Saints Peter and Paul

Standing Tall, 24 x 12 inches, oil on linen

You've seen this one before when I talked about struggling with large, dark, passive areas in my composition. Well, it's been bugging me ever since, and I finally decided to go back into it and just paint what's there, instead of trying to force a contrived atmospheric shadow.

I think that the idea was good, but my execution sucked. I blamed it on getting too dark and flat, but the real problem was that it looked like I was avoiding painting something difficult. Cheating, in other words.

I can honestly say that that wasn't my intent - I wanted to simplify and abstract the lower part of the painting in order to focus on the church architecture. But ya know, it just wasn't looking convincing. And I detest the idea of looking like I was cheating. It bothers the hell out of me that I may be declaring that I can't paint something because it's too difficult so I'm just gonna throw it in the shadow. Especially when it's not that difficult.

So if only to satisfy my ego, I went back into the painting and pulled the buildings out of the dark shadow. Now it's a lot busier but it works much better, too. The solidity of objects in perspective really adds to the sense of environment and depth. I like the opaque, tonal application of the paint too. Sort of Bernie Fuchs-ish, except that it's opaque. Or maybe that's just the colors I chose, the linked shapes, and keyed up shadow values.

At one point it was getting too fussy and rendered, so I knocked back some detail and treated the foreground tree with aggressive brushwork. The juxtaposition of different treatments is kinda funky but I think it looks like a Miura, nonetheless.

...And While That's Drying...

Waning Days, 18 x 24 inches, oil on linen

As usual, I have several paintings going on at the same time. I work on one for a while, and put it aside to let dry or to give myself some mental distance, and work on another painting.

This is one that I've just completed and sent off to Anne Irwin Gallery for an upcoming show, Vanishing Barns. I sent three others which were all... surprise!... barns. 

If you're familiar with my work, you'll recognize the motif as the Sloughhouse. I keep painting it in different light conditions, climates, and seasons. This used to be a working hop farm and I don't know when they stopped operations, but has been deteriorating ever since. I'm told that it was growing hops as late as twenty years ago, at least. I should do more research into its history. 

Anyway, I never intended to record its deterioration but it's kind of becoming an on-going, evolving project. I keep thinking of new ways to compose with the motif, and once I think of something, of course I have to try it. And there is a sense of urgency, too, because if I don't do it now, the barns are going to disappear soon. As farmscapes like these are becoming less and less common, I feel like I have to paint them while I still can.

The Grove, Progress

It's taking me a while but the grove painting is finally starting to take shape. I'm starting to shape and separate the foliage of the foreground tree from the background, and we start to see some suggestions of individual leaves to bring things into focus. The paint is getting Sorolla-thick in some areas too.

When I'm working on this canvas, I can't see the whole thing. Up close it's a completely abstract painting and this little digital image looks to me like an entirely different painting. The photo is terrible. I shot this under studio light (near perfect for small paintings, but can't evenly illuminate something this big) from 8 ft away. But you can kinda see where it's going.

The gnarly trunks and the Halloween-y branches characterize these old olive trees. If they look funky and not quite what you'd expect a natural tree to look like, there's a good reason for it. You see, the top part of the tree is from a different type of olive than the trunk that's supporting it. The fruit bearing parts were grafted onto the "base" stock (I'm sure it's not the correct terminology. but you know what I mean) long time ago, and as the top grew bigger, so did the base in order to support the enormous mass. The lumpy gnarls on the trunk are the result of that. So yes, it's not quite natural, but it's also what gives these trees special characters, and that's what I'm painting.

I have five old olive trees in my backyard, too, but those weren't grafted and they don't have these massive trunks. If I had one of these, I'd build a tree house in it.

With the painting this far along, there will be no big structural changes from here. It'll be a lot of shaping, refining, playing with surface qualities, and finally, a few choice details in the foreground. But as usual, the last 5% of the process takes 95% of the time - not so much time spent painting, but staring at, analyzing, and drying in between layers takes most of the time.
It frustrates me to have to put it aside to let dry before I can continue, just when I've reached maximum momentum - I want to just keep working but some things have to be done on a dry surface, so it can't be helped. Besides, as Titian said, putting a painting away for a while refreshes our eye. Or something like that. Good enough for Titian, good enough for me.

