I looked at this painting and decided it could wait.
Instead, I decided to work on the marmot.
And then the deer.
Finally, I wanted to do something easy, so I put the first layer on these three paintings.
I’d call that a productive-enough day!
P.S. Probably shouldn’t have signed the marmot. His nose is weird. I didn’t sign the deer because his face is a little weird too. Probably should just stick to scenery and architecture.
Here is the afternoon’s painting session after a morning of exploring around Lake Kaweah. I’m easing into the production of Mineral King paintings, with the workshop doors open to the greenery, flowers, cats, and sounds of leaf blowers, chain saws, a distant donkey, and the occasional vehicle. March is a month full of distractions and temptations to lollygag. However, summer is coming and incomplete paintings will not sell.
It is efficient to paint the same scenes at the same time since the colors are mixed on the palette. Because this is the most popular scene to sell at Silver City, I paint it in multiple sizes and shapes, and at different times of day and in different parts of the summer season.
I was pleased to be able to finish these—see the signatures? The previous painting session did not yield anything that was ready to be signed. If I can get those 3 plus 2 from an earlier session detailed and signed, then I’ll be over halfway to completing the ten paintings.
Why ten? With the ones that remain from last year, this is a total of about 15 paintings. Silver City Store sells anywhere from ten to twenty paintings for me each summer. I don’t want to have too much inventory left at the end of summer. So I keep track as paintings sell, then paint more of the popular subjects that have sold out.
It’s all a guessing game, supplemented with a little bit of intuition and experience. That’s the business of art.
In case you have forgotten:
This pencil drawing was done from several photos taken in the campground Sequoia RV Ranch up North Fork Drive in Three Rivers. Like the other drawings used in the 2026 calendar, the original is on a piece of 11×14” archival paper. It is for sale. $375 (plus tax if you live in California) or make me an offer, because sometimes I get tired of being businesslike and think the drawings are better on someone’s wall than in my flat files.
Same sizes and prices for the January drawing, and February drawing.
I painted this scene a few times too, but they sold a long time ago.
I am willing to paint it again, because I accept commissions. (Tryna be businesslike here)
“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).
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.
Heading back outside now. . .
These three topics are rattling around in my skull.
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.
The elephant was buried in snow. “Elephant?” That’s the shape that appears on Alta Peak after a snowstorm.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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
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.