Buckling Down

“Buckling down” is a weird expression. It reminds me of sayings such as “nose to the grindstone”, “shoulder to the wheel”, “eye on the ball”. . . How can a person accomplish anything in that awkward pose?

It was a beautiful early spring day (Yeppers, February is spring in Three Rivers).

Tucker wanted me to stay outside with him.

After a fair amount of procrastination (all productive, of course), I finally moved myself into the painting workshop (the open door to the right of the studio, which appears to be leaning, but that was actually me who was leaning.)

Because these are so small (3×9”), I did my best to make them as realistic as possible without spending endless hours trying to copy the exact look of each flower. We’ll price them at $75 each and see what happens.

Then I finally returned to the Mineral King scenes that need to be completed by Memorial Weekend. I tried to be a bit looser than normal, and after I finish all 10 paintings, it will be interesting to see if I go back and tighten up the detail.

I think this one is finished.

These are not finished.

Jackson started nagging and then biting me.

Heading back outside now. . .

Just Some Stuff

These three topics are rattling around in my skull.

ONE

It rained and hailed rather ferociously while I was painting that indoor oak tree at my church; two days later I took this photo. Check out the first daffodils in bloom, in spite of the recent heavy cold storm.

TWO

The elephant was buried in snow. “Elephant?” That’s the shape that appears on Alta Peak after a snowstorm.

THREE

Stem & Stone* asked if I had any poppy and lupine paintings hanging around for sale. Nope. We discussed sizes and prices, with Stem & Stone suggesting something similar to the popular size 6×18” sequoia paintings. I countered with the fact that sequoia trees are more popular than poppies, thinking that $195 might seem steep for someone here visiting for the purpose of seeing sequoia trees. Stem & Stone suggested a smaller size but the same proportions. I found 2 small canvases in my supplies that fit the bill, both 3×9”. This gave me pause, but I agreed to try.

The cause for my pause is that very small paintings require holding it in my hand while painting and require tighter control, taking a disproportionate amount of time to paint. If I price by size, which is how the buying public makes sense of pricing, after Stem & Stone takes its agreed upon and fair bite out of the price, I am essentially working for less than minimum wage.

I speculated that is the reason many artists choose to paint loose and fast. I could try that method, but then the people who know my work would wonder if I’d been dropped on my head, had tried to paint left-handed, or lost my reading glasses.

Sigh. Sometimes it is really hard to be a professional artist.

HOWEVER, I did a rough sketch for Stem & Stone to see if it fit the vision.

*Stem & Stone is owned by a dear friend whose retail judgement I trust completely.

Quickity Painting Session

This stack of ten canvases was staring at me accusingly. So rude.

The only way I could get them to shut up was to start working on them. I spread out the smallest canvases with their photos, mixed up a pile of sky color to cover eight of the beginning backgrounds, along with a nondescript dark background color for two that are different from my usual Mineral King scenery paintings.

The two Sequoia gigantea are finishing their drying session. No hurry; I delivered one still sort of dampish to Kaweah Arts, and these two are just back-ups.

Some of the canvases had a base coat, and last week I drew the basic shapes in pencil. I don’t always do this, but for some unknown reason felt compelled to do that last week. Maybe I just wanted to make the starting out session more accurate. . . maybe I thought it would make the paintings go faster. . . or maybe I just felt like drawing in pencil. Yeah, that.

As I was taking inventory of Mineral King paintings on hand, I kept returning to this 8×10” of White Chief, which was painted from a particularly dramatic photo taken by Trail Guy, early one season. The painting just didn’t slap me in the eyes like the photos do, so I guessed at what might make it better and then fiddled around with it a bit more.

Before
After

Better? Maybe. Hard to say when the upper one was scanned and the lower one photographed with my inferior phone camera. If it sells in 2026, I will conclude that it has been improved. If not, I’ll just break all my brushes, slash my canvases, and see if I can find a job eradicating typos somewhere.

JUST KIDDING!!

Red-Neck Ramblings

I could be oil painting but seem to want to pull weeds, write blog posts, text with a friend about a difficult situation, make yogurt, and write a few letters.

We have a bit of a situation, but as a wise friend has said, “When you have a problem and you have money to fix it, you don’t have a problem; you have an inconvenience.

