Joint Sonoma Show in April

 I've been having painting adventures with Paul Kratter for almost 10 years. Many is the time at Sonoma Plein Air where we've occupied the opposite side of a display wall in the plaza on a Saturday to show our work, after spending a week of painting all day, meeting up for dinner, hanging out in a guest house, listening to good music, and talking about art.  Since 2005, we've been on packtrips to the Sierra every summer, spending time painting in some exotic alpine locale. Disregarding the scenery, its basically Sonoma at 10,000'. Years ago, we held a joint exhibit at the Orinda Library, and this April, we'll be having a small 2 man show at  the Walt Wines tasting room in Sonoma, just off the plaza.

 We each have our own visual predilections... I tease Paul about his penchant for barns and certain species of trees, and he gives me equal grief for painting ditches and random shrubbery. Regardless, we manage to get along, push each other to do better.... and periodically to step outside our own comfort zone. Periodically. I've been trying to get up to Sonoma on the weekends to build up some inventory for this show. Paul and I even managed to paint together a few weeks ago. Not surprisingly, in the same spot I could find a ditch, and he could find a barn. Here's a few recent paintings with notes.

Early morning in the Viansa winery parking lot, looking southwest. The light in February is so low, there are great shadowed masses almost all day long. Paul and I were driving towards town when we both started noticing interesting opportunities to paint... 

Later that day on Bonneau Road, reverting to one of my 'fascinations'... The obligatory ditch is below the frame, as the fence, foliage, and the side of the house on the right were what caught my eye. 

Painted Sunday (2/24).Thats not a barn on the left... just a wall of some sort. Mid afternoon, looking west on Old Lakeville Road. The Petaluma River is that blue streak running through the Eucalyptus.

Mid-morning, a few weeks ago, pulled off the highway on the way into town. An idyllic view, but cars were whizzing by right behind me.  The grass went from yellow to green, to blue green, as the eye moved towards the horizon. 2 Pheasants were fighting with each other in a hedge off to my left.

Something about this made me give it a shot. We'll see... More to come!

Pt. Reyes Workshop

I taught a 2 day workshop for 14 participants near Limantour Beach a few weekends ago, hosted by the Point Reyes National Seashore Association. The bulk of the class participants stayed at the Clem Miller Center, just down the road from the youth hostel, while a few stayed outside of the park, and commuted in every morning. I was prepared for a foggy overcast weekend, but was surprised to find plenty of sunshine on both days. Here's a few pictures with notes about how the weekend went.

I drove up around noon on Friday to do a little more scouting out at Pierce Pt. Ranch, as I felt we might paint up there on Sunday if there seemed to be a shortage of things to paint where we were situated. It certainly turned out to NOT be the case. I did two studies up there for future reference, one under the gaze of 2 Tule Elks seemingly crouched in the foliage a few hundred yards away. I drove back through Inverness and out towards Limantour. The image above was the underside of a windswept tree on the property of the Clem Miller center. This was around 4:30 on an overcast afternoon. One of the assistants showed up from a run while I was painting, unlocked the dining center and classroom, and we looked things over. I put up some examples of my work and made sure the projector was working, while Marishka put out a cheese plate, and I opened up some wine. Folks from the class started arriving around 5, pulling out snacks and we had a nice evening, meeting new people, and revisiting some who had taken other workshops with me.

I went out early on Saturday and scouted around the beach a bit. It was clear and sunny. There's a variety of elements and views to paint, but I picked this view of bishop pines as my first demo to give the class the sense that the 'unremarkable' sort of views can have as many interesting challenges as the iconic (and more difficult) ones from the same viewpoint.

Here I am painting my second demo of the morning from the same spot as above, but looking towards the spit and the estuary. This is a tougher view primarily for the shallow diagonals of the water in the distance. I also felt that I let the sky dictate my value range too much in the background. I should have been looking more at the tree in the foreground earlier! (don't do what I do, do what I say!) 

