The Louvre, Finished

February Morning at the Louvre, 24 x 30 inches, oil on linen

OK, this painting is finished. Since we last visited this painting, I've made a few small adjustments. The left most light post (the big one) is more black than green to suggest that it's different from the row of shorter ones to the right. It may not show up that well in this photo, but looking at the actual painting, I'm satisfied with that change. The two black posts in the back are made the same size, to avoid confusing perspective. I've added some texture to the roof on the top left of the picture by staining, to introduce another common denominator between the light side and the shadow side of the roof. I wanted to keep the sharp edge of the cast shadow there because I find it a compelling visual element in a purely abstract sense. By adding texture, the value contrast is lessened, and there's now a little bit more of a visual continuity. Lastly, I straightened some lines and added tiny dark accent notes here and there. In this photo, there is still some visible bowing going on with some of the horizontal lines - some of that is just camera lense distortion. I need to learn to take better pictures!

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with this painting.

San Francisco

Untitlted (San Francisco), 24 x 12 inches, oil on linen

A study for a larger painting, which I hope will be in the fall show. This one is just 12 x 24, which helps to keep things simple because I just can't paint the small details even if I tried. At a larger size, it'll be a big challenge to maintain the simplicity and spontaneity, but having done a small one first should help enormously.

This painting is still wet. Once it's dry, I want to go back in with a little bit of staining here and there and see if I can't add another layer of abstract mark-making.

Also, as I'm typing this, the image is scrolling up and is now half hidden by the top edge of the text box. I am only able to see the bottom half of the painting, and I'm liking what I see. Here is a composition that I hadn't considered - I think there's another painting in there. Back to the easel!!

The Louvre, still WIP

February Morning at the Louvre, 24 x 30 inches, oil on linen (WIP)

This is one of the first cityscapes that I started specifically for the upcoming solo show. I've been working on it off and on for a few months now, although total time spent thus far is probably 15 - 20 hours. I'm not keeping track. Unlike my landscapes, this one has a lot of process; glazing, staining, scraping, redrawing and repainting. It is because architecture is so drawing intensive, and my initial pencil drawing isn't all that precise so I do a lot of correcting as I paint. Also, because I'm only working on it a little bit at a time, the paint dries in between sessions and I have to work wet-on-dry, which opens up a whole world of process possibilities which are not available if I were working strictly wet-into-wet alla prima.

Resisting the urge to paint every little detail is proving to be a huge challenge. I want to abstract and simplify, but not in ways that compromise drawing. I wish I had some sort of a logical approach to follow, but as soon as I think I've found one, it becomes a tired formula so I end up abandoning it and I go back to struggling. In the end, this struggling, and searching and trying this and redoing that is what makes my painting a record not of one morning at the Louvre, but of my expression. So goes the old adage, art is in the process, not the product.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to end up with a good product!

I haven't worked on this painting for several weeks now. I hope to spend some quality time with it as soon as my studio is available again.

Another Variation

Blushing, 20 x 10 inches, oil on linen

Here's another variation on the sunset euc theme. The main change, obviously is the format. I was also interested in allowing greater distance between the foreground and the background, which gives us an increased sense of scale. Bigger valley, bigger mountain.

My primary tool for accomplishing this is atmospheric perspective; the farther you go back, the narrower the value range becomes. If you'll compare the violets at the bottom of the mountain to the middle of the mountain (there's an inverse C shape there... see it?) and then to the top of the mountain, you can readily see the systematic change in the value and saturation of the violet. It's not a huge difference because it doesn't need to be. Yet these "stepping" changes in the color of a single element (in this case, shadow on the mountain) gives us enough of a visual cue to make the mountain recede in space.

As I was painting, I noticed this S curve emerging in the composition, so I tried to play with that a little bit and ended up with a visual path that weaves from top to bottom (or bottom to top as the case may be); from the summit it follows the ridge down the mountain, then picked up by the road cutting across the valley, and at the bottom the trail in the foreground ends the curve. I usually don't pay much attention to categories of composition like those spelled out in Edgar Payne's book (don't get me wrong, I think it's a good idea especially when you're first learning about composition and design) but when a compositional device presents itself, I think it's always worth investigating.

Cityscape No.1

Just An Ordinary Day, 16 x 12 inches, oil on linen

I have a solo show coming up sometime in the fall of this year. It'll be at Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco, and it'll be all cityscapes. I've been wanting to get back into doing more cityscapes, and I thought the only way to REALLY get serious was to committ to a show. Nothing like a deadline to crack the whip, you know what I mean?

