Framing for the Show

Blue Dome, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen

As you know, my show in SF is fast approaching and I've been painting as much as I can in the little time that I have left. One of the big concerns in doing a show is framing. I've tried all kinds of framing in the past, and for the most part, have been using stained-black ready-made frames for my landscape works. While these are reasonably priced and work fine for my eucalyptus trees, they don't quite work for my cityscapes.

I've been searching and searching for good framing solution for my cityscapes, and because you don't really know how a frame looks until you actually put it on a painting, I've spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of frames on the search. Needless to say, that hurts. Not entirely a waste though because I can eventually use most of them, and so I'll get my money back.

See, what I want is something with clean lines, not loud or obnoxiously ornate, but still substantial. And ideally, that works for all my cityscapes - I'm one of those artists who likes a uniform presentation for a solo show. A cheap or wrong frame can ruin an otherwise perfectly good painting, whereas the right frame, though not necessarily expensive can really give a painting its due presence. Obviously this is extremely important in an exhibition.

One tricky obstacle I've come across is the issue of the panel / canvas edges. Sometimes you want the edges covered by the frame's rabbet / lip, because the linen's edge don't match perfectly with the panel on which it's mounted. Other times, you don't want the edge covered at all because you (that is, *I*) forgot to allow for the rabbet and composed the image all the way to the edge (I do this a lot!)

I've finally come up with a solution; I won't have one single frame type for the show, but I'll have two. My larger pieces will go in blonde wood floaters with black interior, unless I have edge issues. My smaller paintings will go in a black scoop frame with really clean lines which are copper leafed and stained black on top; It's mostly black, with exposed copper leafing for the sharp edges and corners. It's quiet, substantial, clean and contemporary yet with a classic scoop profile.

I'll post pics when I get 'em so you can see.

Framing takes time, and time I don't have. So I am having a professional framer do them all. Even so, I can't afford to lose two extra weeks just before the show is installed, so I brought a bunch of blank canvases to my framer and asked them to fit the blanks for floaters, and while they're building the rest, I have these blank canvases to work on. I'm juggling! The black scoops are less of a problem because they don't need to be custom fitted.

Except for the painting up at the top of this post, which is a 9 x 12 and I composed it all the way to the edge. A regular rabbeted frame would cover 1/4 inch or more around the edges, and would totally ruin it. So I asked them to figure out a way to put the scoop frame on it but covering only 1/32 - 1/16 inch around the edges. To my relief, they said it's not a problem.

It is really great to have competent, professional help so that I can focus on what I need to do.

Now. A few posts ago I asked your ideas for a title for my cheezy motel painting, and I got some excellent ideas. I can't decide which I like best, so I'm going to pass the buck and have you do it. I've created a poll thingy on my sidebar so you can cast your votes. If you like more than one, go ahead and vote for all the ones you like. But don't stuff the ballot, ok? The poll will close on 9/20.

Also, I noticed on the digital image that my horizontal lines are off. I know it's probably bothering some of you but you're too polite to tell me :-) So I'm fixing them, along with a few other minor adjustments.

Back to the studio!

Grand Lake, Again

Revisting Grand Lake, 18 x 24 inches, oil on linen

This is one of my favorites from the upcoming show. I've painted Grand Lake Theatre a number of times, all before my landscape painting days. I wanted to revisit the subject matter and see how seven years of studying landscape painting and effects of natural light would affect my painting now. The biggest difference for me is in the way I approach abstraction. The care-not-about-form brushwork, combined with brighter, more natural light is all a part of what I've come to recognize as significant elements that contribute to my voice, not anyone else's.

And as with the last painting I posted – thank you everyone for your GREAT ideas about the title! I'm still decideing – the hint of the narrative in this picture is very satisfying to me. I'm an illustrator at heart, I guess.

As I was working yesterday, my friend Don Hatfield popped in for a surprise visit to shoot the breeze. "I need a beer, Terry", he says. "I don't have beer, Don", I say. "Never mind. Can I borrow about $300,000?" He says. "Sure Don," I say, "that's a lot of beer." The guy is a walking entertainment. As soon as he came into the house, he sat down at my piano and started playing Baby Elephant Walk.

He's actually a pretty good piano player. I didn't know that about him. Too bad we didn't have beer. We had lemonade, but ranting about art over lemonade just doesn't have the same cathartic effect. But it was good fun anyway.