Back in camp for lunch and lectures, I did a few more demos in the afternoon. This is the second one, looking into a wooded hillside above the road.

Late on Saturday, some of the class went back to the beach, so I went down there with a few others a bit later. There were some crazy undulating clouds drifting over, with holes between them. I had left my easel and main box of colors in camp, as I was intending to do walk arounds, but we couldn't immediately find the others, so sat in the parking lot and went to work, chasing the light up the hill. Intense warm light slamming into a hill of dead grass can turn green objects practically into orange. Against those clouds, it was over-the-top color, but fun to try and get it in paint, as the shadow relentlessly rose upwards, squeezing orange to pink... Other folks from class appeared almost magically, some on the road, pulled over to paint, some walking down the hill, all as if drawn by the strange clouds and colors. An amazing sunset to witness. We had a potluck that evening that was an absolute feast. Artists know how to cook and eat well!

Sunday morning was foggy, which gave us a change of palette and values to explore. Here's another view towards the estuary with one pine, and a lot of grasses coming up to the foreground. One interesting thing I noticed is that this kind of light can be reproduced in a sort of 1:1 correspondence with pigment. It is not so intense as to exceed the value range of the medium of paint or pastel. In bright light we are compressing value immensely to express that brightness, but it is different on a day like this. Maybe that it is an obvious comment to many, but it was a new discovery for me, as I haven't painted in this type of light very much. 

Here I am doing that demo, and you can see the value range on the ground is close. Ok, the sky is blown out in the photo, I admit. My umbrella is up, because a mist of drizzly stuff was landing on my paper..

We painted until noon, as I made my rounds, seeking out participants on sand dunes, the main trail, and one individual way out on the edge of the marsh, whom I spotted through a pair of binoculars. We returned to camp for lunch, a final crit, and then to clean up and say our goodbyes.

I really enjoyed the group, and the location is full of things to paint. I feel we barely scratched the surface. As a result, I'll be teaching another 2 day workshop out there in the spring. Stay tuned. Thanks to Arden Johnson for allowing me to use her photos, the 2 assistants, Marishka and Janet, and my gratitude to everyone for bringing so much talent, energy (and great food) to the workshop.

Sierra Packtrip 2012

 I finished a packtrip a few weeks ago in the Ansel Adams wilderness with a great group of artist friends, Paul Kratter, Terry Miura, Michele DeBraganca, Jim Wodark, Kim Lordier, Ernesto Nemesio, and Robert Steele. Each year brings a different set of  experiences....  due to weather, place, and other circumstances, and this trip was no different. We hiked in as clouds were building up, and ended up in  a thunderstorm for the last few hours of the hike. We arrived in camp late afternoon, put up our tents in a downpour, then all crawled inside and slept for a few hours, emerging to eat dinner in the dark. We hit a pattern of afternoon rain and thunder for most of the week, so most of our productive hours took place from sunrise to mid afternoon, before we had to beat a retreat to our tents. 

The image above is a study from the first morning. All these pieces have been pinned up in my studio for a few weeks, so most have benefited from a fair amount of touchup/repair/cleanup. When I was up there, I felt pretty limited at times regarding my color choices when faced with certain lighting conditions. Backlit trees in warm morning light, and distant blue shadows in a certain value range were two recurring lighting setups. I was aware of it up there, and it was evident when I got my work home. I needed to knock down certain saturated hues, and also add more complexity and variety of color to some areas. Maybe if we had painted more at different times of day I wouldn't have felt constrained as much. I did a lot of morning paintings. Here's a few more:

I always enjoy the subtle temperature shifts of the light bouncing off of shadowed granite. Plenty of boulders were available to explore and celebrate this quality. I would just wander out of camp slowly, studying views. I usually didn't get too far. This one is about 100 yards from my tent. 

             

                          

This is part of the shoreline of a pond about a few minutes walk from camp. 6 years ago we camped near here, and I swam in this pond almost every day. This year I swam in the lake.

Mid-morning, probably around 10-11-ish... After a swim, back to work!

