Not yet done, but...

Gettin' there. You'll notice that the background turned into a beach. Actually, when I first saw the reference photo sent to me by David, I thought it was a beach... probably because of the umbrella that was behind the truck. I realized my mistake half a second later, but still thought it was a good idea.

Now that I've gotten this far, I'm thinking I want a little more activity in the dark wall behind the truck. This would be a perfect opportunity to take advantage of a really roughly laid in transparent brushy texture. The kind that you paint in dynamically at the very get go, and somehow hang onto (not paint over). I should have foreseen that, but obviously I didn't. I can't get that "look" back at this point because the paint there is already dry. So I'm going to try one of two things; either sand down the surface (just that area) to the original gesso ground and start over, or paint other "stuff" into the dark area which will increase activity.

The far background is just laid in quickly and I'd like to see it done more carefully. Not more detail or realism, just more intentional strokes.

One of my favorite compositional devices is a large passive area, and that's what the ground plane is, in this painting. Passive doesn't mean nothing's going on, however. So I am going to work a bit more variation and movement into it so that it does more than just set up the focal point. I haven't decided how I'm going to do that, but it won't be anything dramatic.

I'll be back after Thanksgiving~

Finding the Drawing

After the entire surface is more or less covered, I go back in with the original dark washy color and find the drawing again. I don't redo the grid or anything. At this point, there's enough information on the canvas to just freehand everything, little detail stuff and all.

I try to keep the drawing fluid and loose, and I don't worry that the color I'm using with which to draw is not the value or color I want to end up with. I could use (and have used in the past) a fat black permanent marker if I thought it were handier than a brush.

After I've redrawn just about everything, I'm ready to go back with more paint and continue developing the surface. Tedious, isn't it?

Yellow

Getting started with color on the Lobentruck. There's something about the monochromatic nature of the initial wash that gives this truck painting a nostalgic, almost timeless feeling. I doubt that I can retain that quality once I get color onto this thing because color just doesn't have the same quality or even purpose.

I did like the first stage very much, but I never intended this to be a monochromatic painting, so I gotta move on.

So I start with the yellow. Simply because it's an easy place to start. As you can see, the application is still pretty thin. The paint will get thicker as I add more layers and variations on there.

The yellow is Cad Lemon + Transparent Oxide Red + White, with a little ultramarine to knock it back. By "knocking it back" I mean graying it down or desaturating and the reason for doing so at this stage (at any stage, really) is so I can go brighter in the focal area later should I need to. If I go full strength from the beginning, I won't be able use more saturation as a tool to punch up certain areas. All I can do is to desaturate everywhere else, which is a pain in the butt.

Of course I have other tools like value contrast and edge work and impasto, but I like having saturation in my arsenal, too.

-to be continued.

The Louvre, WIP

I had a few hours to paint yesterday, so I continued on the Louvre painting. The progression here spans about three hours. Pretty slow going compared to little landscape paintings that sometimes seem to just burst out the brush. (And sometimes not)



I am sort of going all over the place, but in general top to bottom and center out. No particular reason except that I wanted to resolve the most complex and intricate part first.


Here I finally reach the ground plane, and I just quickly cover it with the same tan colors of the building. It'll end up a little different - sightly cooler I think.

Now that I have (almost) the entire surface covered, I'll go more into smaller shapes and variations. But I don't know when I'll have time for that. Maybe after Thanksgiving.

The Lobentruck

Lobentruck, stage 1 16 x 20 inches, oil on canvas

I have started a little side project, just for kicks. Upon seeing the the sinking tractor painting, my friend David sent me a photo of a sinking truck, to which I replied, "hey, why don't we both do a painting from this and see how differently they come out?"
David, who is a good sport, readily accepted. I asked him to set the parameters for this challenge and he proposed a deadline of mid December, and on a support of 16 x 20.

David likes to work big, but I was thinking more like 9 x 12 so I thought "yikes". But I am not one to shrink from such a challenge (which accounts for my many failures) so I dove right in.

What I've shown here is the first stage - the wash - of that process. David thought it'd be a hoot to record the progress (David thinks the whole world is a hoot) and I must admit, it sounded like a good idea to me too. If anything, it'll keep me accountable.

The project has evolved a bit, and now he's assigned his students to do the same in charcoal and watercolor (two different classes). It'll be interesting to see the result, to say the least.


Stay tuned~

More Olives!

Leaves in the Sun, 12 x 16 Oil on linen

Another olive grove study. On this one, I have a higher key and chroma for the violets and blues in the shadows. Because the picture is dominated by muted colors - leaves, trunks and dirt - I thought I could use some keyed up color notes. My work is generally pretty tonal and I don't get crazy with bright colors, but this subject matter calls for an extra pinch of something, especially because it's going to end up 4 x 7 feet.

Still, I prefer to rely on tonal contrasts rather than hue/saturation. In order to make more saturated colors work in the shadows, I'd have to key it up quite a bit, and too much of that will result in a picture that is colorful, but gutless and contrived. The mood I'm after will be much better represented by restrained color notes though it is a balancing act, I'm sure.

In doing these studies, I'm looking for that balance, the tipping point where more saturated colors help but not interfere with the mood created by the more restrained and tonal notes.

