Despite the encouragement to leave this painting and “don’t touch a thing” I wasn’t satisfied with it and made some adjustments to the color. I’m much happier with it now, although I wish my photo was more accurate. In real life the color is less fluorescent than it is appearing on the screen, although the actual scene in person was so brilliant it nearly was fluorescent.
Lone Tree Park, a funky little waterfront spot in the funky little town of Rodeo, CA alongside the railroad tracks. Sunday I joined Benicia Plein Air Painters there for an afternoon of plein air painting. I was determined to simplify, find big shapes, get them down on my panel with bold color, and stop. It was so much fun, made even more so by painting alongside Leslie Wilson, an inspiring watercolor painter.
Today I finished the painting at home from memory (above). I had to work from memory because the photo didn’t even come close to capturing the colors from the setting sun.
Below is the painting on site, just before I filled the white spaces I’d left between shapes to avoid smearing as I worked.
And here’s my easel set up at the park. Since we were painting in the afternoon the sun began to set and glow with wonderful hot colors the last half hour of painting.
It was good practice to finish the painting (at least I think it’s finished) but it also felt good to do what I set out to do on-site, simplifying down to big shapes and colors.
It also felt great to be out painting from real life instead of from a photo as I’ve been doing for the book. I got permission to share some of the steps in progress which I’ll do soon.
Tuesday night sketchcrawl met at Miyuki Japanese Restaurant on Solano and it was a feast for the eyes and the stomach. It took tremendous willpower to sketch and paint each morsel before eating them. I started with the miso soup, delivered with steamy wash cloths to clean our hands before dining.
They brought edamame to our table while we looked at the menu. I sketched and ate them after the delicious miso soup. We sat at the sushi bar and had fun watching the sushi chef. He seemed to enjoyed watching us sketch,e specially Cathy’s sketch of him.
Next was the maguro sushi on a wooden plank. Spectacularly fresh and delicious. Then it was time for the star of the show, the Country Roll, stuffed with perfectly crisp asparagus and covered in spicy and slightly sweet seaweed salad.
For “dessert” I ordered Unagi (grilled eel with a teriyaki-like sauce.
The waitress couldn’t quite make sense of us but since the restaurant wasn’t too crowded they didn’t mind us sitting there for two hours sketching and eating. And we left a big tip.
All of these were sketched and painted on site except for this last one, which was sketched in the dark from across the street when I first arrived. I took notes about the colors and added color when I got home. I highly recommend Miyaki. The food is always fresh and beautifully prepared, the staff friendly, efficient and helpful and the prices very reasonable. It’s spacious so there’s never a wait and it’s not too noisy. And it’s a great place to sketch on a Tuesday night!
The little known Hayward Japanese Garden is a lovely and a very peaceful place. I set up my easel inside one of the little structures sprinkled throughout the gardens as it had a good view and nice shade on a very sunny day last week. It was also a popular spot for wedding and family photos, as two different wedding parties came to take photos at this spot while we painted.
There were a number of challenges with this painting. First was the complicated scene I chose. Also painting under a roof in a shaded area looking directly at a bright scene was tricky.
I was attracted by the rhythm of the crisscrossing diagonals of the bridge, the building, the tree and the reflections. While I was pleased that I met my goal for this session: to focus on composition, I only got as far as an underpainting on site (after starting with thumbnails, value study and a fairly careful drawing). I worked on it some more today from a photo on my computer screen.
Now I see a few things I’d like to adjust (toning down the bright yellow greens, shrinking the rocks under the tree that somehow grew while I was painting, and adding some dark accents). But that will have to wait because…
Now it’s time to get to work on the first watercolor for a book commission that is due in two weeks. I’ll be making three paintings for another book about painting flowers in watercolor by my previous publisher. I love the first photo I was assigned to paint from and am excited about the project. It’s so cool getting paid to paint flowers! I’m supposed to photograph 6 stages of the painting and then ship it off to London for them to make the final photo, Then they’ll send me back the painting and the digital file.
I’m hoping I can post some of the steps here, but my guess is that since they get publishing rights, I probably can’t. Either way, first I have to get painting!
Now that it’s getting dark right after work, we’re having to find indoor spots to sketch and this week we visited another planet known as the Albany Bowl. Since it was early evening on a Tuesday night, the customers were mostly people who like to bowl while drinking pitchers of beer and eating vast quantities of fried food, rather than the gang-types known to hang out there during the later hours.
