I found these taking a walk (I was walking, not these thingees) which I thought might be called Wood Roses…but I looked it up and learned that Woodrose is “a parasitic plant endemic to New Zealand.” Since these fell from a pine tree in Berkeley, they’re definitely not woodrose, but they do look like Wood Roses!
It wasn’t an easy weekend in L.A. visiting family but sketching really helped me to avoid going completely bonkers. There were some lovely moments: walking on the beach in the misty morning with my sister Marcy, taking a tour with Mom and Marce of an historic house (now a museum) in Santa Monica where a huge retrospective of Milford Zorne‘s amazing paintings were on display (more about that in another post).
My 85 year old mother doesn’t cook much anymore, but she got inspired to make Pracas (sweet and sour meatballs in cabbage). But despite not having some of the ingredients or being able to see the recipe in the cookbook well enough to follow it, and despite the jar of ancient fossilized onion flakes she substituted for the actual onion in the recipe (demanding that I use a sharp knife to break the clump up so it could be extracted from the jar), and the house stinking like cabbage all afternoon, dinner wasn’t that bad, really.
It’s amazing how sketching can calm my nerves and put the whole dysfunctional family thing at a distance while still being physically present.
It’s really good to be back home.
My sister and the sunrise at oakland airport. Be back soon.
This was so pleasurable to paint. I experimented with doing an underpainting in acrylic first to put in the darks without having to wait for paint to dry. Then I tried to focus on values and color temperature, but I think I got sidetracked by all the interesting shapes of light, color, reflections and hazy surfaces (they were organic persimmons and some of the skin had a kind of filminess like blueberries have).
I’m also working on trying to see and mix just the right color of paint, and apply strokes once (instead of guessing, putting paint down, scraping it off, trying again). Last night when I realized I’d been painting for an hour with dirty brushes and not mixing specific colors but just using random paint left on the palette I dragged myself away from the easel and went to bed, finishing the painting this afternoon.
I’m pretty happy with this one but would like to try again getting closer with color temperature changes and stronger values. Below are the steps I took along the way, including a change in composition. Although I liked the rich dark in the corner, it was drawing too much attention to itself.
If you click on one thumbnail you’ll be taken to a big picture with another thumbnail to click to go to the next.
Shirley (Paper and Threads) was visiting San Francisco this week and Martha (Trumpetvine) and I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon sketching with her in the park. Poor St. Patrick’s Catholic Church isn’t really falling over despite the many earthquakes it has weathered over the years. It’s just my usual wonky drawing. Martha and Shirley will post their drawings on their own blogs eventually but here is a snapshot of our work lined up together.
And here we are lined up, with me a head taller and trying to take a photo and holding my iPhone at arm’s length.
We were joined virtually on our little art blogger sketchcrawl by phone from Lisa in Texas and via Facebook (where I posted an update and photo while we were sketching) by Marta (MARTa’s Art) and EJ (Rose-Anglais) .
After sitting on cold concrete steps to sketch we were ready to warm up. We walked back to Shirley’s hotel, and she treated us to a glass of wine on the 39th floor of the Mariott Hotel (also known as the “Jukebox” building because of its unique architecture). Here’s the view from the bar just before sunset.
It was such a treat to spend a Friday afternoon with these two very talented and beautiful women. After the sun set in golds and pinks, and the lights of the city came on, I had to leave while they went off in search of dinner. I BARTed to Oakland for the monthly Friday night “Art Murmur” gallery walk where my sister and niece had pieces in a show. Walking from BART I passed the grand old Paramount Theatre and set my camera to “burst” mode so I could capture the changing lights of the neon marquis.
If you want to sketch people while hearing amusing stories, try spending the morning in traffic court as I did today. Hoping to plead for a reduced fine on my $425 ticket (crazy story here) I arrived early to find a line of about 40 people ahead of me waiting for the doors to the building to open at 8:00.
Finally we snaked in and through the metal detector. Unfortunately I’d forgotten that my trusty Swiss army knife was in my bag, along with a camera. After a thorough search of my bag, I was detoured back to my car to put away the contraband, then back to stand in line and back through the metal detector. Next I stood in line to check in at Room 105.
Then it was off to the courtroom to wait my turn. First the dozen people who had actual court dates (because they’d pled Not Guilty previously) and the cops who’d cited them told their stories. Despite convoluted explanations, pleas for reduced fines, photographic evidence and various witnesses, the judge found them all guilty and made them pay their full fines, only offering extended payment options.
An hour later we were shown a video describing our rights while the Spanish speakers were called to another section of the room and were given the same information by an interpreter.
It began to sink in that I’d be there for several more hours and that the judge was not going to reduce my fee. During a break in the proceedings, I decided I’d had enough fun sketching and returned to Room 105 to accept my punishment, pay the ticket and sign up for traffic school (another $35).