There was a large area towards the west end of the lake that was dotted with numerous erratics such as this one.  The recurring threat of afternoon rain kept us from moving too far afield from the shelter of our tents. Consequently, we never hiked to the beautiful upper meadow and melt pond at the base of the peak. I hope to return there another year.

 A quick sketch of the north shoulder of Mt. Banner as  clouds start boiling up around noon from the west. On a few days the clouds came from the east. 

A good example of the typical afternoon weather (cloudy and threatening to rain) vs. the 'rare' sunny evening. The large snow patch is part of Mt. Ritter, viewed over the south shoulder of Mt. Banner.

                                          

Painted on the last afternoon. I had been walking by this view all week, and finally gave it a shot. The 'wall' of the mountain in the background was in shadow from overhanging clouds. The light on the rocks was intermittent. It was the oblique angle of the cliff with the tree shooting up that kept catching my eye.

A view across the lake. The last piece I did the morning before we hiked out. 

Evolution of a Studio Piece

I've been asked periodically to show a progressive series of images on how I work. It is a lot more convenient to document one's work in the studio than it is outside, as the working pace is not constrained by the changing light. There are natural stopping points indoors... a phone call, a meal, a bathroom break, or just to step back and judge the progress, assess the overall balance, decide what's left to do, etc.

I am doing some new work for a group show of Pixar artists at the Holton Studio in early December. As gallery owners and framers deserve to be kept in the loop when the clock is ticking down towards a show, I initially shot this to apprise Tim Holton of what was coming his way (and to assure him that I was actually working on something). Anyways, I took the opportunity to document the progress of this work, as much for my own curiosity as to to satisfy anyone else's interest.
The images below were taken over a week's time, some the same afternoon or evening. This is from a pastel study I did on my last Sierra trip in August to the Little Lakes Valley on the East side of the Sierra. Some notes on my process are given below each image. I should mention that I enjoy studying the game of chess, and a great part of that pleasure stems from reading over the annotated games of players, where they record their strategic ideas, plans, hopes and fears throughout the process of a game. There is a similar process in the creation of a painting, in my mind.




Here's the starting point. I'm working large (for me). This is a 17 x 21 sheet of Canson Twilight taped onto a piece of foam core. I have my field study and a reference photo off to the right. Working in the living room on a Saturday. I'm just laying in all the big shapes. A painting is a 2 dimensional pattern of value and color relationships, regardless of the subject, so my initial marks are just to cover all those areas with a basic foundation color and value. Basic proportions are judged relative to each other. Trying to avoid jumping into any one area, and just keep moving, but you can see I want to play around in the trees against the background on the right. There's some rich color and interesting edges up there.

Clearly started on the right, and headed left. Keep in mind pattern relationships are not necessarily object based, they are simply the major visible differences in the image... masses of things, shadow shapes, etc. These shapes and relationships form the underlying structure and composition of the final image.


Continuing the journey to the left side of the image, but starting to work back into already established zones with the color I'm aiming for, pushing values and temperatures around, and refining edges. This is where a field study is invaluable, as opposed to only having a photograph. One's own color impressions and perceptions are often significantly different than what a camera is necessarily capable of recording. I usually reference my field study for the range of color, value, and my subjective impression of the experience, while the photo provides a more accurate reference for detail and placement of edges and forms.
It was fun to knock in the boulders on the lower left like a bunch dinosaur teeth. Most marks are kept pretty chunky, but I am starting to gradate color in the sky and the background peak that runs off to the right, as it moves towards the light. The upper left needs a cloud, and two layers of overlapping forms before I can justify more work in the foreground. Overall, I've probably put 90 minutes into the work, broken up into a few sessions over one afternoon and evening.


Sunday Session: It's raining out, I've got a Flemish pot roast burbling away in the other room, and the music is turned up. Olfactory and auditory sensations are good! Time to immerse. The upper left has been laid in...cloud, bg peak, and midground blue cliff all have some level of detail in the appropriate value and color range to keep it subordinate to the main contrasting zones of the image. I may make subtle adjustments and refinements to these areas, but they are pretty much done.