Their bar, pictured above is the cleanest smelling bar I’ve ever been in. There wasn’t the slightest scent of beer or cigarettes, just fresh air and a whiff of chlorine bleach, oddly enough. It was also nearly empty since most people were doing their drinking while they bowled. Semi-hidden in the sketch above is the bartender who I “erased” with scribbles and paint after I goofed up his nose.
Cathy and I sat in tall comfy barstools along the back wall and sketched, creating a great deal of confusion for the bartender who couldn’t figure us out, though he didn’t seem to mind when we politely said, “No thanks” when he came over to take our orders. We just kept on sketching.
We had a similar experience in their little cafe, which from the outside appeared to offer retro-diner sketching opportunities, but in fact, had very little going for it besides the stools and miles of formica. When I said we didn’t want food, just wanted to sit and draw pictures, the young waiter didn’t get it until I showed him my sketchbook. Then he said OK and left us alone. The waitress asked to see what we’d done when we were leaving, and she squealed and laughed when we showed her. I pointed out the waiter’s little beard in my sketch and he smiled.
We tried drawing the bowlers in action; I did a page of gesture sketches and then we decided we’d had enough of the noise on this planet (constant music, announcements, bleeps and bloops from video machines, people yelling) and decided it was time to go home.
I really miss being able to go outdoors for our Tuesday night sketching. While urban interiors are interesting, and drawing anywhere is fun, I miss gardens and birdsong which I much prefer to neon lights and the annoying sounds of video games.
I have a theory about the paths we take in life, and how important it is to notice what I call “Angels Holding Up Signs” along the way. Sometimes those angels take the form of a person offering helpful information or silently pointing the way by example, an intuitive thought, or an unexpected turn of events that makes you pause. When I see or hear an angel holding up a sign, whether it’s “Yield”, “STOP,” or “Go This Way” with an arrow, I consider it a gift and give it serious consideration.
Disclaimer: I’m not a New-Age angels and crystals sort of girl. But I do believe there are angels all around us; good, kind, generous people, like Adam at Kragen Auto Parts today who helped me dispose of gallons of old motor oil and their containers that had been abandoned in my garage (long story; don’t get me started!). Thanks Adam!
…And like the angels who’ve held up signs in my art life lately, including Kathryn Law and Ed Terpening who’ve both helped me to a breakthrough in my understanding about why simplifying is important in oil painting, especially when painting plein air. I’m always attracted to details, and so I’ve fought against that principle, and then fought my paints trying to put those details into my paintings.
Then I saw these paintings (below) by Ed Terpening on his blog, Life Plein Air, made during a workshop in which the instructor, Peggi Kroll-Roberts, challenged the class to break the scene into as few large shapes as possible and paint those shapes with a large, fully loaded brush in one brush stroke.
Each study evoked in me a mood and my mind created a whole life story for each of these women. A mom at the beach trying to keep her kids in line; a sad, matron, wondering where her life had gone; a glamorous, young society lady at the country club watching a tennis game while sipping a martini….
How did so much come from such simple paintings? Leaving out the details left it to my mind to fill them in. This is something I so needed to learn: that simplifying and omitting detail doesn’t make a painting boring—it lets the viewer’s mind play and be creative, making for an exciting, rewarding experience. Thanks, Ed, for holding up that signpost!
Another sign-toting angel came via email this week: a request to purchase this plein air oil painting I made last summer at Lake Temescal. There I was at the crossroads, wondering whether to give up plein air oil painting, and this angel popped up with a sign saying, “You’re on the right path, don’t turn back.”
And now about my process with today’s painting. First I tried to simplify by painting large color shapes with the plan to create a color study for a work to be done in the studio. I also focused on the composition, picking a focal point, being careful not to divide the canvas in half as I have a tendency to do, making the subject (the water) the largest portion.
Here’s how it looked when I’d covered the whole panel:
I’d worked quickly, using a palette knife, going for big shapes of color. I should have stopped there and gone for a walk. But instead I messed around for another hour and muddied up the design and the colors:
But the great thing about palette knife painting is that it’s easy to scrape off passages and repaint them. So later that evening I put the photo of Phase 1 on my computer monitor side-by-side with a photo of the scene and worked on the painting until I was satisfied with it (as posted at top).
And I’m very happy with another breakthrough: the way I was able to enjoy the plein air painting process without worrying about making a Painting with a capital P while I was out there.
For Tuesday night sketchcrawl we met at Ranch 99 Market inside the Pacific East Mall, an Asian shopping center. I spent most of my sketching time in the fish department, where shoppers can poke and prod a huge variety of whole fish, select the ones they want and hand them to the fish mongers to scale, wash, and carve them into steaks or deep fry them whole in their gigantic deep fat fryer.