Click on the image to see it big.

Red Canoe

Red Canoe, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

I can't remember if I posted this one before, so here it is.

Because I had more paintings and frames than my new vertical rack can hold, it was time to go through some old work and see which ones should be thrown out. Boy, there were some dogs in the pile. I can't imagine why I kept some of those, unless I thought I could reuse the panels or something.

There were also some nice paintings that I'd forgotten about. Like this one. I remember doing this painting last year - I was set up in a nice comfortable shady grove, and just minding my own business, when this big dog shows up and sits next to me. Didn't seem to be particularly interested in my painting, but he just sat there the whole time. All I had was a cup of coffee and I wasn't going to share that.

When I finished the painting and showed it to him, he looked at it, looked at me, looked at it, looked at me, then left. I wasn't sure what to make of that, but I've had worse responses from people, so what did I care?

Can you believe it's almost May? Where does the time go!?

Vertical Rack

So, after I kicked myself out of the cozy little studio with the beautiful new floor and moved back into the garage to coexist with mountains of household junk and dead appliances and yard equipment, I decided to give myself a little extra elbow room by building a vertical rack to store my frames, paintings (wet and dry), panels, and canvases.

I've been meaning to build one of these for years but I've finally become desperate enough for space that I was forced to get off my ass and build one. It's 8ft x 8ft x 2ft, and built with 2x4s, 1 x 3s and 1 x 8s. It's rude and crude, but it works very well.



All the posts (ten in all) are 2 x 4's and the ones against the wall are secured to the studs with 3 inch corner brackets, which eliminates the need for stringing cables diagonally in order to keep the heavy shelving from leaning over. Of course, this makes it immovable, but I doubt I'll want to move it around anyway.




The short (2ft) pieces and the long horizontal front pieces are 1 x 3's.



The 2 ft pieces are paired for strength and easily supports the shelf pieces.



The shelves, including the floor piece, are made from two 1 x 8's laid down side by side with a few inches of space in between, and I used the extra 1 x 3s to fill in the front edge of the shelves. The reason I left space between the 1 x 8's is so that I can insert a 1 x 2 stick through them where the short pieces meet the horizontal pieces, to act as sort of bookends, so the smaller canvases don't fall over.

This thing is very sturdy, and holds a lot, but unbelievably, I have a lot more frames and canvases that need to be put away somewhere. I think it may be time for a ritual bonfire!

By the way, not that it matters but I built this thing without using a tape measure or a ruler. The reason why I made it 8 ft x 8ft is because the lumber is commonly sold in 8ft lengths, so I didn't need to cut them. I just had to cut the 2ft pieces, and the shelf pieces. Those I just measured against previously cut pieces and canvases laying around the studio, so I'm sure they're not accurate.

Next, I have to build a tableau cart thing, because what I'm using now is too high and a little inconvenient... but I'm not desperate enough to start right away.

American River Sketch

River's Edge, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen

I noticed that this past Saturday the Sacramento Plein Air Meet Up group was painting at Ancil Hoffman Park. As it was not too far from my home, and I had a few hours of reprieve from parent duty, I decided to join them. I did this little sketch of the river's edge.

My set up was in full sun, so I expected to compensate for the harsh light but forgot about it as soon as I started the painting. I'm not sure how the sun light on my canvas and palette affected my painting exactly (typically, it would result in a too-dark painting), but I had a good time, and that's about all I can hope for, when I'm out of practice.

Although in my workshops I stress a clear focal point, I have been experimenting lately with a subtler, more... dare I say it?...ambiguous... structure. In reality, there was quite a bit of value difference between the water and the land mass, which I chose to downplay. I also increased the amount of atmosphere in the background - again, in reality, there were punchy values way in the distance too.