Prolly a starter. Maybe a fuse. Not the ignition switch or the battery. Thank goodness for the good pick-em-up truck (2003) AND the Botmobile (1986). Thank goodness for AAA, for upping the towing package 2 years ago, for Valero Bros. in Woodlake, and for Foreign Autoworks’ new owner, Frank.

We have a new pastor at church, someone with lots of energy and ideas. He joined the 50% of the congregation who wanted to remove the kraft paper from the front windows and asked a pair of fearless monkey-dudes to help. See if this doesn’t cause your guts to squeeze a bit. . .

Okay, done rambling. Gonna paint now.

Planning Session for Summer Selling Season

Deciding what to paint for the Silver City Store this coming summer felt like a daunting task. There is no excuse for procrastination, and the better I plan, the better the sales. So, suck it up, Buttercup.

The first step in planning is to look at the available Mineral King paintings. (For my out-of-the-area readers, Mineral King is a beautiful alpine valley in Sequoia National Park; each summer I sell art 4 miles below the valley at a resort in a little cabin community called “Silver City”.)

It also involves evaluating how many paintings sold, both by subject and by size. I am painting to satisfy a clientele, rather than just doing whatever “moves” me. Thank goodness it is all very beautiful.

This planning part isn’t so beautiful. It’s methodical, tedious, and would be easier if I had a crystal ball. Instead, I have records, intuition, common sense, and piles and piles of photos, both the paper variety and on the laptop.

It is helpful to line them out by subject and size.

It is also helpful to take a break and walk somewhere. (No powerlines in Mineral King or Silver City to clutter the views up there, because it is remote, the Land of No Electricity.)

Rosemary in bloom. . . so far this year, February has been impersonating spring.

Now I have ten new paintings to produce, ranging in size from 6×6” to 8×16” and 10×10”.

I’ve attached hanging hardware and assigned inventory numbers. Next I need to give them titles, such as “Sawtooth #209”.

Not really; I think it is only somewhere in the 60s.

Finally Painting Sequoias Again

After a couple of weeks of messing around, I finally planted my feet in front of the easels to complete these three Sequoia paintings.

First, I dabbled on this one day, and then said, “Never mind, I’d rather [walk] [pull weeds] [go to the library] [anything else]”.

I girded my loins, and returned to the easels on another day. Can you tell which one is finished among these three?

Now two are finished, on the face anyway.

The light is beginning to wane, but all three are now finished on their faces.

The edges remained. It is a good way to use up the rest of the paint, and I hold them in my hand and rotate them around, trying to not end up wearing any paint. Finally, I laid them flat to dry.

The next oil painting task is to decide what to paint for the Silver City Store. Summer is like Christmas—we KNOW when it is coming, there is no excuse for procrastination, and there is plenty of time to prepare without getting jammed up against the calendar.

Maybe in one of those avoidance activities, I can engage in some deep thought to figure out why I was so reluctant to work on these paintings, which sell steadily at two local art stores/gift shops.*

Then since I was on a roll with Sequoia Trees, I got this panel set up in the sunshine to recoat the sky because that knothole made a weird appearance.

*Kaweah Arts and Stem & Stone

Slacking

I’m around, but not working much, sort of taking time off to spend with some friends and other responsibilities. However, I know how annoying and puzzling it is when a blog you read daily just seems to vanish, so I’ll post a quick something each day. Far be it from me to annoy my tens of blog readers!

This painting sold a week or two ago. It has been around for awhile, so I figured that I must have saturated the market with the Kaweah Post Office. This is painting #23. The title is Kaweah Post Office XXII, but I miscounted when I was titling them.

I painted this one en plein air, and then didn’t like it so retouched it, still didn’t like it, so retouched it again. Then when it took awhile to sell, I almost pulled it from the store multiple times, but Nancy Who Knows Better kept urging me to leave it. So, we did little happy squeals and laughs when she told me last week that it sold.

Now I will only paint it again if someone commissions me.

The Kaweah Post Office is no longer operational. Used to be the smallest operating post office in the country. Now it is just a vandalism target. Sigh. It is in Three Rivers, although the folks nearby insist that they live in Kaweah, with their own zip code. Doesn’t mean anything because the mail lands in the Three Rivers Post Office.