Monday Evening: I've got a cold, and am sneezing and dripping. You can see some evidence of that condition right at the horizon of the sky and the curving ridge above center. I've added warm light to the cloud and pushed the atmospheric light temperature on the upper right side of the image, behind the trees, and in front of the snow patch. The entire tree line has been indicated across the top of the cliff. At this point I've got the whole image up and running, and am now looking to balance and refine certain areas. At a glance, it can almost feel done, and the challenge from this point on is not to overwork it, but find a way of gracefully exiting the process after further resolving certain areas. The cliff is full of creases, crevices, and a range of differing temperatures on its faceted surface. Danger! The boulder field on the left needs to progress further, the cool talus slope below the cliff in shadow can use some more definition, as can the trees on the upper right. I again refer to my field study to see what I thought was important information when I was there, as the photo reference shows 'everything' in excruciating detail, and a far blander color scheme to boot. The lower right quadrant of the image has a level of loose handling, and luminous color relationships that I'm happy with, so I use that as a guide towards resolving the rest of the image.



About an hour later I've reached this point, and am feeling good enough to send a picture of it to the gallery. There's still more to go, but it is a careful dance of leaving out detail you know is there, but may not necessarily improve the image, or throw it out of balance. I've touched the meadow, the talus, the trees and the cliff, moving and adding color, levels of detail, and form description. Still need to remove the sneeze spots...



The High Country
16 x 20
Pastel on Canson Paper

My real job kept me busy the rest of the week, so I wrapped this up the following Saturday morning, working the lower left boulder field, the more distant cliff slope behind it, and readjusting color temperatures and contrast on the central cliff. I think I missed a bit of the earlier more luminous trees up top, but I at least managed to quit at this point.

Talk tonight at the Studio Gallery....Go Giants!

I'm slated to give a talk tonight at 7 pm at the Studio Gallery in San Francisco during a heck of a pennant series. I expect I'll be hearing the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd from the corner bar down the street from the gallery, and hopefully there will be a few others in the gallery besides me to hear it as well. ;-)

I recall my first solo show at the gallery last year opened right around, if not on, the income tax filing deadline. We were a bit concerned over the prospect of having an exhibit in a month where folks may have just written 2 big checks to the government, but things worked out fine. May tonight have such a rosy outcome.

For those that won't be attending my talk because they want to watch a penultimate game, (and you know who you are) all is forgiven! But If you happen to be in the corner bar watching the game, feel free to run down the street to the gallery during the commercials, for brief tidbits of art wisdom between innings.

Hey, some of my best artist friends are major Giants fans.. A love of sports and art are not mutually exclusive, he opined, deftly sequeing into his closing remarks. For those that want to read a hilarious article on the potentially vast gulf between die hard sports fans and sensitive 'arty' types, I point you to George Plimpton's Marianne Moore in Yankee Stadium in his wonderful book George Plimpton on Sports.
Go Giants!

Upcoming Art Show(s)

I have 2 shows coming up, and one of them is just around the corner. I'll be exhibiting at the Studio Gallery in San Francisco, from Oct. 13th-Nov. 7th. The reception will be this Saturday, the 16th, from 2- 6. There are 41 paintings focussed in three areas, the Sierra, the Grand Canyon, and local views and foliage studies. I've done 4 studio pieces for this show, and the rest were all done on location. An online catalog of the entire show is available here. Selecting 'view slideshow' allows you to see all the images without having to click on each one. Meanwhile, here's a few of the pieces that are in the Studio Gallery show with notes.