What I wanted was to draw the eye to the foreground activity. To a single, specific area, but do it in such a way that it wasn't hit-the-viewer-over-the head obviousness. My strategy then, was to increase value contrasts, color contrasts, color saturation, and sharpness of edges gradually as we neared a specific point.

Now, you're wondering, what specific point? And you'd be right. When I look at the digital image, I think the same thing. When I was looking at the wet panel, I thought, hey, not too bad! Subtle, but it's there!! Now that it's dry and photographed, I'm thinking, too subtle. point doesn't come across. But hey, trial and error, baby! I'll see if I can bring this thing back by punching the focal area a little bit. I still like this little sketch.



Oh, by the way, I've already got more than thirty orders for my little demo booklet. Thank you so much for your support and interest!!! I'm tickled Carthamus Pink! It looks like I have to order a bunch more. I might even break even hahaha~

You Asked For It!

If you get my newsletters, you already know - but I've finally been able to make these nifty little booklets available to everyone. It's 20 pages, full color, and it shows the process of creating a painting (Almost Spring, pictured on the cover) from start to finish.





The print quality is remarkably good, and the colors are about as accurate as accurate can be, which to me is surprising because I worked as an illustrator of magazines and books for some seventeen years, and I KNOW what good printing is, and how difficult it is to achieve it. And I am very pleased with how these images printed in my booklet. Tchnology has come a long way, indeed!

Anyway, it is available now, for $20, shipping included. International orders please email me directly, for I have to consult the post office for shipping overseas.

You can use Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover Card, or you can send me a personal check. To order, please hop on over to the Book Page.

Thanks! and 'hope you enjoy the book!


By the way, if you'd like to hear news about future releases and workshops and gallery openings via newsletter, please email me. Most of the times, you'll hear about stuff before it goes on the blog, which may give you a slight advantage when it comes to signing up for workshops -- The Tahoe workshop is almost full already. Just a few spots left, so if you'd like to join us, hurry!

Lake Tahoe Plein Air Workshop

Just announced! Our next plein air painting workshop will be at the beautiful Lake Tahoe, California! It is a three day workshop-- the dates are June 5-6-7 (fri-sat-sun). Lake Tahoe is beautiful any time of the year, but in June, the weather should be absolutely gorgeous.

As with my past plein air workshops, we will focus on the painting process from start to finish, paying particular attention to making logical sense out of the many visual problems we encounter during the course of a painting. From design, to color mixing, and application, there'll be lots of practical tips backed by solid logic. There will be demos, and plenty of painting time with individual instruction and critiques.




The tuition for this workshop is $250. If you would like to sign up, please contact Barbara Bingham at merlinandbarb@hotmail.com or call her directly at (530) 277-6669.

Space is limited, so don't wait!! (the Napa workshop filled up in just four days!!) Pack your tube of Cobalt blue and join me in Tahoe!

"...at last the lake burst upon us - a noble sheet of blue water lifted six thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea, and walled in by a rim of snow clad mountain peaks that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still... I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords."

-Mark Twain, "Roughing It"

Channeling Monet

Continuing with the big olive grove painting. I mentioned before that my house and studio was undergoing some construction projects. We put in some industrial grade bamboo flooring throughout the house, and took out some walls and installed can lights and fixed some major structural problems along the way. To make a long story short, the construction is done, and I moved my studio into one of the bedrooms in the house and set it all up so it was like, an inspiring artist's environment. Like. Right? Well, after all that, I discover that I can't work in there. The ventilation is completely inadequate, and I started having painful coughing fits. Art is important to me, but I'm not willing to die for it, so I moved my stuff back out to the garage where I can open the door and let light in and air flow. A junky environment, what with having to coexist with typical garage junk and washer/dryer and bicycles and a weedwacker and just... stuff. But I'm much happier painting in the garage than inside. If ever I build a real studio in the back yard or rent a space, I would need minimum of 500 sq. ft. This I am sure now. My old studio was 1400 sq.ft. and that was a little too big. Anyway, I'm in the garage now and painting furiously.



