June 2014

A few months ago, I painted a creek scene from a photo taken on our sierra camping trip last summer. The painting was not too bad, but I wasn't very satisfied with it and thought I could it better. I don't usually like to re-do a painting. It feels like too much work. A lot of artists do repeat the same idea, trying to get the most out of it. Georgia O'Keefe comes to mind and her series of Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers. In that case, her paintings became increasingly abstract as she zoomed in on the essence of the idea. But that kind of thing is way beyond my reach.

I didn't get off to a very good start with this one. I was in too much of a hurry, and I put down masking fluid over some already painted areas before they were completely dry. When I pulled off the mask, a lot of the color came with it, leaving splotchy areas. I was able to patch them up pretty well and I think it ended up pretty good. I did the whole thing pretty fast, and maybe it would have been better to spend more time on it, but I like the looseness of it too.

A couple of months ago I went hiking in Bishop Ranch Regional Open Space in the hills west of San Ramon. I took a bunch of photos, but I thought one of an oak tree trunk and log would work best for a painting. I liked the sun and shadow on the foreground grass combined with a distant view. Like the previous painting, I feel like I rushed this one a bit, but I like it pretty well.

I was thinking that I'd like to do something with some water in a creek, and looking through some older photos, I came across one of a group of us crossing a creek on horseback. This was from a 2011 weekend horse camping trip to Rancho del Oso Horse Camp, part of Big Basin State Park. The photo wasn't a very good one, just a quick shot behind my back as my horse, Rio, was still climbing the bank, but I figured that a blurry photo wouldn't matter too much for a watercolor painting. The scene brings back some bittersweet memories, because Eddy, the second horse in line in the painting, is gone now. He passed away in his early thirties, so he had a full life.

May 2014

My watercolor class finished its spring session last week, so I'm on my own again until next fall (assuming that I'll take the class again, which I probably will). Although I missed a class when we spent a few days in Big Sur, I still managed to do a couple more class projects.

 

 This was another exercise in masking. We used a sponge to apply masking fluid to create blossoms in a tree. I wish I had stamped out more blossoms, but my masking fluid is nearly white so it is hard to see what I am doing. Ron's demonstration used all warm colors -- lots of pinks and oranges. As he was doing it, I commented that fall colors didn't quite go with blossoms on the trees. I was just joking but he seemed to take it more seriously and the following week he brought in a photo of a springtime sunset scene with all warm colors just to show that it was possible. As you can see, I stuck with colors that I thought fit the season. Several people commented that they liked what I had done, but to me it is just OK. I didn't put too much effort into it anyway.

This is our last class project, a cafe scene in New Orleans from one of Ron's photos. I got more involved in this than the previous project. I liked the building and the people presented a bit of challenge. I think it came out pretty good. I like the challenge of trying to keep it kind of loose but putting in enough detail that it has a bit of realism.

 

One day I did a fairly challenging hike to the Knobcone Point area of Mount Diablo. It was a beautiful hike and when I got home I wanted to paint something that showed the varied terrain of the area -- rocky chaparral, oak woodland and grassland. I used a photo from my iPhone, with a little fudging with the composition. It's not exactly what I had hoped for, but overall, I think it is pretty good. I especially like the cloud shadows on the peak of Mt. Diablo in the background.

One day after watching my grandson, Zachary, play baseball, we stopped by at the San Leandro Cherry Festival. We've lived in the area for a very long time, but we had never been to this festival, which celebrates the cherry orchards that once covered the area but which have been long paved over. I took a picture with my iPhone to get the contrast between the colorful crowds and the rather austere looking Saint Leander's church behind them. Once again, the people were a challenge, but as you can see, I didn't try too hard for a lot of small detail. It came out OK, and it was fun to do.

Recently, I found something that may influence the direction of my painting. I went to the new Kaiser San Leandro Medical Center for an echocardiogram, and there in the cardiology waiting room, were a couple of very beautiful watercolors. I always like seeing other painters work, and I am usually quite impressed by it, but these were really exceptional. The painter is Dan Petersen, who lives in the central valley and is retired after teaching for many years at Modesto Junior College. His landscapes have a lot of sharp detail, with a lot of beautiful flowing lines and vibrant colors. I looked him up online (petersenwatercolor.com), and found that he had made a DVD demonstrating his techniques. I ordered a copy, and found a lot of useful ideas on it. I'm going to try to incorporate some of what I learned in my future painting, but probably won't try to copy all of his methods. He uses a lot of masking, adding washes over and over again, and spends way more time on each painting than most watercolorists do. I probably don't have that much patience, but it will be good to know that the possibility is there if I ever feel like working that hard on a painting.

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.

Two Barns

The spring session of my watercolor class started a week ago. It was fun to see all of the continuing students again plus a couple of new people. As usual, the first couple of classes cover materials and basic techniques, mostly for the new students, so I was free to work on whatever I wanted to. Anticipating this, I looked through a lot of our photos for ideas. I've always liked pictures of old barns, so I found several shots of barns that might work. I suppose that old barns could be seen as kind of an artistic cliché, but that doesn't bother me. I'm just painting for the fun of it and I don't care whether anyone takes it seriously.

This one was based on a shot I took last fall when I was on my way to Black Diamond Mines Regional Park for a hike. It's on Sommersville Road just before the park entrance. I think it turned out pretty good. It's really more about the feeling of being in the dry hills than about the barn.

This one is at Garland Ranch Regional Park in Carmel Valley, when we were there last fall. We like to spend a few days at a friend's cabin near Big Sur, and we often go to Garland Ranch because it is one of the few places in that area where we can walk with our dog. Most of the other places to walk are state parks which don't allow dogs on trails. I think this painting turned out pretty good too (meaning that it came out like I intended, which is often not the case with my watercolors).

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.