Category: Plein Air

Categories
Landscape Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

Painting and Sneezing: Cummings Skyway Sunset

Cummings Skyway Afternoon, Oil on panel, 9x12"
Cummings Skyway Afternoon, Oil on panel, 9x12"

The hills were alive with the glow of the sunset, and also, unfortunately, millions of grassy pollen particles blowing in the wind. The sneezing started when the painting was about 3/4 finished. I’ve heard that it’s best to stop painting when you think you’re 75% done so maybe the allergy attack did me a favor. When I realized I was using more of my paper towels for blowing my nose than I was for wiping my palette knife and brushes, I realized it was time to pack up.

I’ve driven along Cummings Skyway many times en route to other painting sites and have always marveled at the amazing views from the road. I was glad when my Sunday plein air group scheduled it for a late afternoon paint-out today. The pull off on the side of the road was big enough for about 8 of us to park and paint near our cars.

In between the roar of speeding motorcycles, passing semi-trucks and the occasional family car that thought it was fun to honk at us as they passed, there was the sound of crickets and the friendly murmur of conversation from other painters. Along with the wonderful warm sun on my face (and the not so wonderful glare in my eyes from facing into the sun) there was the wind that kept me cool (and blew that darn pollen).

Here’s a photo of the scene when I arrived at 3:30. As the sun set, the shadows deepened and the tops of the ridges lit up. This was my first time painting hills at sunset and it was great fun and a good challenge. I tried to focus on composition and selected this chunk of the view from the wide panorama available.

Photo of view when I arrived
Photo of view when I arrived
Categories
Landscape Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

I Lied!

Dish soap Version 1
Dish soap Version 1

I thought it wasn’t good enough and so mucked with it some more (below) but now I wish I hadn’t. This is the theme of today’s post. Lesson learned: Leave well enough alone, or as my boss always says, “It’s good enough for jazz!”

Dish soap and sharpener
Dish soap & sharpener, watercolor 7x4"

And here is another poor retread, worked over and over.

Sibley Final Revision, 12x9" Oil on panel
Sibley Final Revision, 12x9", Oil on panel

I’m not sure whether it’s better to start a new painting or push one that isn’t working to try to make it work. I know I said the SIbley painting was finished, final revision, moving on…but I lied. I spent a couple hours trying to change the composition so that there was more of a path into the scene. That meant getting rid of the wall and while I was at it, I added a little more warmth.

I promise: now I’m really done! And you know what’s really funny? When I scrolled down and looked at all the different versions I like the very first one best!

Frustrated at wasting time and getting nowhere I tried doing a quick watercolor (above) before bed. I should have just gone to sleep since I don’t like it either. Oh well. Tomorrow (well actually today, since it’s after midnight) will hopefully be a fun plein air day.

Categories
Landscape Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

OK, Now I’m really done!

Sibley Finally Done!
Sibley Finally Done! Oil on Panel, 12x9"

I’m persistent if nothing else. Now I’m really moving on!

Update 9/15: Katherine posted a really helpful comment yesterday about the real problem with this painting, which is that putting a wall (or any “fringe” at the bottom of a painting) is generally does not make for good composition. She helped me to see that the real problem with the painting is the existence of the wall at the bottom which can’t be solved by painting or repainting the wall.

She asked whether I’d done compositional/value study thumbnails first. I did do one but should have done more than one, with and without the wall. In the original thumbnail, the front of the wall and the two trees were the darkest darks but when I painted it that way it looked wrong.

I’m so grateful for our wonderful international art group with so many brilliant artists who can I ask for help and who are so generous to share their wisdom!

Categories
Drawing Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air Sketchbook Pages Watercolor

Pardee Home Museum Tea Party

Pardee House Water Tower, ink & watercolor 8x6"
Pardee Home Museum Out-Building, Ink & watercolor 8x6"

Driving by Preservation Park in downtown Oakland today I noticed this odd little structure on the grounds of the Pardee Home Museum and pulled over to sketch. I have no idea what this little building was for, but it’s in between the carriage house and the main building.

The museum is available for tours by appointment but had the nicest “Closed” sign I’ve ever seen. It says something like, “If you find yourself on our doorstep without an appointment, try phoning our office as we may be able to assist you with a tour on short notice.”

Their office must be located in the neighboring Preservation Park collection of Victorians, now homes to non-profit organizations. The Pardee Museum offers a full house tour for $5, a “Tour and Tea” for $10 (tea and scones), and more elaborate teas, with as many as eight dishes, can be combined with tours for $25 per person.

The tour and tea sounds like fun and I’m trying to think of an excuse to schedule one. There are four parlors, four bedrooms, the billiard room, the curio room, and the hallway lined with cabinets of Mrs. Pardee’s antiquities and the cupola, or tower, to admire the views.

Categories
Art theory Landscape Oil Painting Painting Plein Air

Sibley Take Two: Better?

