Napa Workshop 2010 - Day 1

I just got back from my three day plein air painting workshop in Napa! We were blessed with glorious weather the entire weekend, which was just a tremendous treat. Last year, we had all kinds of weather during the three days which made things a little more interesting, and a whole lot more challenging. This year we lucked out! Beautiful sunny weather, not too cold, not too hot. Ahhh Thank you Mother Nature!

So on Day 1, we arrived at Quixote Winery which is tucked away behind some hills on the Silverado Trail. A real gem of a location. Really funky and whimsical architecture surrounded by beautifully landscaped grounds, Lots of ancient oak trees, olive trees, ornamental grasses, lavenders, etc. There was even a cool little stream running through the property. All this is surrounded by the quintessential vineyardscape, which in turn is surrounded by green hills with lots of atmospheric distance. The winery is backdropped by rugged, sheer cliffs. The great diversity of this place made it an awesome place to hold a painting workshop. Thanks to my hosts, Alan and Leslie who know everybody in the valley!

So after saying our hellos, I gave out my new workshop hand-outs. This in itself was a big project, on which I spent two or three months putting together. And I must say, it is a really cool book and I was very excited to be able to give this out to my students. And I was even happier to see their reactions to the book. It was totally worth all the time and effort I put into it!

The handout originated years ago, when I first did my demo/lecture. The night before it suddenly dawned on me that I needed some kind of a handout to make my points stick, so I sat down, typed up a bunch of tips off the top of my head and stapled the 11 pages together and gave those out.

Since then, every time I conducted a workshop, I added more information to my material and edited, improving organization and correcting embarrassing typos and grammatical errors as I found them.

This year, I decided to make a big upgrade to my material mainly because it's grown so much and digital on-demand publishing technology has become so much better and much more affordable. Even though I had all the content, it was still a lot work putting it together but I'm glad I did it.

It is now a 66-page, full-color, fully illustrated book. I have a whole lot more to say so it will keep on growing. Every time I do a workshop, I imagine, I'll try and improve it a little more, add a little more information and more pictures too. At some point it will be more than a companion to my workshops and be a full-fledged book available for anyone to purchase.

That is to say, it is not yet at that point and I'm not going to make this available for purchase until it's ready. I've already had many many people asking to buy it and while I am very happy that the interest is out there, my intention is to keep this a part of my workshop for the foreseeable future. I want to nurture its development. I hate the idea of letting unfinished or sub-par paintings out of the studio, and I feel the same about this book. Not that I think it's sub par, but I consider it a work in progress and it's not done yet.

So I'm sorry, I can't sell it yet. But I promise at some point in the future, it will be available. If you MUST have it, come to one of my plein air workshops!

So the first day of my three-day workshop is usually a demo / lecture thing. I set up and talked (and talked) about materials, techniques, theories, processes, and anything else that came up. I started to paint the vineyard view, explaining everything I was doing in real time, and why. I think demos are important for students to see and learn the process and the thinking behind it. Actually seeing the painting being done is far more effective than just hearing about it. It is a visual language, after all.

But talking and painting at the same time is no easy task. Some artists are really good at it, others can't do it at all. I do it because I think it's the best way to teach, but it certainly is not easy for me. After about an hour and a half, it became apparent that my painting was really not working out. All the basic things were in, but it was a boring painting, to be blunt.

No artist has a perfect batting average, and it is a matter of fact that sometimes we don't succeed. That's true for beginners, as well as seasoned pros. Not to make excuses for my less than impressive demo, but being fully aware that I can't do a good painting every time, I felt no pressure to perform. Instead, I turned it into a "how to deal with a failed painting" demo. Basically, I used the painting to demonstrate different concepts. I'm comfortable making stuff up thanks to my years of illustrating magazines and book jackets, and so I painted a road that wasn't there, explaining how perspective worked on a varied terrain. I also explained how I invent and design with shadows which weren't actually there. This type of skill set really comes in handy when you get into trouble painting en plein air. Literally depicting a scene is a good skill but really, how often do we really do that? We are always pushing color or moving a bush or eliminating a telephone pole. If adding a road makes a better picture, I don't hesitate.


Anyway, the demo was fun despite my messing up, and students seemed to enjoy and appreciate the merits of deviating from the literal. There's always something to be learned, even from (especially from, in some cases) failed paintings.


After I came home, I chopped off the bottom half of the painting because it still didn't look good. the image you see above is the chopped version. I forgot to take a shot of the painting before I chopped it. If anyone who was at the workshop has photos of the first day, please send them to me!

Later that evening, we reconvened at a local restaurant and had a feast. We ate, drank and made merry. Good times! In the pic above; Don, me, and Bob, getting a head start on everyone else. Don Hatfield, if you don't know already, is a big time painter and a friend of mine. He lives in Napa so I called him up and invited him to come down and get hammered with us. He's not one to refuse such an invite, so he came down in a flash and joined us. Don's wife Janey and another artist friend, Silvio Silvestri, who just happened to be in the area came and joined us too.

I invited Don and Silvio to paint with us the following day, and being good sports, they said hell yeah and made our workshop more interesting. You never know what surprises you get at a Terry Miura workshop!


To be continued~