Sharon’s Suggestion

When I showed my two orchard paintings, Sharon, a real life friend and most active blog commenter, suggested I paint a stonefruit orchard in full spring color.

I told her that those orchards just aren’t in my normal routes.

Then, I went to Fresno for a day. The plums (white blossoms) were finished blooming, but there were some peach orchards still going strong. Since I prefer backroads to the dreaded State Highway 99*, I was able to find a blooming orchard with a shoulder to pull over and take a few photos.

Oops. I was in a hurry. Sitting on the side of the road while traffic blazes past isn’t conducive to careful framing of one’s photographic shots.

There were better orchards, but a ditch separated them from the road. AND, I didn’t think of it at first. Probably should have taken photos on the way to Fres-yes instead of waiting until I was on the way home. Maybe I need a boss.

Pretending that I had a boss who told me to get crackin’, I messed around with the photos and came up with this beginning.

I bet this orchard painting will sell quicker than the walnuts or the olives.

THANK YOU, SHARON!

*99 is said to be the darkest highway and the most deadly of all state highways: a study says “Highway 99, a 424-mile road that runs through the state’s Central Valley, leads the country for most fatal crashes per one hundred miles”. But that doesn’t matter, because we will get a bullet train from Modesto to Bakersfield some time in the next 50 years or so. You should see the stone-henge type concrete supports, complete with graffiti along the route. . . lovely fixtures in Central California for almost a decade now. As I said Friday, California is a special kind of stupid.

While the Deer Were Grazing. . .

. . . I was actually painting.

The canvas was finally covered, with good detail in the rock faces. (Not real faces—it is just the way to clarify that I am talking about vertical rocks rather than basic boulders.) I didn’t try to match the scene line for line or space for space. It already is taking w a a a y t o o l o n g. So, I just tried to capture the feel of the place.

The gully/ravine/drop off behind the bank of flowers wasn’t looking separate enough so I darkened the edge. There are still many details to perfect on this painting, but I need to wait until all the green is dry so it doesn’t muck up the colors of wildflowers. You KNOW I will put in more wildflowers. 😎

Time to begin the last oil painting in the queue. It won’t be the last one for the solo show in the fall; it is the final one before I start painting smaller pieces of Mineral King to sell in the summer.

This is a special Tulare County view; it is from a place open by invitation only. We were fortunate/lucky/blessed* enough to receive such an invitation last spring.

It is important that I get the snow-covered Sierra Nevada accurate. Sorting out all the peaks is very time consuming, so I skipped it on this day in order to see some bigger progress.

I had to stop painting because it gets dark at the end of the day, in spite of the time change. (You can’t make a blanket longer by cutting off the bottom foot and sewing it to the top.)

There will be wildflowers. . . thank you for asking.

*Pick your favorite adjective.

Six Oil Paintings at Five Stages

I have oil paintings at every stage right now. All depict Tulare County places, because that is where your Central California artist resides. She is a Tulare County artist, perhaps more accurately known as a “regionalist from Quaintsville”.

Finished, scanned, ready to show and sell:

Big Oak, 11×14″
Olive Grove, 10×10″

Finished, changed my mind, made it better, now drying again:

Before
After

Hard to compare fairly when the coloring is so different.

Barely begun:

Sold:

Sold, but I forgot to sign it, so I delivered it with a wet signature.

Newly painted to replace the sold poppies:

This one was photographed at the end of the day in low light as it was getting transported to the house for drying.

A Good Painting Day

What makes a good painting day? So glad you asked. It is a day where I make visible progress on paintings, the kind of progress that makes me like the pieces I am working on, and the kind of progress that brings me closer to putting the paintings on the DONE list of Tulare County’s prettiest places.

I didn’t photograph this one after putting on the final touches, so I’ll just tell you that I fixed the branch in the center that is too light and too straight. I also added a few branches hanging down in front of the main tree with leaves and a hint of olives. Then, I signed it!

The road is dirt now. Yeah, yeah, I know that Dry Creek Road is paved, has a center line, and feels like a freeway compared to the Mineral King Road. But this is my painting. So, moo. I also tightened a few details on the barn.

This one needs to dry so that I can add wildflowers. Looks as if that leaning tree on the left could use a bit of straightening. It didn’t look weird in the photo, but it isn’t translating well here. When the flowers are in the painting, I will do a post showing you all the photos that I used to make this scene, which is the best representation of my memory of walking this trail on a very early morning last spring. The photos just don’t tell the story.

This painting is another compilation, or perhaps amalgamation is a better word, of many photos. I know how it looks in person, the camera doesn’t tell the story, and so I mess with the photos on Photoshop to see if I can make the different elements work together. Then I use that to create the scene I remember.

This was so fun. It felt as if I was painting for an hour or so, and suddenly, the day was over!

Farming With Paint?

This day’s oil painting session went from an olive grove to a walnut grove. (Grove or orchard? Same thing.) The day ended with a potential cattle ranch.

The last olive grove painting session left me with this mess to tackle, layer by layer.

I began with improving the trunks and branches. Here you can see one of the main reference photos.

Next I put in leafy texture.

The front gnarly trunk needed detailing, and now it needs to dry. After it dries, I will fix anything that is looking wrong, and then, if the paint is flowing well, if the force is with my brushes, and if I become one with the canvas, I hope to put in some close branches where you can see leaves and olives.

Time to visit a walnut grove. Clearly, this is a walnut grove, no?

No. It is not clearly a walnut grove. All the lined up trees seemed difficult (read “impossible”). I started with the closer trees.

Here you can see the main reference photo. It was a little tricky to condense a rectangle into a square and do it believably. I don’t feel the need to put in every tree. I do feel the need to have the trees line up in their rows. (How do farmers plant their orchards so perfectly?)