While it totally sucks to have to pay nearly $500 in hard-earned money AND spend hours doing traffic school, there are some positives to be grateful for:
The Point San Pablo Yacht Harbor is hilariously misnamed. It should be called “Junkyard by the Bay” because of all the derelict boats and boat trash; abandoned equipment including cranes, caterpillars, vats and tanks; motorcycles and detritus of all kinds.
Just beyond the abandoned junk and falling-down-yacht club-buildings there is a thriving houseboat community. Despite the beauty of the bay itself, I can’t imagine having to drive the windy, rutted, potholed road out to the harbor through an abandoned military base and then walk out the pier and down the wharf to get to a houseboat in the dark, especially in the rain and wind so far from everything.
Just before the turnoff to the road to the harbor I’d spotted this amazing view of the Brothers (two islands in the bay; East Brother has a lighthouse that has been converted to a bed and breakfast). So after exploring the harbor/junkyard area and saying hi to my fellow painters, I drove the rotten road back to the little cove where I could see the island and painted there the rest of the afternoon.
After all my whining about plein air painting, I had a wonderful time and managed to turn off the judgmental voice and just painted. The weather and light was absolutely amazing—warm, a gentle breeze, and except for smog, perfectly clear without a drop of fog to hinder the glow of the approaching sunset.
Another bonus effect of getting off caffeine—I was painting miles from the nearest restroom and even though I had my wonderful Whiz (stand-up-to-pee device) with me, I didn’t need it.
Another success: when I got home I didn’t touch the painting, just let it be a plein air painting: not perfect, not a finished work, but a record of a beautiful day. Yay!
Here’s a little gallery of pictures from the day:
This is what I look like far too often these days as I’ve gradually been reducing my caffeine intake. I’m down to one cup of 25% caf & 75% decaf in the morning and then nothing but decaf after that.
My painting ritual had been to make a cup of coffee before heading into the studio and bringing an entire vacuum pot of the stuff when I went out plein air painting. The extra energy from caffeine not only kept me painting when I should have been sleeping, but it also fueled my late night blog visiting and email answering.
It was fun having that artificial boost, but burning the candle at both ends was doing bad things to my health. While I miss the energy, I am sleeping at night now and waking up feeling alive and ready to go instead of feeling like my head is full of mashed potatoes.
It reminds me of something Maya Angelou said her grandmother told her:
“You don’t always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.”
Yes I was squeezing extra hours out of the day but I was paying for them with being constantly sleep-deprived.
I asked a friend who doesn’t use caffeine what you’re supposed to do when you’re tired if you can’t drink coffee, thinking she’d have some other trick for keeping going. She looked at me perplexed at what seemed like a silly question.
“You rest!” she said. What a novel concept!
I arrived late and lazy (due to my efforts to decaffeinate myself) for our paint out at Martinez Waterfront Park today and decided to sketch in ink and watercolor instead of setting up my easel and oil paints. It’s a great park, with a marina full of boats on the bay, fields, trees, ponds, an historic train station and old train (pictured above), a nearby river and marshlands and much more. It’s right on the edge of the older part of town and the Amtrak train station is just outside the entrance to the park.
I sat on a very hard stone bench at the old train station about 20 feet from the tracks. On the sketch above, I drew without much of a plan, just picking things I saw that interested me and sticking them somewhere on the page, drawing in ink and hoping it would all fit together somehow. I added the watercolor on site.
The two artists in the sketch were standing between the west and east Amtrak tracks. Every 15 minutes a train would roar by about 2 feet of where they were standing, sounding it’s horn so loudly it was painful, but they stood their ground like the dedicated plein air painters that they are.
I turneda bit to the left at the end of the day and quickly sketched this wonky old Hot Dog Depot (named because it’s adjacent to the train depot. The perspective is all wonky but so was the building. It has a weird corner section where that second smaller window is. So the building isn’t a rectangle, it’s a pentagon (5-sided). I didn’t have time to worry about perspective as the group was convening for a critique and I had to hurry to finish this at all.
I thought that these apricot pits and this avocado pit, still in a bit of it’s outer papery sheath would be a good subject for using my set of Kremer Pigments’ pan watercolors. The Kremer watercolors are unusual in that they’re so highly pigmented, mostly opaque and mostly sedimentary. They are quite stable when applied: the colors don’t charge or bleed much into each other, unlike the more volatile quinacridone and other synthetic pigments.
But I found that those qualities make them less suitable for glazing because their opacity and and saturation mean that one layer hides the one beneath it. Half of the colors in my 14-color palette are muted shades of red, brown, gold, green; a few are more brilliant, but so richly colored that they have to be thinned way down to appear transparent.
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not as familiar with how these colors work together as I am my regular palette of mostly Winsor Newton tube watercolors. It takes practice to have control over one’s media and I felt pretty out of control with these but enjoyed playing with them. I’ll try them again for the next summer leftovers.
Jana Bouc, Artist 