So, starting December of last year, I resolved to paint two medium to large paintings and two small paintings every month till August. It's February now, so I should have four medium/large paintings and four small paintings by now. In reality, I have one small painting and several paintings of various sizes in progress. It seems I've overestimated my abilities by...like... a lot!

It's true that I really can't do much of anything right now due to the ongoing construction projects which have turned my house and studio into a disaster zone and also my parental duties are my number one priority. Even so, I thought I'd be further along than just one completed small painting! I just have to laugh at the disparity between reality and my expectations. 

The good news is that the one I did finish (above painting) came out really good. I LOVE it. And I hope to capitalize on this success and keep the momentum going. As you undoubtedly know, confidence in one's own art is a precarious thing, especially when you're treading new territory with deadlines. (Not that cityscapes are a new territory for me. Just the way I'm doing them is new)

Gray Day on the River

Gray Day On The River, 6 x 11 inches, oil on linen

There is a plein air painting group in Sacramento organized around Meetup. I signed up months ago but I hadn't participated in any of their paint outs. This Sunday, I noticed that they were meeting at the Fair Oaks Bluffs, just two minutes from my house, so I decided to pop over and introduce myself.

It was a gray, drab and chilly day, but there were three artists already set up and painting. One of them was my friend Craig, who came up to Donner Summit with me last September.

After I said my hellos I decided to set up on the boat ramp and do a little sketch looking downstream. I had a little 6 x 11 panel that I made from scrap wood and linen, and I thought a vertical format would be great for what I was looking at. But my Soltek easel isn't made to hold a panel so little. I sometimes use a home-made adapter (a stick) to accomplish this but I must have lost it - couldn't find it in my pile of junk, so I just opted to do a horizontal.

There's a nice trail alongside the river, and there were quite a few hikers despite the chilly weather, and many of them stopped to watch me paint and talk to me. I thought I was doing pretty well, but more than a few people asked me, "are you a student?" haha~ Ah well. I liked the sketch, so there.

Upon reading my previous post on Slough House painting, Rutger from Holland looked it up on Google Earth and correctly located the farm. I thought that was pretty cool. Here's where I painted Gray Day on the River.


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Variations

Dusk Eucalypti, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

One thing I like to do often - especially on small paintings - is to look at finished work and ask myself, "what if?". What if the mountains were larger? what if the trees were larger? what if the tops of the trees got cropped? what if there were more distance between the trees and the mountains? What if the sunset colors were more saturated? Less? What if the ground plane was inclined? You can come up with all kinds of compelling possible variations. Most of these go unanswered, and fewer still end up being paintings, but sometimes it starts a series of variations.

Valley Sunset, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

The second painting is one of these variations of the first one. I wanted to see a little more color on the mountains. When I'm doing these "variations on a theme", I make it point to change only one or two things from the original (in this case, saturation). That way, the effectiveness of the change is readily measured. If I make a lot of changes, I can't tell what the change does exactly, because the "control" element is gone. It's like comparing apples to oranges, you see, rather than comparing an orange to another, slightly different orange.

The new piece may now become the "original" and spawn variations of its own, or I can go back to the first piece and answer a different "what if?" question. Either way, the painting starts to evolve and I have all the pieces to compare and make decisions on what works and what doesn't.

It used to be that, if I had another idea based on a painting, I'd paint right on top of it and make the changes. While it sometimes resulted in a good painting, I no longer had the original to compare to. I don't think I learned nearly as much from this method as I do from my current method of creating variations on a theme.

Slough House Revisited

Slough House, Late Afternoon, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

This is an old farm along the Jackson Highway just east of Sacramento. This area used to be all hop fields once upon a time, but that's all gone now. Besides the buildings pictured here, the Slough House also has these neat twin hop barns (of which I've never been able to do a satisfactory painting), but they're  being torn down. (Perhap it's already gone by now - I haven't been over there in months)

I've painted from this angle a few times before, both on location and from photo references. Painting this on location can be a bit scary because you're set up on the shoulder of a highway where big trucks speed by at 60 miles per hour. No view is worth risking one's life, but plein air painters live dangerously, ya know?

This one is done from a photo, and the idea I had primarily to do with manipulating the "soft perspective" in the foreground. The photo itself shows nothing but flat dirt with no discernible directional lines. I wanted to introduce some indication of perspective in order to create a sense of scale, and to play with composition.