I didn’t want to get in the way of shoppers (or have my fishy model sold before I could sketch it) so I moved down to the bins of fish heads to sketch. But even in the low rent department my models were being picked over and sold.
The catfish (below) had long whiskers that reminded me of Salvador Dali.
We also sat on benches inside the mall and sketched diners at some of the restaurants. That made me hungry and it was getting late so I ordered takeout from Great Szechuan and we called it a night and went home. The dish wasn’t great, made worse by being slopped into in a styrofoam clamshell container instead of a traditional Chinese takeout carton and I didn’t even get a fortune cookie!
When I brought home today’s plein air oil painting, I spent a few minutes messing with it, tried to fix it, and then just wiped it all off. Then I painted the scene in watercolor instead (above). I’m getting really frustrated with plein air oil painting and I’m starting to reconceptualize how I might approach plein air painting in the future.
I love being out in nature looking closely at it, and trying to capture it in paint. I also really like hiking in these beautiful parks. But when I paint with oils I focus on painting and then when I leave, I’m often envious of the people who hiked past me as I stood there in one spot.
My new idea is to bring my watercolors, sketchbook and my camera and spend half of the time walking and taking photos and the other half making watercolor sketches. Then I can use those studies, photos and my memory and experience of the place to either make larger watercolors or oil paintings in the studio.
I so admire people who can make beautiful oil paintings plein air. I know that there’s nothing that can compare to seeing color and light and painting it right in the midst of nature’s glory. But maybe it’s time to accept that it’s just not my forte and focus on the things that I both enjoy and can do with some modicum of success.
For last Tuesday night’s sketchcrawl, we went to Bridges Rock Gym to sketch people climbing on the rock structures and practicing “slack lining” (like tight-rope walking). When I arrived I sketched these sunflowers growing on a little garden plot besides Tin Roof Yoga, attached to the gym. The Assistant Manager, Jeffie, told me that the sunflowers were “volunteers” that sprouted up in the dirt they obtained for the plot by Annie’s Annuals.
Since I was hungry and we were sketching from the cafe on the loft’s balcony I enjoyed a plate of homemade hummos, veges and pita bread, and sketched the salt shaker while I waited for my food. The cafe was offering free samples of their homemade ginger cookies — best I’ve had! Then I tried to draw the moving targets of people climbing rocks (above).
Cathy worked quickly and did a great job capturing so much of the movement and action of the climbers and the balance of the slackline (like a tightrope only springy) walkers. Here are two of Cathy’s sketches:
If you have a chance to visit the gym, be sure to look at their amazing photobook of the gym’s owner slacklining high atop peaks in Yosemite, from tree to tree in the Berkeley hills, and several floors above a Polish shopping mall. Visiting the gym made me wish I wasn’t scared of heights — it’s such a beautiful place, with great amenities and very friendly staff. Everyone is welcomed and the night we there we saw absolute beginners, a small group of children, and some very advanced climbers with amazing muscles.
When it was time to go, I was just starting to get the hang (no pun intended) of how to approach sketching the climbers, noticing that as they climbed or balanced on the rope, the movements were in patterns that kept repeating so it was just a matter of waiting a couple seconds and they’d be back in that frog-like position, for example. I’ll come back to sketch again and to try out their yoga studio.
I wanted to try to bring to life the image in my mind from painting last weekend at Albany Bulb because I didn’t feel I’d really captured it in the oil painting I did. Since I’m going to be teaching a watercolor class starting October 17, I thought I’d give it a go in watercolor.
There are so many different approaches one can take when working in watercolor, from very slowly and precisely painting every detail, to working in many layers of transparent glazes, to loose, free and juicy washes, and everything in between. I like all approaches, and especially enjoy the meditative experience of painting each petal of a flower separately, taking weeks to finish a painting. But tonight I just wanted to go for it, working quickly and completing the painting in one session. I started at the sky and worked my way down.
For reference I used the image in my mind to Photoshop the photo I’d taken, moving things, deleting things, changing the colors to try to get it to look like I remember the day.
Perhaps the painting needs more or perhaps I should have stopped sooner? I won’t know for sure until I look at it for a few days (or until one of you kindly points out what I’ve missed!)
Meanwhile I have several posts just crying out to be written but this has been a very busy week, with day job overload and catching up on things so they will have to wait until tomorrow.
Jana Bouc, Artist 