This nitty gritty technical stuff I love to read in other artists' writings, but I don't necessarily like talking about it. Not that I have any secrets about technique and such - after all, I'm not doing anything which history hasn't already given us - but I'd imagine it gets tedious to read. Art ought not be so tedious. It ought to be resonant without getting into the boring technicalities. But ya know, sometimes you have to take a hard look at the sentence structures in order to arrive at the compelling story. Thinking about in technical terms helps me, anyway, to organize and clarify in my mind what's important in this picture and how I might achieve it. And that's all I'm doing.

I'm liking the increasingly flippity brushstrokes, though. It occurs to me, I need some round brushes for this!

In Progress

This is a painting that I've started a while back and have since put on the back burner. Do you recognize the building?

In terms of process, this is obviously in the very early stages, perhaps just a few hours into the painting. Using a grid, I drew the positions of key elements on the canvas with a pencil, along with a few perspective lines. Nothing too tight or precise, as you can see. (my horizontal lines are way crooked!)

I should note that I'm not spending any time on the composition, because I'm working from a study that I did a few years ago. the design, and the colors are already worked out.

I usually don't have a pencil underdrawing for small paintings, but I can't draw accurately when the scope of the canvas exceeds my distortion-free cone of vision, so I use a grid for larger paintings. This canvas is 24 x 30 so it's by no means a huge painting, but it's big enough that free-handing the design is not practical for me, especially because architecture requires a lot more accuracy than, say, a eucalyptus tree. I'd still do it free-hand if it were a landscape painting.

Anyway, after drawing on the canvas with a pencil, I go in with turpy washes to draw and to block in the shadow/dark areas. At this stage, I really try to explore how I might abstract certain areas by losing shapes and edges. It's easy to push the abstraction at this stage because there's really very little invested in the process and there's no risk. If I don't like something, It takes no time at all to bring it back to the representational realm. In fact this back and forth between the representational and the abstract starts to reveal a direction which guides the later painting process. Often, an unexpected deviation from the literal will emerge. I may or may not hang onto it, but the discovery keeps things fresh and keeps me engaged.

After I've played with the washes for a while, I start painting the lit areas with opaque colors, and that's what you see on this shot. The very first "layer" (in quotes because I don't really think of my process as painting in layers) of opaque colors is applied thinly, and although I don't necessarily "stay within the lines" (in quotes because I've already obliterated the outlines in the wash stage), I try to hang on to some key elements which will help me with the addition of smaller elements later on.

I'll post photos of subsequent stages when I get there.

"Base Camp" by Tim Horn

Tim Horn, Base Camp, 12 x 16 oil on panel

This is a painting by my friend Tim Horn from our painting trip to Ediza Lake in the High Sierras. Tim painted this from his perch some 30 feet up a steep hill where he had pitched his tent. The grey tent near the bottom of the picture is mine. The yellow one is Sharon's, and the greenish grey one belongs to Kim.

I thought I'd show you something cool by someone else(and not just because the painting depicts my tent!) because I got nothin' cool to show. Quite frankly, my own efforts this past week have resulted in nothing but crap! I have so few hours to paint nowadays, and fragmented little chunks at that. In my rush to make the most of these few hours, I get so anxious that I start taking short cuts, which results in sloppy work that inevitably has to be scraped. Every single time. You'd think I would learn, but no, I keep doing the same thing. 

I've scraped three or four pieces in the last week! How very frustrating. You know it's bad when you start second guessing what it is you're supposed to do. The things I'm fairly good at, are betraying me and it just feeds my bad attitude.

When I catch myself in these ruts, one of the things I do to try and turn things around is look for inspiration elsewhere. I look at art books, watch movies, listen to music. And of course, cruise the web to see what other artists are doing. It often gives me a fresh perspective, and might even get me unstuck. I came across this painting on Tim's website, and immediately recognized where he "designed away from the literal", which made me think, "would I have done it that way?"  Probably not, because we don't think the same way. Nonetheless Tim is a very gifted compositionist (I prefer this psuedo-term to "composer") so it does me good to really think about why he made these design decisions.  

Anyway, if my rut continues, I'll be showing you more of other people's work because I won't have anything worthy of my own. Oh but don't worry about me. Occasional ruts come with the territory. Nobody said art is easy. If it were, I wouldn't be doing it.

Tea for Two

Tea For Two, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

Another Rose painting. I'm finding out just how tricky it is to paint roses. I work with tight values normally, but this really requires even more control with values and saturation. What a challenging exercise! Sargent was right when he said painting flowers will do you good (I'm paraphrasing) because of the precision such exercises require.

The higher saturation in the shadow areas of of the blooms allows for a sense of translucency and luminosity. It's amazing what a little shift in color will do to the overall effect. I feel like I'm just learning what painting is all about!

This is a quick study from a photo. The moody overcast sky attracted my attention, and this sense of openness and anxiousness (anticipating rain?) was what I was investigating. The colors are too photographic to be interesting, but I see some potential in the treatment of the sky. It needs to be painted bigger too, in order to really get into colors and textures of the landscape - something I think would be necessary since there's so little of "active" areas in this composition. Hmmm...