I am recording my progress with this painting, (duh) but the sheer size of the canvas makes it impossible for me to have even and correct lighting on the entire area at once, so these photos aren't very accurate. In these photos, there are warm spots where my halogens are spot-illuminating, and the top is much lighter and cooler than the actual painting because it's about a foot away from my flourescent tubes. They're marketed as accurate color tubes, but you should know, there's no such thing!


Still, I think it's rather interesting to see the progress laid out sequentially. For this painting, I am channelling Claude. I don't think I've ever really delved deep into the process of impressionist painting till now, and I have to say, I like it. I'm getting into the groove now, and my brush is faster, (I am using a single beat up No.10 filbert bristle) and I'm even getting the hang of optical mixing. This is fun stuff. I am appreciating Monet like never before. And you know when scholars talk about Impressionists, particularly Monet, they say things like "the impressionists used pure colors and by juxtaposing them unmixed on the canvas, created optically mixed colors" ? All I have to say about that is, Bullshit.




Here I am holding the study in my left hand. Notice the temperature difference between the areas where my right arm is casting a shadow onto the canvas compared to surrounding areas. That's how much color influence my "accurate color" lighting has. You can see that it's nowhere near accurate.





This is what I have at the end of the night. I'm pretty happy with how it is progressing. Up to this point, I only used the study as my reference. Tomorrow, I think I'll put that away and look at some photos to get a better sense of the structure of the foreground tree.

Thanks everyone for your comments - I'm still not responding individually, (had to file for an extention on my taxes!) but I appreciate your taking the time to look at what I'm doing!

The Grove, Restart

After I tore the corner of the canvas yesterday, I was much more careful with this second piece. It took longer to stretch it, but it got done without further incident. I hauled it into my studio (barely fit!) and set it up on my easel.

My easel is a Sanyi Professional Four, which is huge and looks like a torture rack. It's made for big canvases like this, so it was no problem securing the seven foot wide support. Actually, I bought the easel t last fall specifically for this project. I was previously using a half box French easel, which would have been comically inadequate. I had ten or eleven good sized oak studio easels when I was running shop downtown but I gave those away when I left the studio. I might have kept a few for myself, but then I wouldn't be able to rationalize purchasing my current monster easel, so all's good.





First, I gridded the canvas and roughed in the drawing using a brush.




Then I switched to a big 2-inch house painting brush, and started washing in the darker areas.



Continuing with the washes, keepin' it loose and abstract.




Then I proceeded to block in the big tree trunk, using a no. 10 filbert. (I don't have anything larger)




At this point, the colors are approximate and while they're now opaque, they're still quite thin. I want to nail down the value relationships more or less, and get a sense of the hue direction; violets for the cast shadows on the ground.




I then started in with blues and greens for the foliage. Not defining forms or even shapes, but only general color direction, and a sense of texture to come.


That's it for today. I'm already seeing the structure of the painting emerge. When the sense of light and shadow is apparent this early in the game, it's a great feeling. It usually means I'm on the right path and I'm going to enjoy the rest of the painting.

Oh, please pardon my not responding to individual comments lately. I appreciate all your comments. I'm just trying to get my taxes done in time and it's not leaving me much time to dilly dally. I'll get back into the groove of things after tax day~

Progress(?) on the Olive Grove Project

The Grove, 12 x 21 inches, oil on linen

After I went down to the olive grove to do a couple of sketches in January, I finally worked up the final design for the big painting. The painting above is the study for it. After doing many studies of these olive trees, I came to the conclusion that, while a tonalist approach would give me a compelling mood, I didn't think it would work as well at the huge scale of 48 x 84 inches. Since most of the painting is going to be foliage, which basically is a soft abstract mass, a tonal painting may not provide enough visual interest. How can I make a big soft green abstract mass interesting to look at? Brushstrokes and texture alone wasn't going to do it for me, and there really wasn't going to be strong structure in this area either, which means I couldn't rely on value to create interest.