Black Butte Aspens I

Black Butte Aspens II
I spend a week in Oregon every year at a family reunion/vacation at Black Butte Ranch. It is one of the places I first started using pastels outdoors in the mid-90's. There is an enormous meadow in the middle of the property with a bicycle path running across it, bordered on the south side by small aspen groves. I have been whizzing by them on my bike for over 15 years, but this year I stopped, and spent 3 quiet afternoons working in this dappled space with flickering circular aspen leaves and pale trunks exhibiting beautiful colors. I'll probably be sitting here next summer as well.



Emerald Afternoon
This is a studio piece from a packtrip to Pear Lake in Sequoia National Park in 2009. I had already stopped at one lake to paint, and walked off the trail to look at this one, but wanted to keep moving. This small lake had several great rock falls, cliffs and beautiful green depths of water.

Granite Shoreline
This was from a non-mule, weekend packtrip out of Tuolomne Meadows to the Ten Lakes Basin. I brought with me a very small
set of pastels, and did several studies while I was there. This one was a good candidate for a studio piece, due to the level of complexity in the smaller forms. You can see the field study for it in this post.

Grand Illumination
I have ten pieces in the show from a Grand Canyon trip I made in 2008. I hope to return there and paint some more.
It really is an overwhelming experience for an artist to be immersed in a world of such complexity, scale, and the strength of reflected light and color into shadows. Combine that with 100+ degree heat, 48° river temperature, thundering rapids, and all your senses are fully loaded. I could only paint when the rafts were pulled over, and we were on the water from about 8 am to 5, so we motored past an extraordinary number of views I desperately wished I could paint. This image is a typical example of me gawking at a massive display of reflected light into a shadow as it casually drifted by one morning never to be seen again. That's where the studio comes in.

In Deep

Even in the confines of the canyon, one could periodically see a fair distance, and when the light got low enough, quite a bit of atmosphere was visible. The river would make a turn, and suddenly you were looking down a long corridor towards the light with large shadowed portals on either side. You were always in motion on the water, so the scale was dynamic in nature, as a slow parallax effect told you how 'big' the world really was.

I'll also be participating in a group show of Pixar artists that opens in early December at the Holton Studio in Emeryville. Tim Holton handcrafts beautiful hardwood frames, and also maintains a gallery space. The other artists are Ernesto Nemesio, Dice Tsutsumi, and Sharon Calahan. I am excited to see what everyone is doing, as we've all been busy at work on different projects, and I haven't been out painting with any of them in quite awhile. I'll post more details on this show when I finish the pieces, and the opening date is firmed up.

I hope to see some of you at the reception this next Saturday, the 16th at the Studio Gallery.

Pt. Reyes

The California Art Club hosted a gathering of artists at Pt. Reyes last weekend. A large group stayed at the hostel near Limantour Beach. The weather was warm and clear, with some great semi-foggy morning light to work in. All images are pastel on Canson paper. More notes to come.

Recent Work

Ediza Shore
10.5 x 10"
Pastel on Canson Paper

Here's one of the pieces I've been working on for the Studio Gallery show in April. I've flown over Lake Ediza in the winter and it is covered in ice. Funny to think of it in late summer, glowing luminous green in the morning. This was the view below my tent, where I would paint in the early part of the day.

Painting in the Sierras

This year marks the 4th year of an annual Sierra backpacking/painting trip that I have put together with the help of artist and friend Paul Kratter. The basic goal is to be high in the mountains with the freedom to focus on painting, in the company of other artists. Towards that end we hire a pack station that provides mules to haul our gear up, and a cook to keep us well fed. It is not by any means 'roughing it.' One just has to be fit enough to hike about 8 miles at altitude to get to the spot, willing to sleep in a tent, put up with the occasional bear, and deal with the possibility of daily thundershowers. This year we had clear skies and a few bear visits, but Penny, our excellent cook, has a dog, "Nowena", who did a great job of driving them out of our camp.

Our destination this year was Lake Ediza, on the East side of the Sierras in the Ansel Adams wilderness. We hiked in from the Agnew Meadows trailhead, at a packstation run by Reds Meadow. 9 painters and one photographer made the trip this year: Sharon Calahan, Kevin Courter , Tim Horn, Greg LaRock, Paul Kratter, Kim Lordier, Clark Mitchell , Terry Miura, and Bob Watters were the folks.

