October 2014

I missed the second week of my painting class because we finally did our trip to the mountains that we had planned for a month or so earlier. We kept putting off the trip because our horse, Rio, got some kind of spider bite and his left front leg swelled up to more than twice its normal size, and he could barely walk. After nearly two months of vet visits and treatments, he is almost ready to ride again. We had planned to go camping, but decided to make it easy on ourselves and we stayed three nights in a cabin near Mammoth Lakes. It was kind of a short trip, but we had a great time.

When I returned to my class, the assignment was to work on a painting for a holiday card. We could choose any subject that we wanted. Maureen suggested that I use one of our photos from a trip to the snow with the kids a couple of years ago. I found one with lots of people having fun in the snow, and found it fairly easy to paint. People in my class saw what I was doing and commented on how hard it looked. But really, much of the area is just white paper with a few blue shadows and the people are too small to do much detail.

The following week, my class was still working on the holiday card, but I had finished my snow scene, so I brought several photos from our recent trip. I chose to try one of a rocky mountainside with some colorful aspens. This was in Little Lakes Valley, a short hike from the Mosquito Flat Trailhead at the end of the Rock Creek Road. This is just about the best place in the Sierra to see timberline country without much hiking, because the trailhead is over 10,000 ft. elevation. Late in September, the aspens were turning yellow and red here, but still green at lower elevations. I took the liberty of adding a little stream in the meadow, but in this drought year, it was all dry.

After finishing the painting with the aspens, I had another photo that I wanted to try to paint. This was also in Little Lakes Valley, a lake with lots of sparkly sun reflections. I thought it would be a fun challenge to see what I could do with the sparkles. I started out using a dry brush technique on the water, which gave me some of the effect that I wanted, but it was really messy and I almost gave up and trashed the painting. But then I decided that I may as well keep trying to make something of it. A bit of touch up with opaque white helped a lot, although I still see it as pretty messy. But overall, I like it pretty well. I think if I were to do it again, I would try using masking fluid for the sparkles. Maybe I'll do that one of these days.

September 2014

A week or so ago, I went hiking in Sunol Regional Park. I saw lots of nice scenery but not too much that inspired me to paint it. But as I was walking along, something drew my eye to this grouping of oaks on a dry hillside. Years ago, I would have just let it go by, thinking that it wasn't worth wasting film on, but now when something catches my eye, I can just pull our my iphone and snap a photo. I thought it would be just another throw-away shot, but when I looked at my photos later, this one was the only one of many that I thought I would like to paint. Something about the arrangement of the trees and the shadows spreading down from the center said something to me. Something that couldn't be put in words. The red poison oak on the left adds something too. It is pretty loose and quickly done, but I like it a lot.

My painting class started up again a couple of days ago, and I needed something to work on in class. I remembered that I had a shot of a little cottontail bunny that I shot on our trip this summer. I also had another photo of the distant view from the same spot as the bunny, and I thought I could combine the two. This was on highway 40 at the Utah-Colorado border just south of Dinosaur National Monument. I hoped it would show the difference in scale between the bunny's world of rocks and grass, and the wide open spaces of plains and mountains. Instead, is seems to bring them together, which maybe is what I had in mind anyway. Maureen thinks the bunny looks too big. That's probably the result of combining a close-up shot with a distant view. I suppose I could have done better with the perspective. It's another quickly done painting, but I like it.

August 2014

I've been trying to keep going with my painting to keep from losing some of what little skill I have. It seems that the more often I paint, the more sure my brush strokes and the better my paintings. If I neglect it for very long, when I start again, I feel a lot less sure of what I am doing. In that way it is kind of like playing the guitar or any musical instrument. Regular practice makes it better.

A few weeks ago, Maureen and I spent a Sunday with our son, Aaron, his wife, Alicia, and our three-year-old grandson, Dylan. We took the ferry from Alameda to San Francisco and wandered around Fisherman's Wharf. We had a great time, and on the way back home, the ferry made a stop at Angel Island. On the way back, we had a nice view of the Golden Gate with the fog bank just beyond it, and a sailboat floating by. I thought it would make a good scene for a painting, so I shot it with my iPhone. I included the heads of a couple of passengers to show that the wind was a major part of the scene.

I decided to try another scene from our visit with my cousin John and his wife Pat in Colorado. This is the view from the front of their house. Actually, it is put together from several photos, but it is not too far from reality. They have such a beautiful place that wherever you look you see something like this.

July 2014

This summer I haven't been as productive with my painting as I could have been. I guess I need my weekly class to keep me going. Maureen and I went on a great trip to Utah and Colorado in early July, and I brought home lots of photos that I hoped to turn into paintings. But for some reason, I've been reluctant to get started. It may be that some of the places we saw were just so beautiful that I'm afraid that my art will fall far short of showing them as they are. I know that I should just keep telling myself that it doesn't matter, that painting anything is better than not painting at all.

 I have managed to do a couple of paintings, however. For this first one, I thought that maybe if I tried something that was not from our trip, I could get myself started. In my last blog post, I showed one of a group of riders crossing a creek. There was another photo from that same ride in Big Basin State Park that I had wanted to paint, so that's what I chose to do. This is West Waddell Creek, just below Berry Creek Falls. I wanted to see what I could do with the lush greenness and the reflections in the water, and I think I did pretty well.

This morning, I finally tried one from our trip. We stayed several days with my cousin, John, and his wife, Pat, at their place in the mountains near Boulder. Late one afternoon, I spent some time just wandering around taking pictures that I thought might become paintings. This one was of their driveway with a puddle from a recent rainstorm. Yes, they actually have rain in the summertime there, something that made us Californians quite envious. I don't usually do so much with clouds, but I thought it was worth a try. The painting was fairly quickly done, and is rather sketchy, but I think I caught some of the beauty of the place.

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.