last seven years I have been enjoying the class and the group of students that have become like a family, and it was a shock to find that it was now finished. Several of us got together by e-mail and found another class given by the San Lorenzo Adult School. We visited the class and it looked good, so seven of us signed up for it. It will be quite a change from our old class, but I'm looking forward to it.

October 2019

Last summer I added one more painting from the John Muir Trail. On our way up to Silver Pass, we passed this marmot on the rocks. I could have zoomed in on the marmot, but I wanted this to be more about his rocky habitat. I felt that a close-up of the rocks said more to me about the place than the many expansive views in my photos.

When my painting class started up again in September, our first project was a trumpet player that Ron had photographed in New Orleans. I thought the background was a total mess when I started, but now that it is done, I like it.

Our second class project was to paint something for a holiday card. We had just returned from a couple of weeks in west coast Canada, and I wanted to do something from that. We had visited the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and saw these totem poles and houses in an outdoor exhibit. After days of gray skies, dark forests and wide views of sea and islands, I felt that the native artwork said a lot about this environment, so I tried to put it all together in this painting.

July 2019

My painting class was done for the summer, but I wanted to keep it going. I decided to do some more work on the series that I had in mind of scenes from my 2001 hike of the John Muir Trail. I took several hundred photos on that trip, and though many of them wouldn't make very interesting paintings, I was sure that some of them would work. This scene is from our second day on the trail, after leaving Yosemite over Donohue Pass and descending a couple of miles to Rush Creek. We rested for an hour or two in this beautiful spot.

On our third day on the trail, we passed by Garnet Lake, with a great view of Mt. Ritter and Banner Peak. My son, Aaron, and his wife, Alicia, were accompanying me at this point, and I think that after a couple of days of hard work, they were finally fully appreciating what a beautiful place this was.

On the morning of our fourth day, we hiked along Shadow Lake and saw this scene. I don't usually like to do much masking, but I thought it was needed for this one, for the trees and sparkles. I wanted to show the early morning light with lots of contrast, and I think I did it pretty well.

I had already done a couple of paintings several years ago that fit into this series. At some point, I'd like to show them all together. I could put them on a website that I've been planning for years but haven't got around to yet. Two of the paintings that belong in this series are from May 2015 showing the Tuolumne River and Palisades Lakes.

June 2019

The last class project of the spring session was a turtle. Ron supplied two different photos, one black and white and one in color, and the idea was to combine them. By the end of the class, I thought it just needed a little more work, which I could do the following week. When that time came around, I decided that I was satisfied with it as it was, so I started a new painting instead.

One spring afternoon I went for a walk on the Ukraina Trail in the Hayward hills. It was a beautiful day, and as I passed a rocky hillside with a few poppies, I thought that it could be the subject of a painting some day, and I took a photo with my phone. In my class, while everyone else was still working on the turtle, I started this scene and finished it up later at home.

May 2019

 

I found a photo online that I liked of an old car in the snow at the ghost town of Bodie. It was fun to paint and I think it turned out pretty good.

In April, our friends Norma and Mike invited us up to their ranch deep in the hills southeast of Livermore. The wildflowers were at their best, and we walked up the ranch road to admire them. In my painting class, our next project was to paint the "superbloom", the amazing displays of wildflowers brought on by our wet winter, especially in southern California. Those scenes didn't excite me much. I wanted to paint a place that seemed more real to me, someplace that I had actually experienced. I chose to work from one of my photos from Norma and Mike's ranch with a field of poppies.

 I found another photo online that I liked and wanted to paint. I'm not sure of the exact location but I think it is in the Buttermilks west of Bishop. I really like high desert places like this and I like my painting a lot.

Another class project was to paint this scene of the entrance gate to San Francisco's Chinatown. It was a very busy scene but didn't try for too much accurate detail. After two class periods, I was done, and I looked around and no one else was anywhere close to being finished. They all joke about how fast I paint, but it doesn't feel fast to me. I spend a lot of time just sitting and thinking about what to do next, and waiting for areas to dry. I'm not sure what the others do that takes so long.



A couple of months ago I painted a scene from my 2001 hike on the John Muir Trail, but I wasn't completely satisfied with it and thought I could do better. I almost never try to repeat a painting, but I know that many other artists do with good results, so I tried it with this one. The scene is at the upper end of Lyell Canyon in Yosemite, when Mt. Lyell first appears. This time I added some people. I had another photo of my son Aaron, his wife Alicia, and her brother Ray sitting on the bank, and I used it to add them into this scene. I think it improves the painting a lot, and I like it.

March 2019

One day in early February, I went up Mt. Diablo for a hike. A couple of days before, it had snowed on the mountain, but I didn't care about that, I just wanted to do some hiking. I found that the road up was closed at Juniper Camp, and the parking lot was filled with people come to play in the snow. I started up the trail to the summit, and took a few photos along the way, including the one that inspired this painting. I think I did a pretty good job of it. The trail began to be dangerously icy in spots, so I gave up and turned back before reaching the top, but I had a great afternoon anyway.

For the last project for the winter session of my painting class, we painted a couple of toucans. Ron had just returned from a vacation in Costa Rica, and that may have inspired his choice of subject. The birds and branch were masked to paint a quick wet-on-wet background, and for once, I refrained from trying to fix it. That made it a better painting.