It’s nice to remember those sunny summer and fall days when painting outdoors required sunscreen, not rain gear. Back in October I painted this view from the former refinery “company town” of Tormey. Now Tormey is just a couple blocks long on the edge of the Tosco Oil Refinery near Crockett. At the end of the main (only?) street is a small paddock with horses and goats. It was a fun place to paint.
I did 75% of the painting onsite and finished it in the studio from this photo:
Reference photo for Tormey, CA
Now it’s another rainy Sunday here in the San Francisco Bay Area, but after a great walk in the hills between showers, I’m happy to be in the studio working on several paintings in progress.
This oil landscape painting started as a poorly drawn, wrongly colored plein air painting which I’ve reworked many times until I am now finally ready to call it done. The painting started on a hot September day when I dragged my painting gear up a trail and set up my easel amidst dried cow pies and weeds near the Bull Valley Staging Area above the hills of Crockett. You can see my learning process below.
First, here is the washed-out reference photo I had to work from back in the studio. It’s really not even an interesting scene and doesn’t at all capture the way the hills were glowing a brilliant end of summer California gold.
Grey Day at Lake Anza, plein air (mostly) oil on Gessoboard, 10x8"
Only two of us showed up to paint at Lake Anza in Tilden Park on an almost-drizzly, grey Monday morning last month. The air smelled fresh and clean and it was so quiet there; a wonderful change from the noise of the city just a few miles away.
I painted most of this onsite, with some corrections and clean up later in the studio from the photo below.
Lake Anza reference photo
One of the corrections I made was to the little clumps of marsh grasses on the other side of the lake (barely visible in the revised painting). They had been my focal point but I realized when I got home and looked at the photo that I had made them three times bigger than they should have been.
Yesterday I was painting in Sonoma and saw the same problem when I got home: I painted some distant trees way bigger than they should be. It’s interesting to me how as I focus on one element of painting and begin to improve it (like composition, values, color, etc.), I discover another area needing work. Next time I’ll pay attention to measuring/comparing sizes of the things in the painting.
While I’m still miles of canvas away from mastering plein air painting, at least I am beginning to grasp the principles and see that while there are many important concepts to consider out there, the list isn’t endless (as it once seemed). Maybe eventually it will become more automatic like driving; I’ll still have to pay attention and keep my eyes on the “road,” but I won’t be driving over curbs, crashing into things, or totaling my car/canvas.
Sometimes painting in a pretty park with views leads to painting surrounding suburbia (or is it “urbia”?) instead of the park. The scene I wanted to paint (a picnic area between big eucalyptus trees) was occupied by teenage boys smoking pot and I decided to leave them alone. I didn’t think they’d appreciate me setting up my easel and staring at them, and they were there first.
Fairmead Park in Richmond is a little, hidden gem of a park. It is almost at the top of a hill with interesting views, the sounds of birds and squirrels, and the wonderful scent of eucalyptus. I got a good start to the painting while I was there and took some photos so I could finish it at home. I tried to focus on values, color and getting the paint down and leaving it alone and I really like the way it turned out.
Here is the photo I used, taken from the edge of the park which goes up the hill behind where I stood:
Fairmead Park photo reference
So is this Suburbia or Urbia — it’s on the edge of a very urban area in the town of San Pablo but it looks pretty suburban, doesn’t it?
Alvarado Bar and Grill, San Pablo; oil on panel, 8x10"
I recently began painting twice a week with the East Bay Landscape Painters whose members are preparing for a show of urban paintings of unexpected, nothing-special spots. For two Saturdays we painted on the unlovely corner of McBryde and San Pablo Avenue in Richmond.
I set up my easel by the air and water pumps at this gas station and set to work. I sketched out the composition and started painting the building when a huge semi truck double-parked right in front of it and began unloading produce for the market next door. My view was just about like this so I started on the empty lot next door. Half an hour later the truck left and I could finally paint the bar. I was happy with the above painting; a rare occurrence when I paint plein air.
Pupusas and Desayunos; oil on panel, 8x10"
The next Saturday afternoon we returned to the same corner. It was hot so I set up in a shady spot under this tree in front of a used car dealership and painted the Pupusas place across the street. Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez also painted the Pupuseria, except she worked on an enormous canvas (maybe 24×30″) and her painting was fantastic! She also tells a funny story here about the day and the idea behind painting nothing-special spots.
While we were having our critique in the shade of the Fish and Chips place, one of the artists who’d left her chair and easel set up across the street by the pupusas shop just happened to look over her shoulder. She saw a guy jump out the side door of a van and pick up her folding chair. She started yelling at him, ran across the street and grabbed it back before he could stick it in the van. He took off and returned to our critique.
My plein air painting group held a workshop today at the beautiful Legion of Honor in San Francisco’s Lincoln Park at which Ed Terpening demonstrated. After an hour some people set up and started their own painting but I watched the full demo so had only enough time for this quick sketch. At the critique Ed pointed out the problem with the size of the guys in the foreground compared to the cars which made me laugh.
Ed is one of those rare artists who can paint while at the same time explaining the how, and why of what they’re doing. I learned so much! I’ve enjoyed following Ed’s blog, Life Plein Air for years and it was a real pleasure to meet him in person.