Sibley Take 2, Oil on Panel, 12x9"
Sibley Take 2, Oil on Panel, 12x9"

When I took a peek at yesterday’s painting this morning I was disturbed by the color of the foreground wall (“YUCK!” I said out loud when I walked in the studio). I worked on it some more and now it’s closer to how I actually saw it.  I also touched up a few things here and there.

I noticed that I’ve broken a rule of composition: avoid placing two of something, better to have three. For some reason human minds prefer three items to two: two is boring three creates interest. Also avoid two shapes of the same size because contrast is what makes the painting interesting I’ve got two trees the same size, though one is a little further back; two bushes; the wall is split in two, etc.

So what do you think? Is this better than yesterday’s version? Am I done? I’m still bothered that the road and the top of the wall are nearly the same color, but they actually were just about identical and pretty close together.

Advice always greatly appreciated!

Categories
Art theory Landscape Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

Painting in the Dark for More Colorful Paintings

Sibley Park View from Visitors Center, Oil on panel, 12x9
Sibley Volcanic Park: View from Visitors Center, Oil on panel, 12x9"

OK, it wasn’t really in the dark, but I was in deep shade and could barely tell what colors I was mixing. Yesterday I went to a non-painting event in 105 degree heat and blinding sun and came home with a migraine. I just couldn’t take another day in the sun today but wanted to join my Sunday plein air group. I set up in the shade of the visitor center at Sibley Volcanic Regional Park in Oakland where we were going meet for our group critique at 2:00.

Bicyclists and hikers stopped by all afternoon to eat lunch in the shade, get water, or use the restrooms. Two hardcore women cyclists spent their entire lunch discussing in great detail their recent fruit purchases. Another woman cyclist in full cycling gear told her cycling buddy that her ex-husband married her ex-best friend. Then she dated that woman’s ex-husband. But when her ex-husband and ex-best friend divorced, she and former best friend fell in love and recently got married thanks to California’s same sex marriage law. They rode off before I could find out if the ex-husbands fell in love with each other too.

The rest of my plein air group painted the amazing vistas along the roadside on Skyline Drive and Grizzly Peak Boulevards but they had to put up with the heat and direct sun. I was perfectly happy with this lesser vista and the lovely shade.

Painting in the dark
Painting in the dark

I discovered an interesting phenomenon. When I paint in the bright sun my colors look really nice and bright, but once out of the sun, the painting looks duller and dark. Just the opposite is true when painting in the shade. The colors look much dull and monochromatic in the shade (see above). But in the light they’re bright and colorful. That also seems to happen when I wear gray tinted sunglasses.

In the same way that squinting (reducing the light coming into your eyes) removes the color from the scene, allowing you to see values better, painting in the shade or wearing dark glasses reduces the perceived intensity or saturation of the colors you’re mixing. That in turn tricks you into mixing more brilliant, saturated colors. Or at least that’s what happened to me today. I was pleasantly surprised each time I carried my painting out into the sun to see what it really looked like.

Me enjoying the shade at Sibley
Categories
Berkeley Landscape Life in general Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

Wrong side of the tracks in Rodeo & Trash and Art

Rodeo Shore, plein air oil on panel, 9x12 in. (click image to enlarge)
Rodeo Shore, plein air oil on panel, 9x12 in. (click image to enlarge)

The little shoreline park in Rodeo where we painted Sunday is funky like the town itself, but a fun place to paint.  Click here to see some of Sue Wilson’s cool photos of the area or her little video of some of us in Da Group painting there. This beach is about 40 feet from the railroad tracks where freight trains and Amtrak trains rumble by, whistles blowing, every 20 minutes or so.  One train made me laugh: an engine pulling another two dozen engines which were all riding backwards. It looked so silly.

On the north end of the little beach there’s a broken down old pier and a couple of tin shacks. The shacks and pier are all that remains of the “resort” that a man with big dreams (but apparently little common sense) built there on a former industrial dump. In his later years he allowed a homeless encampment to flourish on his property. When he died his heirs had the vagrants evicted. To get even, they burned the resort down to the ground. The property is worth less than nothing because of the clean up needed due to the toxins under the ground.

Dumps to Cities

Most of the bayfront land in the San Francisco Bay Area is built on former dumps. A combination of ignorance, greed, and “out of sight, out of mind” thinking, led cities and businesses to dump everything from tires and batteries to whole cars; from industrial waste to ordinary garbage into the beautiful bay, eventually creating “landfill” upon which homes, hotels, parks and major freeways were built.

I remember going to the dump at the Berkeley waterfront where you drove up  (holding your nose) and dumped your trash in a pile on the ground, seagulls flying overhead. Then the bulldozers would push it into big hills. Now that dump is hidden under  Cesar Chavez Park, home of the Berkeley Kite Festival. The park has air vents to allow the methane gas to escape from the garbage dump buried underneath the grassy hills and waterfront trails. Vents won’t help buildings on landfill if there’s a big earthquake and the landfill undergoes liquefaction.