For other reports on the trip, check out the 'Studio Notes' on Terry's website, and Sharon's blog.

Our camp was on the North side of the lake, on a slight bluff, so we had good views across the water into the granite slopes and boulders, as well as the towering Minaret peaks to the Southwest. I painted a few studies almost every morning, using my tent as shade from the rising sun.





The color range of the light throughout the day provoked a discussion amongst us about the cool nature of the midday light. From about 10-4, the brightest light on surfaces appeared a light shade of blue, lemon yellow, or even a light green to my eyes. Only in the mornings and late afternoon did the light have a characteristic warmth with accompanying blue shadows. Was it the intense blue of the sky coloring the same surfaces as the sun? Was it an increase in the blue end of the spectrum towards ultraviolet that high altitude exposes one too? I am curious to know the cause.

A few days into our trip, a group of us hiked up another 500 ft. to Iceberg Lake, which sits at the end of a long, narrow meadow at the foot of the Minarets. In 2005, Paul and Bob hiked to this lake and observed small icebergs floating in the water, broken off from a large snow patch across the lake. This year, the snow had retreated, and the lake was berg free. The feature that struck me most was the extraordinary range of turquoise and blue in the water, along with it's great clarity. I spent 2 days up there painting.



Iceberg 1
Pastel on Canson Paper
I was geeking out on the color of the water at the outlet of the lake, about to commit to painting there when Paul convinced me to walk a bit further, where a large boulder sat, surrounded by the same range of colors. I immediately set up and went to work. Within minutes, a hiker walked past us, marched out to the rock and climbed upon it. After awhile she started doing yoga-like poses and stretches in full view of us painters, perhaps hoping we would include her in our work. No dice!

The cool nature of the midday light is evident in this painting. The color range and transparency of the water was a big hook for me. It was fun to decode the relationships of form and color in the depths. There were numerous views of water with interesting rock forms at this location. I hope to do a few studio pieces based on the pictures and studies I did.



Iceberg 2
Pastel on Canson Paper
This is a late afternoon view across the right side of the lake. The slopes were very steep, littered with boulders and carpeted with vegetation ranging from a bright green to an orange/ochre color. The verticality of the trees really showed how steep the angle of the slopes were. The light is clearly warming up again.



Iceberg 3
Pastel on Canson Paper
Another water view with a rock 'foil', painted the next day, during the 'blue' hours. Ironically, I spent most of my time painting, and re-painting, the rocks and vegetation, which were giving me the fits. It was a relief to finally get into the water and submerged rocks, and not be so confined by specific, contrasting forms.



Iceberg 4
Pastel on Canson Paper
Late afternoon across the lake with a pronounced atmosphere and glare towards the sun.



The Blue Egg
Pastel on Canson Paper
This is a small, white boulder nestled under a massive, dark-toned boulder, which reminded me of a large goose egg my daughter, Julia, once found on a shady creek bottom many years ago. I had seen this view on the first hike up to Iceberg, and started talking about it to my companions, and finally made it back to paint it on the 5th day of the trip.



Above Ediza
Pastel on Canson Paper
This is a typical mix of fractured granite forms and grasses one could find in almost any hike out of camp. Painted in the late afternoon, looking into a shadowed wall over a mile beyond the foreground. The light values of the granite allowed brilliant colors to reflect and fill into the shadows



Ediza Shore
Pastel on Canson Paper
My last piece before the hike out. Kim Lordier and I had been puzzling over how best to indicate the numerous rock cracks and fissures one found everywhere, and this painting gave me some clues.

On our last evening in camp, we held an exhibit, placing our work, weighted down by rocks, all across a curving granite bluff. Then we walked all around, discussing each other's work. It was surprising and delightful to see the diverse choices, as well as similar views painted by different artists. Get thee to the mountains and paint! It's inspiring and a load of fun.