I've still got a ton of great photos from Bay-to-Breakers this year (for non-SF people, it's an annual road race in SF, that has prizes for the fastest runners, and also for costumes. Folks 'round here like dressing up).
This is a quick study for piece I want to do of a woman in a ballerina costume, crossing through the park with her parasol. I think I may switch this to a vertical, so there's more figure and less landscape. I'll keep you posted.
And here ends "abstraction week in Gringo-land." Well for now, I think.
At the suggestions of a few followers here, I did indeed try to replicate one of the postcards at a larger size. This one is 18x14 inches.
I skipped the palette knife, because it's really not big enough. Instead I used a 3-inch foam brush. I've seen Wyland do this a lot as an underpainting etc. but I gotta say, it's really a lot of fun.
I gave myself a very short window of time to enlarge this image. I think that helped, because it's very hard to go back over areas with a 3-inch brush, and I felt like I was pushing $2 worth of paint every time I made a swipe. "It's just paint, it's just paint, it's just ..."
I'm getting a little tired of painting landscapes, so this week, I'm doing some more abstract work. This is based on a painting I did of a red book, but I did it from memory, trying to distill it down to just basic color areas. I kinda let the brush flow where it would, so it wound up looking more like a flag. So be it.
I took a pic of this while walking around in the park today. I think it's really a public bathroom, but not totally sure. I just liked the way the light was making it pop out of the scene.
I'm still using the limited 3 color palette and it seemed to work out fine, but then again, the sky color in the city is different than in Sonoma.
OK. Last stab at this. This is really just an extension of yesterday's piece. I thought things had gotten too simple and that it lacked any real interest or flow, so I tried connecting some of those shadow shapes and making those vines a little more round and connected.
I also tried to add some detail to those back hills, without making them busy, and tried to put some more accurate color in them. I mean, the pale blue thing works, but really I saw more of that burnt straw in there.
I decided to try this again, painting from a photo and incorporating what I had worked out in my field study. Wow, this is the kinda thing I've read about!
I also wanted to see if I could simplify some of the bigger shapes, like the trees, so that not everything had the same jarring brushstrokes that the field study had.
Well, what took two and half hours outside, took only 1 hr today. I don't think it's really any better, nor any worse. I'm also having a very hard time mixing the right greens, for the lightest parts of the vines. Some highlights are yellow, but some are a very pale, yet warm, green. I think I need to use a different blue to make that shade. That means adding to my limited palette. Oh, well.
One of the great painters who attended the workshop (there were enough pros there to make me feel about two inches tall) set up to paint the train tracks. I couldn't face painting another barn or mountain ridge, so I thought this would be a fitting end to the weekend. My first plein air painting of a plein air painter.
I rushed through in about an hour and a half, and she liked it enough to take it home with her. That kind of compliment is better than any other kind of reward.
Day two of the workshop. The paint was drying so fast yesterday that I decided to switch to a set of Golden Open Acrylics, but with temperatures nearing 100, I still had to add tons of medium and even water (I had my trusty spray bottle but even that was not enough) just to keep things fluid.
Every time I adjusted something on this piece, I made something else worse, or exposed a bigger area of trouble.
At the critique I got a lot of helpful tips on how I might "fix" this, and I thought, "yeah, right. I'm not putting another dab on this loser." However, when I got it back, I did follow the advice. I softened the mountain line, warmed up the vineyard ground, and got some deeper darks in the green shadows. I'm not saying I really rescued it, but it certainly served as a learning experience.
Day one of Judy Butler's workshop in Sonoma. My generous father invited me on a two-day outing with one of the best plein air painters I know. Check out her stuff, it's truly outstanding.
We went to the seashore, but it was so foggy that "you couldn't see the seagulls" as it was said. So we moved to the tiny harbor of Bodega. Judy did a great demo of a rotting pier, and then turned us loose. The weather was changing dramatically minute by minute, so I thought I'd pick something nearby in case it got socked in completely I could still make out some basic shapes.
Well the shapes stayed put, but the light cycled through the entire spectrum. It was very challenging.
Karin Jurick at DSFDF has us painting the figure again. I've never painted so many people!
The challenge she put to everyone was to get the figure right – the weight, the dimensions, the turns and curves – and not worry so much about the setting, and extraneous details.
For some reason I keep making peoples heads too big. I just keep putting more paint on and the edges seem to drift until the head becomes overly large. Instead of correcting this one, I'm gonna do another one manana.
This is a new painting of the same subject (I painted this originally a few months back, May 16 and May 17). I wanted to see how differently it might turn out based on the things I've been cramming into my head, so I didn't look at the others until I was done.
I've definitely warmed things up quite a bit in the sunlit areas and kept the background stuff loose and a little cooler.
I started this scene, but didn't like what was going on with the truck, so I scraped it off a bit, and took a break.
Looking at it later I decided I kinda liked it this way. It's still immediately recognizable as a truck, and has that quality of both being there and not being there.
I'm gonna leave it like this for a bit, on the wall of my office, and see what happens to my opinion over time.
I'd love to hear your thoughts...
Back to my regular acrylics (saving the open ones for another landscape). I'd toyed with the idea of doing this for a while, but felt like I couldn't make a good composition of it. I finally decided I wouldn't worry about that so much, and instead concentrate on the contrast of the light and dark areas and trying to see how much information to include in the shadow areas.
I'm not entirely sure this is Fairfax, but it reminds me of Fairfax. I was going to crop in on the buildings, but then realized what I liked about this shot was the shadows of the trees across the road, and the fact that the buildings look so small against the mass of trees.
For paint I tried a new set I got of Golden Open Acrylics. I didn't immediately notice much difference, but when I went back to lay in new color on previously painted areas I found I was picking up a lot of the color underneath. This made it fun to paint and repaint the trees and shadows, though it took some adjusting from my normal style.
Also interesting, the following morning, some of the paint was still not completely set.
This one is sort of a combination of what I learned doing the more abstract version, yesterday, with some of the more details versions I did earlier. Again, hard to leave the face alone, but I'm getting more used to it.
I was at a gallery last night that had two different artists work on display. One painted every tiny detail in the faces of his subjects. Even on a huge painting, if there was a figure only a few inches tall, the face would have every eyelash in place. They guy must have tons of tiny brushes.
Across the hall was another artist who painted quite large as well, but his figures had very little detail at all, and the faces where completely blank.
Not content with my attempts I decided to try a stripped-down version, with just the basic shapes. This is more in the direction I wanted in the first place. It's still hard to deal with that face mostly in shadow. If it was the side of a barn I could paint it in and leave it, but since I "know" there's a face there, and as humans, we all respond to faces, it's really hard to leave it be.