Oh yeah, this is completely off topic, but this summer, I'm obsessed with gazpacho, and I know I'm not the only one that always makes too much. Since I don't use a recipe (I just throw in whatever vegetables I find at the farmer's market), as I try to adjust the flavor by putting in one more tomato or a cucumber, I inevitably end up with too much. Yesterday, I had a brilliant idea about what to do with the leftover gazpacho; marinade chicken in it! It's got all the right kinds of veggies and seasonings, olive oil to coat, and vinegar as the acid. So I marinated some chicken overnight and baked it in the oven. Voila! fantastic! I get more excited about food than art sometimes. Now I'm salivating.

Title For This Painting!?

Untitled, 16 x 12 inches, oil on linen

Here's a painting fresh off the easel. It's going to be included in my upcoming show Return to the City. The motel is just one of many colorful and cheap lodgings found in the town of Reno, Nevada. It's a quieter, less flashy sibling of Las Vegas, and as such, there is a lot of character in this neck of the woods, both in terms of businesses and people that occupy it.

When I saw this sign, I had to take a snapshot of it. I just knew it was going to be a painting someday, and here it is. I love the suggestion of narrative in a picture like this. Sort of Edward Hopper meets John Updike. I didn't have a story in mind when I painted it, but I like to imagine scenarios as the painting develops. It does take on a life of its own and it feels like I'm painting a scene from a story that already exists, as opposed to it being my creation. I like that I'm a spectator in the process.

Anyway, I need a title for this painting!! Any suggestions? I know you people reading this are creative people! I'd like to hear some ideas from you~ Just type it in the comment box. If I use one of your ideas, well... I don't have any prizes or anything, but I will credit you every I talk about it :-)

Sunset Ride

Sunset Ride, 12 x 12 inches, oil on linen        sold

This is a re-work of a painting I did last year. It's lighter overall, and has a lot more surface play. Consequently, it's looser and more abstract, in keeping with my current direction.

Now I'm thinking, I want to see this much bigger. hmmm...

So it's official. My fall solo show Return to the City opens Saturday, October 3rd at Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco. I am going to show many of the paintings I've posted here in the past months, plus many more that I haven't. 'Hope you all can make it to the opening! 

Panic!

Evening Commute, 12 x 12 inches, oil on linen

It looks like my solo show this fall may happen sooner than originally planned. October, instead of November. That changes things a little bit around here. I wasn't planning on panicking till mid-October, but now I think I need to get it into overdrive, like, right NOW. 

I plan to have some twenty five paintings for this show, and I have that many on canvas, more or less, in different stages. I have no doubt that I'll have enough paintings, even if I only have one more month to paint. However, I keep thinking I can do better, so as I paint new paintings, I'm shelving some earlier ones. I'm not throwing them away, because they're still pretty good and I know I can bring them up to par later. 

I suppose I can bring them up to par now and include them, but I don't want to. The later ones have a more confident, abstract brushwork that would be hard to replicate in the "fix" stage. It's about expression of attitude, and not just creating competent paintings. It's a lot more fun to do fresh new paintings than to fix old ones. The abstraction comes out less contrived, somehow.  

When I finally do get around to fixing the earlier ones - and there's really nothing wrong with them except that their "mood" doesn't fit with the rest of the paintings - I will likely do something drastic like give it a black glaze and work back into it with a big brush.

Oh, and here's another thing that makes it tricky; I have to order a whole bunch of frames (all custom this time) at the SAME TIME in order to get the maximum bulk discount. That takes some planning, to say the least. 

But these are not crises. Just speed bumps, as Dustin Hoffman's character put it in Wag the Dog. I am feeling really good about this show, and I want you all to come to the opening and see the new paintings. 

I'll post firm dates soon!

Thanks!

Walkers No.12 ~ No.15,  8 x 10 inches, oil on panels

 

Napa Valley Art Festival was this weekend.  It was a really nice venue as far as these outdoor shows go. Very classy and well attended.  There was a lot of great paintings there, too. I wished I had a whole bunch of money so I could take home some of them. A great show.  

I don't know how the sales went overall, but some people were doing pretty damn well. I did better than last year, which was a relief.  But more than sales, I loved seeing my friends, the handful of people who actually speak my language. 

I also enjoyed meeting many of you blog readers for the first time! A big thank you to everyone who came out to Napa for the show. I hope you had a good time, even though it got a little warm in the afternoon.  The Sauvignon Blanc was not bad, eh?

