Big Trunk

Big Trunk, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

Front lit by the late afternoon sun, this one hundred year old olive tree presents its massive trunk, claiming its rightful place in the universe. Seemingly immobile and immovable, but the truth is that hundreds of its kin have recemtly been uprooted (just like that!) from neighboring groves to make way for.... what? McMansions?

This ranch is the last stand, and this tree is one of its Ents.

Makes this project all the more important.

The looseness of the brush is becoming a lot more effective now, which makes me very happy and more confident about moving on to larger paintings. Not that I wasn't confident about doing large pieces before, but there is definitely a process to getting into the zone, if you will. Sometimes it takes just one painting. Sometimes it takes fifty. I've learned that I have to let it happen at its own pace. If I try to force it, I'm just asking for frustration and disaster.

Lookin' good so far!

Retirement Party

Retirement Party, 12 x 16 inches, oil on linen

The tractor and the sprayer at the grove. They both have such great character! The sprayer kind of looks like the face of a crotchety old man in a comical sort of way. Looks sorta like Jack Lemmon. That would make the tractor... Walter Matthau?

The visual elements in this painting are mostly abstract and not readily identifiable without context. The one thing that is very recognizable, and therefore provides context for everything else in the picture, is the tractor wheel. So it was necessary to get the drawing of the wheel correctly, and everything else would fall into place by association, even though the other marks and notes are unidentifiably abstract. The sprayer might be recognizable if you were familiar with the equipment, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, I couldn't tell ya what it was myself.

Four Small Works

One Last View, 6 x 8 inches, oil on linen
This painting is available. Please contact First Street Gallery for details.

'Tis the season of small works shows. These four are going to one such exhibition at First Street Gallery in Turlock Ca.

Slowly, 8 x 6 inches, oil on linen
This painting is available. Please contact First Street Gallery for details.

I love doing these little 6 x 8 tonal paintings. They're all painted from memory, usually with a very specific visual idea in mind, such as "dusk light on eucalyptus". Certainly you can do that with big paintings, but with little ones like these, you can't (that is to say, I can't)get more complex than that. So the question might be phrased, "how simply can I express the idea?" I should emphasize that "simply" is not to be confused with "obviously".

A Look Back, 8 x 6 inches, oil on linen
This painting is available. Please contact First Street Gallery for details.

I find that often, these simple compositions are harder to pull off than a cluttery complex one, due to the fact that so much is riding on so little. There's not much room to cheat, if you take my meaning. On the other hand, there is a lot you can do and make almost anything work at this scale. And if it doesn't, you haven't invested hours, days, weeks, months into a painting so it doesn't feel so bad to just wipe it off and start again. That might just be the best thing about little paintings.

Dusk Path, 8 x 6 inches, oil on linen

This painting is available. Please contact First Street Gallery for details.

I showed these to a friend of mine, and he noted that my shadows were warm, and was perplexed that the paintings still felt very warm. "If you have warm shadows, why is it that the light doesn't feel cool? I thought that was a rule; warm light - cool shadows, and cool light - warm shadows?"

But my lights are warmer than the shadows. The shadows may look warm, but the lights are warmer still. It's comparative, see. Just because the shadows are brown (that is to say, reddish hue) doesn't mean it's warm. You have to think of it in terms of warmER or coolER. Without something to compare to, there is no warm or cool, right?

Another thing is that with these very limited-palette tonalist paintings, the overall color theme plays a huge role in determining how warm or cool a painting feels. Though probably not accurate, it helps me to put it this way; it's not that the light is warm; the whole painting is warm.

More Olive Sketches

Continuing with the Olive Grove studies. I'm using a 0.5 mm Uniball, which is just your ordinary pen from the drug store. I've been using it since art school days - it's just a really reliable basic tool.

There is an old tractor with flat tires that looks like it's been retired a long, long time. Looks like it's slowly sinking into the ground, slowly becoming a part of the earth that it worked on. Next to it is an old sprayer, but I really couldn't tell you what it does. In fact I only know it's a sprayer because Chris told me so. For someone like me who's not familiar with the ranch life, it could be anything...and that's why I have to study these things before I dive into a big painting as though I understood what I was painting. If I hope to pull this off with some authority, I need better understanding of this stuff.




When I'm painting, I don't always "work the forms". Especially landscape paintings which affords many opportunities for abstraction, I tend to approach them in a more impressionist manner. (My high school Humanities teacher insisted that "impressionistic" is not a word. I don't agree or disagree. but she may be reading this - she'd be about 24o yrs old if she is)

However, drawing with a linear tool, I am noticing that the way the olive branches grow, there is frequently an interesting contraposto occuring where two cylindrical forms are side by side. We often hear of contraposto in figure drawing classes, and it usually means that the model is standing with a twist in the torso. Contraposto means a lot more than that, though. Anytime two forms are juxtaposed and one form is going in one direction and the other in another direction, we have contraposto. Posture-counterposture. It's an important device in figure drawing, to create tension and interest, complexity and gesture. It's one of the things I emphasized a lot when I was teaching figure drawing, and though I wasn't looking for it in these sketches, it jumped out at me. Consequently, my trees in the painting will likely have a slightly more leaning toward form drawing in the branches.