Afterwards I tried to walk over to the museum to see the Impressionists in Paris show (wonderful!) but was prevented by this craziness:
There were about a hundred noisy, smoky mopeds, coming up the hill and then circling around and around, more and more of them. Finally they left and I made it across the street and directly to the museum’s café for a much-needed latte. While I sipped I sketched the view out the cafe’s french doors (except they didn’t have Ed’s name above them):
Sketch under my notes about the workshop in journal
I took notes during the demo on a page in my journal that had an unfinished sketch done with green pen which is what that green mark is under Ed’s name.
Apparently the Legion of Honor is a place people go to take wedding and Quinciaños photos (even though their ceremonies weren’t actually held there). I noticed five different groups being photographed and took my own photos of a few. Since I used a zoom lens you don’t see the tourists and museum goers that were all around them:
Wedding group #1, So formal and seriousWedding Group #2: Flower GirlsQuincianera and her court of honor getting ready for photos
The Quinciañera is a Latin American tradition for celebrating a girl’s 15th birthday. Formerly a religious celebration, it has become an obscenely expensive event that can match weddings in cost and extravagance, including ball gowns, banquets, limos, huge parties, photographers, bands and more. I wish they’d save their money for college.
After their photos they left in a huge stretch limo as long as a bus but made out of a Hummer.
What is he thinking?
Nobody looked like they were enjoying themselves much in any of the groups. Except maybe the photographers, but they were getting paid to do their art.
I don’t know what they were pumping out of the ground but the name on the truck—”Environliners”—made me think I probably wouldn’t want to know. It was a gorgeous summer day and I was determined to get outside for a few minutes at lunchtime. I spent it eating a take-out salad and sketching in Snow Park across the street from our building in Oakland.
Our office culture is to eat with co-workers in the office kitchen and get right back to work since there’s always more to do than hours in the day. We’ve even been trying to figure out how to add a new month to the calendar to fit it all in. But some days you have to forget about all that and just enjoy the moment and the all-too-rare sunshine in the Bay Area this summer.
Peet's Coffee El Cerrito and Albany Hill, ink & watercolor
Our Tuesday night sketch group is now an official Urban Sketchers group, known as Urban Sketchers SF Bay Area. If you’d like to visit our Urban Sketchers blog, you’ll get to meet my fellow Bay Area sketchers and see the different ways we interpret scenes in our sketchbooks, often from the same viewpoint.
The sketch above was done while sitting on the steps of the Pier One across from Peet’s in El Cerrito. It was the first sunny day in ages and it felt so good to enjoy a latte and some sketching in the sun. Albany Hill sticks up right behind Peet’s. It’s an odd bit of geography that resembles a very tall cupcake (sprinkled with trees instead of jimmies) in an otherwise flat landscape.
Albany Hill’s “Dynamite” History
In the late 19th century, the Judson Powder Works used the hill for the manufacture of dynamite. The company was forced to move from San Francisco and then Berkeley because of continuing accidental explosions. They planted the eucalyptus trees on the hill to catch debris and muffle the sound of their explosions. The stop on the transcontinental railroad tracks just to the west was called Nobel Station, after the inventor of dynamite.
When I arrived at Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline the sky was gray and cloudy but even in the fog the park had so many great views: a salt water lagoon, Mt. Tamalpais across the bay, a fishing pier, an abandoned ferry landing, beautiful trees, and across the road, a railroad museum and a squat yellow building that houses a motorcycle club.
Miller Knox thumbnail
I finally picked a spot and got started with the above thumbnail sketch. I set my ViewCatcher to 8×10 and looked through its “window” to choose the composition. Then I put the ViewCatcher on my sketchbook and traced around the inside of the window to outline a box in my journal of the same proportion. By the time I was ready to add watercolor to the thumbnail sketch most of the fog had lifted except over the hills, and the sun was shining.
After 2-hour plein air session, oil on panel
Above is how the painting looked when I brought it home. The composition needed work: the picture is evenly divided in half with 2 trees on left, 2 trees on right and an empty center. The lagoon and bay should have been different colors. Too bad I’d ignored my thumbnail once I started painting because it had a much better composition.
I tried to continue the painting from a photo but the photo didn’t match my memory of the colors and light, even after Photoshopping it (below). But it did at least offer some clues for fixing the composition, like adding the sailboats (duh!).
Miller/Knox Regional Shoreline photo
Maybe I should add in the little “No Swimming” sign (only putting it on the left side as I did in my thumbnail). What do you think?
Tuesday night we sketched at UC Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Campus. Built in the 1930’s as a residential school for the deaf, it now serves as home to hundreds of university students and 200 low-income seniors in a peaceful setting of mission style architecture, courtyards and sunny lawns, located just behind rowdy Fraternity Row.
Clark Kerr at Sunset, ink & watercolor
With the students gone for the summer and few of the elderly out and about, we had the place to ourselves. We met at Derby and Claremont and tried to stay in the light, moving west to follow the sun as it set. I enjoyed painting on site, trying to capture the light instead of making many drawings and adding color later as my sketching pals like to do.
Read this brief, wonderfully scandalous “get-even” taleby one of the facility’s elder low-income residents about her earlier life as a mistress to a rich, powerful man who was a member of the Bohemian Club (as was Bush). What a story and how bizarre to find it while Googling for info about the campus.
Jana Bouc, Artist 