Tahoe Sketches

Tahoe Pine, 8 x 6 inches, oil on linen

I'm back from a few days of R & R up in Lake Tahoe. Although this was a family trip, I did manage to get a few sketches in. This first one I got up early in the morning while everyone else was still asleep, and took off to the Nevada side. I wanted to go to Sand Harbor, which has both nice sandy beaches and rocky boulders, but the gates weren't open that early in the morning so I had to keep on driving. I parked my car at the next "vista point" on the lake, and walked down a steep incline about 50 yards, looking for a spot sheltered from the whipping, icy winds. There were plenty of neat views, and plenty of sheltered spots, but not both sheltered and with a view.

Dismayed, I looked up toward the sky and I saw this pine tree against dramatic cloud formations. I decided that's my painting - While I was doing a little sketch of it in my sketchbook to pre-solve some problems, the sun came out and spot-lighted the top half of the tree, which looked more delicious than the clouds beyond it. So, change of tactic. I would focus on the spot lit tree, and play down the clouds. And there you have it.



While I was painting, a lady came hiking down the hill and asked to see my painting, because she did a bit of plein air painting too. I said, sure, and stepped aside. She stood there, looking at my painting for about...10 seconds, and then said "huh." and left.

I'm not sure what to make of that.

Sand Harbor's Edge, 8 x 6 inches, oil on linen

After the first sketch, I packed up and drove over to Sand Harbor again. This time the gates were open and I was able to get in. It was still 9 am and the beach wasn't crowded at all, which is nice, but not if you want to paint people on the beach, which is what I had in mind. And it looked like it could start raining any second, too. In fact, across the lake I could see the heavy clouds dumping water like curtains with soft edges. I decided to wait and see, so I got myself a cup of coffee, sat down, and started drawing in my sketchbook.

The small drawing above shows the view without the sun shining on it; a dark imposing mass against a less dark background. Eventually, the sun peeked out, so I set up and did my painting, deviating from my little pen sketch because the sun changed everything.




During the course of this painting, it started sprinkling a few times and each time I had to pack my stuff away and wait for the rain to pass.

A guy came up to me and told me how impressed he was with my painting, which was nice. Then he asked how much I'd charge for something like that. I told him, and he was like, "Holy Shit!" As he walked away, I could hear him reporting back to his wife and expressing his surprise and disbelief in no uncertain terms. More often than not, people expect to hear twenty or fifty bucks and when I quote a price that has more zeros on the end, they get offended. It's no wonder making a living as an artist is so difficult; people just don't appreciate what goes into creating a painting.

Kiva Beach, 6 x 8 inches, oil on linen

This is on another day. A little warmer and less windy, which was nice. When the sun was out, the lake was this beautiful blue green color, but when the sun hid behind the clouds, the lake turned steely dark gray. I sipped my coffee when it was shady, and painted when it was sunny. Worked out pretty well.

More sketchbook drawings. I like doing quick drawings of people. It helps enormously when I paint figures into my landscapes or cityscapes, because it's all about the gesture. And when people are moving around, that's pretty much all you can get.


Here I am at my easel. I brought my Open Box M with me on this trip, because I hadn't used it in months and I felt I needed to spend some quality time with it. Besides, I was only doing 6 x 8's so the little palette wasn't too inconvenient.

That's all folks. Next week, I'm going up the coast to Mendocino. Don't know if I'll get to paint, but I will definitely try!

Dinner Shift

Dinner Shift, 12 x 16 inches, oil on linen

This is a very good Italian restaurant in San Luis Obispo where a bunch of us had dinner together last year at San Luis Obispo Plein Air Festival. Next to the restaurant is the old Freemont Theatre. I stood across the street from it and took three afternoons to paint the old building with its marquis featuring "Gone With The Wind" and "Rocky Horror Picture Show". What a combination, huh?

I also did a sketch of the restaurant during the same week, but that turned out to be a dud. This painting is done in the studio from photo references and I took some liberties with the details.

I am also increasingly preoccupied with messing around with edge rules. I'm introducing sharp edges where conventional wisdom tells me to put soft ones, and vice versa. I'm finding this exercise really difficult, but eye-opening. Lots of scraping and re-working to try out different types of edges on each and every shape. Sometimes I stumble upon an unexpected note that I really like. "That shouldn't work." I say out loud, "...but it does." Just when I thought I'd figured something out, the complete opposite will assert itself as another truth. It's this kind of discovery that keeps me coming back for more. Time and again, I think, how boring painting would be if you could actually figure it all out.


I'm off to Lake Tahoe for a few days. I'm bringing my easel with me, but I'll be with my family so I don't know if I'll get any painting done. 'Hope so.