SLO Footnote

Here's a photo that I'd forgotten about. It was on another camera which was lost in my studio chaos. This is a shot from San Luis Obispo Plein Air. I was on the side of the Los Osos Valley Road, on either side of which are these beautiful farmscapes.

As you can see, I'm not painting all that literally. The two most obvious deviations are; eucalyptus trees became much taller, and the sky is painted less blue. Actually, the sky wasn't as blue as the photo suggests - I'm sure you've noticed that photos often make the sky an unnaturally intense and dark blue, haven't you? Still, the sky in my painting is even less blue than that. Why did you do that, you might ask. Or you might not. I'll tell you anyway. See, the thing that originally attracted my attention was the green roof of the big barn. A little bit of an unusual color for a barn roof, and a pretty green it was, too, what with weathered patina and all. And in order to emphasize that focal point, I had to be careful with other colors so that they did not overpower the green of the focal point. Had I painted the blue of the sky as I actually saw it, I think it would have been much less effective.

Anyway, I think it's interesting to see the painting alongside the location shot so the artist's intent becomes really obvious. I wish there were more opportunities to see other artist's paintings alongside the location photos. I get to see some of that in person when I do these events, but usually, I'm busy painting too. I should make time to do more of just hanging around better artists and watching them work.

A Rose Is A Rose

A Rose is A Rose, 9 x 12, oil on linen

This is another painting for The Olive Grove Project. As mentioned in the previous post, the Grove is not just about the ancient olive trees. The incredible rose garden is just too good to dismiss, so here's a painting of a beautiful peachy pink rose.

detail

Painting flowers, particularly roses has its own intrigue. It's not an easy thing to paint primarily because they are so delicate, yet a timid brush will not yield that sense of freshness and spontaneity I look for in these paintings. You have to really look and understand the gesture of each petal and execute each stroke with utmost care. That is not to say you have to follow form necessarily, but it helps to know exactly why you're NOT following form with your stroke, should you decide to deviate from the predictable.

detail

A curious thing about painting these flowers is that contrary to many a solid object - and these do have solid structure - the darker areas (in between petals) maintain saturation of color. In many cases the shadow areas have a lot more saturation than the lighter areas. Kind of counterintuitive, but there it is. I assume it's because the translucency of the petals let light through and intensify the colors, but even areas where light isn't coming through the petals seem to hang on to rich chroma so... what do I know? I just paint.

The Olive Grove Project

Olive Tree Study, 12 x 16 inches, oil on linen

Now that all the plein air events are done for the year, I am starting a new project. My friends Chris and Linda have asked me to create a large painting depicting their ancient olive grove down in Porterville, in California's Central Valley, and I thought what a great opportunity to dig deep into a subject matter and do a proper, old-school project. That is to say, thoroughly explore the theme and do a bunch of studies and sketches to arrive at the final painting. (Anyone ever see the El Jaleo show at the National Gallery years ago? It was an exhibition of sketches, studies and other related works - some of which were fully realized masterpieces themselves - which culminated in the unforgettable flamenco dancer painting. Now that's doin' it proper, yo)





I was supposed to stop by the ranch on my way back from SLO, but it got too late and too dark to see anything, so I had to come straight home. I will make a trip down yet, to collect some photo references and do a few sketches en plein air, but in the meantime I have hundreds of Chris and Linda’s photos with which to work. I dove right in without a preconceived notion of what the final painting should be. Actually, I’m not thinking about the final painting at all. At this early stage, I just want to immerse myself in the creative process and do a bunch of studies.





It’s sort of like writing a short story or a novel I would imagine, and I don’t actually have the story yet. I’m trying out a few sentences, character studies, plot lines, voices and dialogues... I am absolutely confident that by going through this process, a story will emerge on its own. Then and only then will I consider sitting down and designing the big painting. Even after I get there, I’m sure I’ll be doing more studies but they’ll be in context of the final piece.



Besides the grove itself, which is a hundred years old, there is this garden filled with roses and irises and whoknowswhatelse, which obviously are not about the ancient olive trees, but they’re contextually important. An essential character, or a tangent plot or a background setting to a story, if you will. This stuff may not find its way into the final, but they still need to be investigated because they’re so much a part of the significance of the Grove.




This shot is actually an interesting visual problem. There is so much contrast around the fountain and so much activity, it’s difficult to maintain that sense of visual busy-ness and create a focal point as well. I like the idea of the fountain getting lost in the activity, which to me is a purely abstract exercise - I may give it a try later on.

The Fountain, 12 x 16 inches, oil on linen

One thing I do want to achieve, is to keep the brushwork as loose and free as possible. With structures like this it’s easy to get too tight and rendered. If I could keep things loose yet accurately drawn, I’ll have a much stronger piece. Easier said than done, since inaccurate drawing will stick out like a sore thumb.

Olive Tree Study No.2: Afternoon Sun, 11 x 14 inches, oil on linen

I love the late afternoon light hitting the trunks. The midday sun creates its own moods which are very compelling in a Steinbeckian sort of way, but it’s very tricky to define the tree’s structure when it’s all in shadow. Still, I wouldn’t abandon an idea just because it’s difficult to do. We’ll see where the story takes us.

All the sketches and studies may be viewed larger on the project page.

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