Now trash goes first to a warehouse “transfer station” where it is sorted and then piled onto trucks and hauled to a dump/landfill in another town. (And in my own bit of “out of sight, out of mind” I realized I didn’t know where it went and had to look it up). It’s trucked to Livermore, land of rolling hills and wind farms.

Dump amidst the lovely Livermore rolling hills

I’ve heard that all the Bay Area dump/landfills are all going to be full within the near future. I hope we learn to do a better job of recycling and precycling before that happens.

Trash and Art

And now to tie this digression about dumps back to art, San Francisco offers an artist in residence program at the Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center where San Francisco’s garbage goes before being trucked away. Artists get 24-hour access to a well-equipped studio, a monthly stipend, and an exhibit at the end of their residency.

Categories
Landscape Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Photos Plein Air

Tilden Park Trail: A perfect day for a hike

Tilden Trail, Oil on canvas, 9x12" (click images to enlarge)
Tilden Trail, Oil on canvas, 9x12

Last Sunday it was a perfect day for hiking in beautiful Tilden Park in the East Bay hills above Berkeley with my best friend Barbara. When we came upon this scene I had to stop and take photos to use as reference for a painting, along with my memories of how the scene felt to me.

Late that night instead of going to bed I gave myself one hour to block in the basic shapes and get the painting started:

First draft of Tilden Trail painting
First draft of Tilden Trail painting

For a variety of reasons it was a whole week before I could get back to the painting. After spending this  afternoon and evening with the painting I think it’s finished (or nearly so). I really tried not to lose the things I liked in the first “draft” and for once (I hope) I stopped before it got overworked.

This is the first oil painting I’ve done that I’ve been happy with from beginning to end. I know I still have a long way to go with learning (which is good since learning is my favorite thing), but I’m happy that all the studying and practicing I’ve done is beginning to allow me to get an image on canvas that I can see in my mind and feel in my heart, like this one.

Categories
Oil Painting Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

My neighbors’ garbage

Garbage in the Sun, 10x8", oil on panel (click image to enlarge)
Garbage in the Sun, 10x8", oil on panel (click image to enlarge)

When my neighbors saw me painting their trash cans, with my easel set up in the driveway, they didn’t even look surprised. They know I’m a nutty artist and so they just apologized for interrupting my painting to throw some bottles in the recycling bin.

The truth is, I am easily amused and can find almost anything interesting to paint or draw. Seeing these  city-issued garbage cans glowing in the sun, transformed from their usual blah colors, seemed a perfect subject for a quick oil sketch last weekend.

When I showed the painting to my painting teacher Camille, she said I’d done a good job with showing that it was a sunny day, but that I should lose the detail and focus more on the difference in value between top, side and front, to better indicate the direction of light and dimensionality of the cans. And she’s right, of course.

What’s the weirdest, oddest, or nuttiest thing you’ve drawn or painted?

Categories
Art theory Landscape Oil Painting Other Art Blogs I Read Outdoors/Landscape Painting Plein Air

Dry Wetlands: Where’s the water?

Shollenberger Wetlands, 12x9", Oil on panel (click image to enlarge)
Dry wetlands sketch, 12x9", Oil on panel (click image to enlarge)

Shollenberger Park is normally a watery paradise where you see swans, herons, egrets, pelicans, geese, turtles, frogs, lizards and the occasional harmless snake. But when I arrived there this morning with Camille Przewodek’s class, we were surprised to find cracked dry soil where the watery marsh used to be. Camille said she’d been painting there for years and had never seen it dry before. You can see many of her marsh paintings on her website here.

She set up for her demo in the hot sun, on land that used to be under water. Seeing her paint is like watching a magician, the way she creates the illusion of space, depth, atmosphere, weather, even time of day, all done with color relationships.

The smell from the dried up marsh was making me nauseous but nothing phases Camille when she’s painting. She never complains, whether it’s hot or freezing, windy or smelly; she just gets in the zone and paints. Her students know better than to whine about weather or anything else; or as one student pointed out:

“It’s called ‘PLEIN Air’ NOT ‘Complain Air’!”

About the paintings:
Both of these 1 to 2 hour plein air sketches were done at the marsh, trying to work on getting the big shapes and color relationships. I think my easel must not have been level today; the horizon seems to be slanting downhill on today’s sketch above.

Shollenberger Wetlands sketch, 12x9", oil on panel (click image to enlarge)
Shollenberger Wetlands sketch, 12x9", oil on panel (click image to enlarge)

When I got home I tried to find out what happened to the water at Shollenberger but couldn’t find anything online. I did learn some interesting things about wetlands and what a valuable and important resource they are on the Petaluma Wetlands site.

I know we’re having a drought in California, but I don’t see how such a large body of water could dry up that quickly from being full just a few weeks ago.

I hope all the birds and fish and froggies are OK.  If you know what’s going, please do tell!