I spent a morning inside that open door, working on the unusual commissioned oil painting.
Let’s do a series of progressive painting photos (the first two appeared on February 27).
The studio sat empty beneath the flowering pear tree.
Pippin waited for me patiently, until he found something more interesting to investigate.
This painting seemed too bright. After studying it awhile, I decided to only tone down the brilliant green in the distance to push it farther away. (“Push it” visually, not warp the canvas.)
This is after:
Hmmm, that’s a pretty subtle difference, perhaps even dubious*. Might want to try that again later. In addition, the photography colors are significantly different.
Never mind. Let’s move ahead, shall we?
This painting looks scary in its beginning stages unless you happen to see it while galloping by on the back of a fast horse (or see it the size of a postage stamp on your phone).
After these fairly dissatisfactory adventures in oil painting, I returned to my pencils. This one has a story, which I’ll tell you when I know the ending. This is the sketch I sent to the customer to see if it matched her design expectations:
To be continued. . .
These paintings only show on my blog because I can’t remember how to get more than a handful of paintings to appear on the store part of my website. You may call or email or text if you’d like to buy any of these. Use the contact button on my website, because if I type the info in here, the cyberjerks might harass me.
Painting these is almost just as much fun as drawing with pencil, especially when I get to the third pass over the painting, where I get to draw with my paintbrush.
P.S. There is sales tax if you live in California. Figure in $8, and I’ll pay the postage.
After spending a week doing plein air paintings at the beach in October, I could not wait to get home where I could paint waves and the ocean in my painting workshop, where the waves were frozen in motion on photographs. I love those blues and teals and greens and splashing whites, and I wanted to capture that in over-the-top detail.
“Over-the-top” hasn’t quite happened, but I am pretty happy so far. I’ve shown you Pacific Ocean I, II, III, and now it is time for IV, V, and VI.
A friend knows someone with a store somewhere in a town on the California coastline, and she is SURE the paintings will sell there. The store has very limited shelf space, so instead of putting the paintings on little easels like I had envisioned, she said they will need to hang.
That took some searching, but I eventually found something. The choices were to buy a package of 2 for maybe $4, or a package of 100 for $8. After a brief struggle between the frugal part of my brain against the side that doesn’t want to own extra stuff, I ordered 100.
Pacific Ocean VII, VIII, and IX are wet at the time of this writing.
Once again, I am counting my chickens before they hatch, which might be my strongest talent.
When I started my art business, I named it “Cabin Art”, or perhaps “Cabinart*”, because my favorite subject matter was architecture, mostly cabins.
As my skill and confidence grew, my favorite subject to draw (and eventually paint) was the Oak Grove Bridge.
During a particularly wet winter after several dry ones, I became enamored with rushing water.
Next, it was orange groves with foothills and mountains in the distance.
After a handful of years of painting multiple variations on this theme, I seem to be transitioning into beach scenes.
More on that later. . . Monday is time for a monthly Learned post.
*For a typo-psycho, I certainly am ambivalent about the spelling of my own studio name.
In 1996 or thereabouts, I drew this in pencil. It is a compilation of photos taken in Pauma Valley, Lemon Cove, and maybe even in Ivanhoe and Exeter. For some reason, a reproduction print was still around during my show last fall. It sold quickly, and a friend asked me to paint the scene for her.
I’ve never painted from a pencil drawing before. Since I have experience in the subject matter, and I can still locate most of my reference photos, I said yes. (Everything is easy compared to those miniature faces.)
First pass over the canvas.
Second pass.
Third pass.
I will be taking my time on this since my friend said she would like it some time in April. This remains my current favorite subject matter, and it brings to mind all the phases of favorites that my art has gone through. More on that later. . .
… I am working on several art projects at once. That is, IF I am actually working.
The little beach paintings are still progressing. I have enough boards for twelve of these. Six are now completed, three more are in the messy first layer stages, and three more are waiting for my decision to either paint more beach scenes, or paint some oranges.
I like these little boards.
There are also three unfinished oil paintings in the painting workshop, but none have deadlines. The beach paintings don’t have deadlines either, but their small size gives me the illusion of productivity and progress.