So there.

P.S. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DWIGHT!

Building Sequoias on Canvas

Do you have any understanding of the difficulty of coming up with interesting titles to the same subjects, over and over and over? Just asking, not really expecting any answers.

These paintings, 6×18”, of Sequoia Gigantea, AKA Redwoods, AKA Big Trees, sell very steadily at $195 each. I get a little tired of painting the same thing over, until I think about the alternative occupations of waitress or secretary. Thus, I began another set-up of three of these popular paintings, with layer #1 completed last week.

Layer #2 is sky, because I work from back to front, meaning that I paint the most distant thing first.

Next, the wood. Redwood.

Then, green on the big trees.

Green on the more distant trees is supposed to be less vivid, more bluish green, a bit lighter.

Hold on—Jackson is hungry, poor deprived underfed malnourished beast, begging for a morsel. He begins with slamming into the back of my legs as I stand at the easel, gripes at me if I don’t respond, and eventually, he stretches upward and bites me. So, I must feed him if I expect to finish any work.

The last layer is the ground with its shadows. For variety, I put the sun at two different angles.

Notice the lack of reference photos. They are taped to another easel, and I only glance at them from time to time. Yeppers, I am making up these trees rather than trying to copy any one tree exactly. Visitors to the Park don’t know the details; the main request is to have a painting show the entire tree, from top to botrom.

These paintings will dry, and then I will begin layer #3, which is the most enjoyable part to this pencil artist: details!

P.S. If you don’t hear from me for the rest of the week, fret not. I’ll post about the mural progress next Monday.

A Light* Workday in Three Rivers

*“Light” meaning the sun was shining and also meaning I didn’t do much work.

Let’s get the work part over with, and then we can enjoy some photos that might shock anyone who lives where there is real winter.

Three new sequoia gigantea 6×18” paintings are now on the easel.

Next, I battled with Adobe InDesign for awhile. I bought a couple of book design templates, and they aren’t working correctly. Rather than keep tinkering, I emailed the company where I bought them to ask if they still sell such items. They are probably all lying on the floor laughing at the idjit who thinks that something 10 years old SHOULD STILL BE WORKING!

Then I got the bright idea of going to Lulu, a book printing company that Louise Jackson and I used for her novel, Only the Living, last fall. We are about to publish her second novel, and I don’t want to waste any more time fighting with the wonky book templates.

In order to mitigate the irritation and frustration of all the tech hassles, Trail Guy and I took a walk. While it is pea-soup fog down the hill, we have had brilliant sunshine.

Today I expect to be painting in Ivanhoe on the west-facing wall of the library. If my website is functional, I’ll post about it for you to read on Monday.

Thank you for sticking with me through this techno-chaos.

Oil Paintings on the Move

Sales were slow this December. Actually, sales of oil paintings were slow all fall, beginning with the show in Tulare called “Around Here”, where no paintings and six pencil drawings sold.

However, during the fall season, a few paintings did move. These first two sold through Kaweah Arts, located in The Dome in Three Rivers.

The other two were commissioned paintings, neither one on a fast track, and both recently delivered into the hands of happy customers.

Look at this painting, drying in the house, and drying outside by the wood stack.

Now look at how much better it photographed in the sunshine than when it was overcast.

I drove this next painting to the customers rather than shipping it. It was a rare and wonderful chance to visit with them. They ordered it while living out of the country, and I delivered it when they were prepping their old house to sell so they can move to another state.

The painting caused a few tears, since I apparently (by the grace of God) did manage to paint the right person.

These customers requested another painting to take as they move to a home with many walls, in a place that has no Mineral King and no sequoia trees. I brought two more paintings to show them, and they chose this one.

I was pleased to put this in their hands, and happy that I had it long enough to make some improvements. If a painting doesn’t sell, I evaluate it carefully to find ways to make it better. This one, Sunny Sequoias, provided me with several opportunities for improvement.

And although it seemed like a slow season for sales, it wasn’t really. Just different. Not complaining, just explaining. All Most of my needs are met (but I need to find a different host company for my website), and most of my wants (does anyone know if it is possible to convert an automatic transmission to a standard?? OF COURSE IT ISN’T! I still miss Fernando, but recognize and appreciate the superiority of Momscar.)