Last year I planted Early Girl tomatoes and Best Boy tomatoes. They must have gotten together and had some fun over the winter because they’ve returned bearing fruit this summer all on their own.
I was ready to paint something other than that stupid scene at Sibley. Rummaging around in the kitchen a tomato caught my eye and then when I reached into the stack of colored cloths I keep for still lifes (or is it still lives?) in an overhead cabinet, I came away with a blue-violet piece of velvet (actually it’s a small velvet bag).
It was fun working with such saturated vibrant colors but now I have to clean brushes and let go of painting for a few days while I return to my “day job.” Although I often feel grumpy at having to make that switch, today I’m feeling very grateful for a good job and my comfy home and studio, given all the terrible news of financial ruin and weather-caused devastation I’ve heard today. I haven’t been watching any TV for the past month, which has been great, but today I took a look at the news while I ate dinner and was so sad to see all the suffering.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
I was invited to participate in a two-person show for the month of September and the reception is Friday night September 12, from 7:00 to 9:00 P.M. I love the paintings of the other artist, Lin Salamo. The opening coincides with the festive monthly “art walk” called the Stockton Stroll (the gallery is on Stockton Avenue) but the show is up for the rest of the month.
If you’re in the neighborhood stop by for a sip of wine and say Hi!
Paintings by Jana Bouc and Lin Salamo
Fingado Art Gallery
El Cerrito Landscapes ~ September 4-27, 2008
Watercolors by Jana Bouc and
Acrylic paintings by Lin Salamo
RECEPTION
DATE: Friday, September 12, 2008
TIME: 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
LOCATION: 7025 Stockton Ave., El Cerrito, CA 94530
I didn’t plant tomatoes this year, but oddly, last year’s plants came back on their own. This critter was the first one to ripen and it was so gnarly looking I had to paint it. I wonder why it turned up with this shape? Could it be 3 or 4 tomatoes that grew together like Siamese twins? Or did the tomato frame that supports the vines dent it?
I started by doing a couple watercolor sketches to get an understanding of the shape. Then I made a gallant start on the oil sketch, getting it almost done but then fiddling with it until I had to scrape it all off, repainting and then fiddling some more. I must have scraped and fiddled and scraped 10 times. I called it done at midnight and went to bed.
Tonight after work I gave it another shot, and am happier with this version (painted on top of the first). I can see that I wasn’t using enough paint the first time around. There are so many other colors than red in a tomato and mixing the right color for the right spot is surprisingly challenging.
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.
Feeling frustrated from failing to form a faithful facsimile of a silly spud I sought some solutions. (I’ve always loved alliteration.) Displayed below in reverse order (last version first) are my efforts in trying to understand the shape of one homely sweet potato (and a can of beans).
Sweet Spud #4 , Oil on panel, 6x8" (after watercolor study and sketch below)Sweet Spud #3, watercolor on Arches cold pressed paper, 6x8"Sweet potato #2 (Pencil sketch to try to understand planes and volume), 6x8"Sweet Spud #1, (First oil painting before doing the studies) 6x8"
I think I like the watercolor best, what about you?
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
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.
Jana Bouc, Artist 