Meanwhile, I have two very complicated pencil commissions to complete. One is now in progress; the other is awaiting my thumbnail sketches for the customer to choose from.
“Bad things happen quickly; good things take a long time. This is why patience and determination are such primary virtues.”
I don’t know who said this, but I intend for these two difficult pencil commissions to be good, so they may take a long time.
*Gessobord is something akin to masonite, coated very smoothly with gesso, a thick white paint, probably acrylic.
There is an excellent museum in Three Rivers, and parked in front are some old fire trucks plus this tow truck. I had to wait for a couple of friends stuck at one of the many ongoing lengthy roadblocks, so I wandered around with my inferior phone camera.
On a recent walk, I took this photo because it reminded me of my painting titled Swinging Oak. You can see it below with a convenient link for purchasing from my website. It’s just business. (I’m tryna earn a living here!)
Where’s the other chair?
Why am I not showing you any paintings or drawings? Because I am spending most of my time in the studio, editing another book for another writer on another topic.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
A good friend, mentor, and wise man asked me if I have a relationship with my paintings. I wasn’t sure what he was seeking, so I just told him what goes through my mind while painting. Then I looked at the email conversation and thought, “Hmmm, this might be an interesting blog post”.
When I start a painting, I have photos to look at, and I copy what is there while also trying to improve on it. Move a tree, brighten a color, ignore a tangle of branches, don’t get too weird about making those rocks or cracks in the cliff perfect, increase the contrast, make that insignificant part blurry or leave it out. . . on and on and on, a continual mental conversation about how to depict a scene realistically but cleaner than real life. Real life is pretty messy, and I try to clean it up.
Often I think a painting is finished when it isn’t. It takes awhile of studying it, sometimes a couple of years, before realizing that it can be improved. This isn’t improvement to make it look more like the photo, but improvement to make it more appealing to the viewer.
My method of painting is to layer and layer, over and over, tightening the details, correcting the proportions, remixing the colors with each layer. Usually when I start, it is very sloppy, getting better with each pass over the canvas. This is similar to writing, where you tell yourself the story in the first draft. Then as you edit and rewrite, you refine your words, rearrange your paragraphs, realize that something can be misunderstood so you correct that piece, decide that something sounds foggy or stupid or unnecessary so you delete that sentence or phrase. Then you think it is done, until you look at it the next day or the next week or after you hit “Publish” and WHAM! THERE’S A TYPO! Or you wonder “why did I say that??” Or you think, “Nobody cares, why did I write this?”
I’ve never thought about it as a relationship with a painting. It is a project, separate from me. I talk myself through it, talking to myself rather than to the painting. Sure, occasionally I’ve said to a painting, “Buddy, you are toast!” just before painting it out entirely.
But the conversation is entirely to myself—“WHAT are you doing?? Stop licking the canvas! Choose the right color, get it carefully on the best brush for the job, and decide what you are doing before you just dab and jab. Okay, that is looking good, so now do it again over here. Your brush is too small and this will take forever. Whoa, I thought that part was finished and it looks really weak. Oh great, now you’ve missed entire pieces of the conversation on the podcast you are listening to because you were trying to mix a better green.”
So now you know what goes through my brain while I am painting.
With drawing, things are much easier, more automatic, and it is easier to talk to other people, or listen to a podcast while drawing. But I don’t feel as if I have a relationship with my drawings either. Many years ago I had to learn to keep emotional distance, to stop viewing them as something fabulous and irreplaceable or it would have been too hard to sell them.
And here is your reward for reading to the end of this very long post.
I’m not much good in town, but if the town is on a beach, I’ll cope with it just fine. These paintings were done from photos taken around Monterey, but I am simply titling them Pacific Ocean I, II, and III, with hopes for IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX in the near future.
Email, call, write me a note, or tell me in the comments if you would like to buy one of these paintings. (They look better in person, as you probably already know.)
We can pretend they are in Pismo, Cayucos, or any other spot along the Pacific Ocean that floats your boat.