Up To The Blue, 14 x 21 inches, oil on canvas


San Francisco is really difficult to paint. Technically, it's not any more difficult than any other city, or any other subject, for that matter. (OK, it's a little easier to fake a tree than to fake a building)  What makes SF so difficult, at least for me, is that it's been done so many times by so many great painters, and these iconic views of steep hills, while irresistible, have become predictable. 

How do you differentiate your view from the rest, especially when they're all painting the same thing?  This is a question I've struggled with for years. I've tried to look for unusual angles and croppings, but while those did result in unexpected views, I felt they weren't really me. They looked contrived because they were. They can each be good paintings, but because I was forcing myself to be different for the sake of being different, it meant that they really weren't grounded in my identity. And inevitably, I would burn out after two or three paintings.

Eventually I've come to accept the notion that what differentiates my SF cityscapes aren't found in unusual views or clever cropping. My identity is found in my choice of colors, how I put them down, what I chose to edit out, how I structure values in designing a picture. The fundamental things that, when combined, result in a moodiness that feels like something from my own past. And the ordinariness of view is an essential ingredient precisely because I feel compelled to express the subtler aspects of my visual experience, which would be overwhelmed and overshadowed by the unusual, the contrived, the spectacular, the awesome. 

Don't get me wrong–I'm not saying I strive to be predictable. I'm saying we see the subtle things more readily when our senses are not dazzled by the unusual. And I have this suspicion that somewhere in those subtle aspects of the ordinary is where I'll find my identity.

Took me 20 years to realize that, and I'm still looking for it.
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  1. Awesome account of the nuances of your work. It's a beautiful, evocative painting. (I really love the vehicles in shadow.)Excellent.

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  2. Very good Terry, you did a great job. I like it a lot, cheers

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  3. I only know your work from your blog but this painting has Terry Miura written all over it. Nicely done.

    I once had a fellow artist comment that one of my landscape paintings was wonderful - but that I should paint a red square outline over part of it.

    I said "why?" He replied "why not?"

    But it's not me. Not that we shouldn't consider options and alternatives but we surely must stay true to ourselves.

    I've seen the sort of thing he means and I don't find it appealing - so I'm fairly certain I won't be doing it anytime soon. Maybe one day though, who knows?

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  4. Thanks Dar, Jesus, and Andy!

    Andy, "this painting has Terry Miura written all over it" just made my day. I really appreciate that. thanks!

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  5. Great painting and a great post!
    Thanks for sharing.

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  7. Thanks Carol! Thanks Bill!

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Hi everyone, thank you for reading Studio Notes!

I wanted to let you know that I am moving this blog to a new platform under FASO.  In recent years parts of my website have become more fragmented and it's not as easy to make sure everything is working together, so I've decided to move the whole thing to FASO for a more streamlined experience.

The move is gradual and as of this writing, the website is not complete. But I've started posting new blog posts over there, and will be continuing to do so from now on, so please check it out.

I will keep this blog as an archive so you can come back to it if you want to read an older article, but I won't be adding new posts here.
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When I paint the figure with the intention of ending up with a showable painting, I always do a couple of color studies first. They not only give me a good feel for the mood, and a sense of whether the painting is even worth pursuing at a larger size.

The mood of the painting depends a lot on color choices and the big design elements and these are the things that I pay attention to in the studies, not details.
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Ready for Work, 18 x 24 inches, oil on linen

This painting is currently on view at the Harrington Gallery at the Firehouse Arts Center in Pleasanton, Ca. The group show is all about the Eastern Sierra pack trips. For the last seven or eight years I have been going up to the mountains with a group of painters to spend a week up in high elevation (10,000 ~ 11,000ft) and painting the Edgar Payne country.
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Study for The Traveller, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen

A couple of months ago, we had a long pose session (6 hrs) where we had a clothed model take a seated pose in my studio. He was a dapper fellow, skinny jeans and Italian shoes and all. 

The sketch above is a pretty literal depiction of how he looked.  I actually tried to be faithful to what I saw, in terms of colors and values.
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Happy New Year everyone~!  Sorry, it's been forever since my last post. I keep thinking I need to post more often but I keep reaching for the much shorter format Facebook and Instagram.  I guess I've become a creature of the social media - just thinking about writing something longer than a sentence sometimes overwhelms me.

...and to think, I used to do blog posts twice a week! Times have changed, eh?

But I'm not done with this. I will try and do better this year.
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Here's one with Cad Green, Cad Lemon, Cad Orange, and White. That green isn't as tricky as it may seem. Even with a full palette, one often reaches for greens to mix a cooler part of the skin tone, so there's nothing too surprising there.

The challenge, again, is the fact that with this set of colors, I can't get a really dark value. So again, I have to work within the compressed value range.

The Impressionists often worked in a limited range in the higher key, so it's perfectly do-able.
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Just because you use a specific limited palette, it doesn't mean your paintings will have similar looks. Especially if you have all three primaries represented, we can mix all kinds of in-between colors and values and as a result, two studies painted in the same three colors +white, can look very different from one another.

Both studies I'm posting today were done with a limited primaries palette of Transparent Earth Red / Yellow Ochre / Payne's Gray / Titanium White.
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So in the previous post I showed a few examples of painting the figure using different sets of primary colors out of the tube. If that's too easy or too conventional for you, here's another tweak on the color game; use only two colors plus white.

In these examples, I tried complimentary colors; Red / Green / White for the first one, and Blue Violet / Yellow Orange / White for the second example. You can see they're of the same pose.

I host figure painting sessions at my studio once a week, where artists can come and paint from the model. The model is sometimes nude and sometimes clothed - I try to mix it up. Usually we have one long pose (with breaks) so there's plenty of time to study the figure.

In these sessions, my aim is just to practice. I'm not trying to do a gallery-bound painting because the poses have to be based on what works for a roomful of people viewing the model from different angles.
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I like doing value studies.  When I'm out in the field, I always do at least one thumbnail sketch in my sketchbook using a ball point pen. It's a great way to visually organize the value structure and think about what's important, and what should be edited out.

If I'm in the studio, I still do these pen-and-sketchbook thumbnails, but sometimes I like to do them with paint. I have a lot of scrap pieces of canvas which are perfect for these little studies.
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Terry Miura • Studio Notes
Terry Miura • Studio Notes

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