I got tired of brown, so I moved to the distant horizon line and put in the sunlit green in the distance, and then patches of sunlight on the ground. It isn’t as close to finished as the olive grove painting, but I ran out of daylight and the cats wanted to reclaim the workshop as their cafeteria and dorm.

But first, I erased the center line on the road of this painting. There was a bit of a pickle here: I want cows, but that means a fence, and without a real photo of a fence in this position, it is too risky in terms of believability. I could do it if it meant saving all the women and children, but this doesn’t come anywhere near that sense of desperation. So, I messed up the center line and the asphalt, and when it dries, I will try to make it look like dirt or gravel, which means the cows won’t need a fence.

It was really getting dark out. I was cold, tired of difficult decisions, and the cats wanted dinner, so that was the end of my day of farming with a paintbrush in the groves, orchards and ranches of Tulare County.

Little Things Mean a Lot

It often just comes down to the little things, the details, those finishing touches on a painting that bring the most satisfaction. Here are five paintings that I added little things to on a single morning of painting.

Tucker wanted to know if I was going to be there for awhile.

Big Oak: I studied this painting for awhile and decided the dirt patch at the bottom might be too large— “might be” was enough to make me go back to touch it up.

I signed it too. Wow. Was that worth the effort? Maybe.

Square Orange Grove: I thought this was finished but maybe I wasn’t convinced, because I didn’t sign it. Trail Guy asked me why I hadn’t put orange blossoms on the close trees. Ummm, I forgot. . .

Excellent! And now it is signed too. All it needs is a title (I’ve been calling it The 16×16″), photography, and varnish.

Take Me Home: I tried to put a single leaf in tight detail on the road. It looked dumb. So, I put in texture to resemble dirt, rocks, sticks, and basic dirt road debris. Then I signed it. I don’t want to work on this painting anymore. (But I will if someone tells me something that would make a measurable difference.)

Homer Barn: I had forgotten to put the trees on top of the left hills, and the road wasn’t quite right. I worked on the shoulder of the road and added a layer to the field on the right.

Now I have to decide if it should have cows on the right, which will mean it needs a fence. I’ll just wait on these decisions until the road and other new parts are dry.

Dry Creek Wildflowers: more lupine and leaves on the skeletal tree were needed.

This could be signed now, but then again, I might keep “polishing”. I might want to keep this one. . . maybe I’ll just keep working on it so it isn’t ever quite ready to sell.

Yeppers, Tuck, I was here long enough to bore you to sleep.

And thus we conclude another tour through painting the prettiest places in Tulare County.

A Three-Painting Day

Three paintings of Tulare County scenery were brought closer to completion on a productive day of painting. Two were fun, and one is still riding the struggle bus.

Not a lot to say about this other than I photographed each step.

It was fun to detail the unusual barn, and now I need to detail the road and lower right pasture.

This painting is really fun. I filled in green around the rest of the poppies, added more green in the lower regions, built the oak tree (needs the beginnings of spring leaves), and put the lupine stalks in place.

I took this painting to a life-long friend for her input. She has a great eye for design and has assisted me in the past. She suggested more of an overarching canopy and more detail on the road (which was also suggested by my friend and blog reader MB). I got this far on the canopy before the light ran out.

Maybe adding tire tracks, more light, and some dirt clods will be all this piece requires before it exits the struggle bus.

Big Oak Tree

Did you know that Tulare County is home to the largest oaks in the country? The valley oak, quercus lobata is not what this big oak tree is. I found this tree somewhere along Dry Creek Road. I didn’t get close enough to know what kind, but I can tell by the shape that this isn’t a valley oak. It is unusually perfect, almost symmetrical, and all without ever having been pruned (except when cattle chew on the lower leaves.)

Sky and distant ridge.
Distant waves of wildflowers, closer blades of grass.
Added wildflowers, a rock, more blades of grass and a few limbs because I couldn’t wait to get to that tree.
Details in the grass, another rock, and details in the dirt.
Finally started on the tree.
Am I finished? Time will tell.

Once it is dry, I will sign it, paint the edges, and either photograph or scan it, so you can see it with its brighter and more accurate colors.

Layer by Layer, Little by Little, II

Nope, it’s not Moro Rock.

Layer by layer, little by little, these two paintings are inching ahead in spite of the Central California artist’s desire to park indoors by the wood stove with a book.

The top one is 12×16″, an odd barn along Dry Creek Road, known as the Homer Barn. The bottom one is 11×14″, some perfect oak tree with wildflowers beneath on some perfect day of driving Dry Creek Road, in Tulare County, California’s flyover country. But don’t forget that we feed the world. (And don’t move here either, because we are all fat, uneducated, poor, and the air is terrible.)

Green and Orange

Poppies and oranges are two of my most popular subjects. Orange and green, green and orange. Orange is yellow and red; green is yellow and blue. I’m getting more relaxed about the specific shades of each, focusing more on values, which is Artspeak for darks and lights.

This painting will take awhile, because I want it to be perfect. Do I always say that? Prolly not. I’m not a perfectionist. It takes discipline to keep returning to the same painting over and over when I just want to cross it off my list and keep going on to the next one. BUT, I have learned that it is better to be a little annoyed during the process than embarrassed later.

This one has been very fun. It seems finished now, but chances are that I will see small things to correct once it is dry.

Finally, this one has orange trees that are green but the ones on the right are really wet and shiny.

This is an excellent example of how to not photograph a painting.

All three paintings show the beautiful parts of Tulare County at the prettiest time of year. When these are finished, I will begin one in the fall season. It won’t be orange or green.