Well, how about color? I started experimenting with color contrasts, and noticed my painting getting more and more impressionistic, and I became confident that this was the solution I was looking for. I keyed up the shadows on the ground plane, and pushed the hues apart. I ended up with a painting that not only looked like the grove, but felt like it too, which was what I wanted in the first place.

Anyway, I'm ready to start on the big canvas finally, so I got some long stretchers and proceeded to put my support together.


It's four feet by seven feet, so it's pretty big; in fact, I think it's the biggest canvas I've ever stretched! I've done paintings bigger than this for theater backdrops, but not on stretched canvas. I used three cross braces to support the long side, and 10 inch corner triangles were attached from the back.




...then cut the canvas to size,




It took a few hundred staples to stretched the canvas. If you've ever stretched canvas, you know it's no walk in the park. If you have smallish hands like me, the canvas pliers are murder on them. My hands were getting blistered toward the end.

With one staple left to go, I pulled on the last bit of canvas with my pliers and...




Rrrrriip!!! I tore the corner! NOOOooooOOooOOooo!!!!! was heard around the block at that point. My gawd! The LAST staple!! can you believe that? I just stood there in disbelief. My hands were blistered, and a few hours of work just went down the drain.

Oh well, whaddayagonna do? For the next hour I cursed the canvas as I pulled out each and every staple. I was too disgusted to start again today, so I just went and soaked my hands.

What I really need right now, is a beer.

Standing Tall in San Francisco

Standing Tall, 12 x 24 inches, oil on linen

Large, passive, dark areas have been a regular device in my compositions for years, but I still struggle with it. I tend to make it too dark, or too opaque, or too flat. I really have to think ahead to make it work because the "just right" touch doesn't look like it's working until everything else is resolved.

I need to anticipate what the dark area will look like in the finished context, long before it gets there. I suppose most things are that way in painting, but most things can be fixed easily in oil paint.

The dark areas filled with atmosphere are, (the way I'm trying to do it, that is) less forgiving because they need to remain transparent and brushy. If I'm too timid with the area, and try to do it in multiple transparent layers, it tends to lose the freshness and end up being flat; too passive, in other words.

If I go too dark and have to bring it back, then I'm dealing with opacity issues. In the context of how I set up the painting, opacity suggests atmosphere being lit; which is not a bad thing at all, unless it becomes too prominent - then it looks like a solid wall.

Subtlety is the key, and it's this elusive quality that keeps me trying and trying. My success rate seems to be improving, but not nearly fast enough.

This is another painting, of which I will do another, larger version for my fall show.

I've Only Been Kinda Idle!

Red Awning, 12 x 12 inches, oil on linen

You may remember a recent post of the Flatiron in San Francisco. In talking about that painting, I mentioned that I liked the bottom half of it by itself. And here it is. Obviously, the focus changes (for one thing, the funky dome thing isn't even in the picture!) and it becomes an entirely different painting. (as opposed to a variation) I like this one a lot. Particularly, I like the loose treatment of the various elements; something I struggled with in the earlier piece.

The idea is to make it look like I just slapped down the paint and it made the right color, value and shape each time I put the brush to the canvas. The truth is, more thought and care goes into these strokes than into a more representational painting. In other words, making an abstract mark takes more thought and care than making a realistic note. For me, anyway. Some guys (and gals) make it look effortless, and watching them paint it really looks like they're just slinging paint onto canvas. I wish I could do that but I have two left brains and painting "intuitively" seems like a completely foreign concept to me.

I've Not Been Idle!

Daily Commute, 12 x 12 inches, oil on linen

I have not been idle! Ok, maybe a little. The fact is, the construction project is in the home stretch and I've been running around buttoning things up. I have been painting but don't have much to show for it. I have studies and WIPs but I'm reluctant to show them because as process pieces, they're only interesting at the beginning to middle stage, and when they're finished. The second half goes much more slowly and they just tend to look like a finished paintings with a lot of things wrong with them. Unless they are in the context of showing all the stages, the later stage WIPs by themselves aren't that interesting or informative. That's my excuse, anyway. I'll likely contradict myself in the next few posts and show you those unfinished paintings anyway.