Happy Birthday, Diana Banana!! Since I have about 32 oil paintings of Farewell Gap with the Crowley family cabin in Mineral King, let’s keep going. You can evaluate my progress (or lack thereof). I painted it often in 2012. The Roman numeral numbering system isn’t consistent here. Sometimes I called a small version simply “Mineral […]
Layer After Layer After Layer
That’s how I paint – layer after layer after layer. The Artspeak word for that is “glazing”, but I prefer English. Layer one – Should have begun with the sky, but I asked my boss and she said, “Do whatever you want, if you think you’re so smart!” I didn’t want to mix up sky […]
Fruits, Nuts and Flakes
A friend said he disagrees with the idea that California is land of fruits and nuts. He said it is more like a bowl of granola: fruits, nuts and flakes. I wonder why there is a correlation between flakes and artists. Artists have often been called flaky, and I work very diligently to blast that […]
Payback to Mean Art Teachers
When I begin a new painting, it is ugly. Messy. Rough. Weird. Those are discouraging words, here at my home on the range. However, after oil painting for more than 10 years, I’ve come to accept that the start to an oil painting is ugly. Gotta start somewhere! My method of layering, called “glazing” (are your eyes […]
More About Fruit and Nuts
I paint a lot of fruit. I don’t paint very many nuts. I drew walnuts a few years ago (feels like 5 years, probably is 10). Wow. That’s pretty good, if I do say so myself! And I do. I LOVE to draw. However, drawings need frames, and oil paintings sell better than pencil. Sometimes […]
Fruit and No Nuts (or It’s Good To Be The Boss)
Happy Birthday, Judy-O!! Have you heard California referred to as “the land of fruit and nuts”? If you take the statement figuratively, it is referring to people in the state. If you take the statement literally, it is referring to the vast amount of food produced here in Central California. As a Central California artist, […]
Second Most Popular Mineral King Painting
The second most popular scene I do as a Mineral King painting or drawing is the Honeymoon Cabin. This is the one remaining cabin from the resort days in Mineral King. The resort was owned by Ray and Gem Buckman, and they sold to Disney, thinking that the ski resort was an inevitable next step […]
Painting on a Bungee Cord
No, my painting isn’t suspended from a bridge. It just returned to me for a minor detail. Mrs. Customer asked if I would put the tiny white lines in the windows because her husband wanted them there. I sighed, and said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice!” Then I told her to smack her […]
Half-Solved Mystery
Last year I did a little oil painting of a backcountry scene whose location was a mystery. I didn’t know who lent me the photo, and I didn’t know where the scene was. Since last September, I have been working with Louise Jackson on her upcoming book, Trail of Promises. I edited about 200 photos, […]
More New Mineral King Paintings
But wait! There’s More! Why does that always elicit a smile or a chuckle? Because it is obnoxiously obnoxious. Here are the other paintings I finished last week. It was very hot in Three Rivers, so they dried quickly outdoors, and I was able to scan them without getting paint on the scanner. It is […]