Nocturne...Night Trail

A couple of days ago I had to spend a couple of days at my parents home in Pasadena, California. I took my plein air rig but didn't have time to go out to paint so I decided to just work on a nocturne study and to practice up on a dark scene with highlighted foreground. On the drive down I was thinking of looking for a scene with a large foreground tree up at Eaton Canyon but they lock the gate at night. There is a trail leading down into the canyon but I needed to spend some time with my folks so I just painted in the backyard and will leave the Eaton Canyon idea for another trip....I painted the scene I had in my head so all is good. A night trail in a nocturne is a favorite subject of mine so I added that too next to the tree. I've been looking at trees at night and when there is no moon the edges of the trees are super blurry. I added a moon here so my edges are a bit harder and more defined.

At the recent nocturne show I went to I saw some paintings that were so dark it was almost impossible to make out what the subject was. I might try one of those some day. That's going dark! One big problem with the nocturnes we saw was the glossy varnish had you break dancing to see parts without all of the shine. Add museum lighting and it made the problem worse. I'm not crazy about matte varnish so I'm still trying to figure out what to do about that problem. Here are some details of this one....

Gold To Black - Frames

I received and Honorable Mention for one of my nocturnes down at the Carpinteria show. At the reception I met the judge, Thomas Van Stein, a nocturne painter himself from Santa Barbara. I like airplanes and he restores them so we had a nice chat. He will give a gallery talk in November on the show that I'm going to try and get down for. Van Stein is also going to do a 2 night workshop doing nocturnes in Los Olivos in late November that I'd love to take but I really cannot afford it. This is one of those deals where a year from now I'll be kicking myself in the butt for not being able to do it....don't ya just love life at times!

Before...orangy gold

Stain applied and ready to be wiped down

I bought a bunch of gold plein air frames a while back but was never crazy about the tone of the gold on them...kind of orange/gold. Some of the paintings did not look their best in them so I decided to just get some stain, paint and sealer and redo them in a distressed black leaving a small gold band near the opening. They came out pretty good and make the paintings look 500 % better. Putting the stain on and rubbing it off to give the distressed look gets a little messy but overall it was pretty easy to do this whole operation and saved me a ton of money by having to buy new black frames.

After...all finished up

A Large Tree!

I needed a large painting to go over our fireplace for an upcoming Artist Studio Tour. I decided on an image and then made the frame and stretched the canvas. This is a large 36" X 60" gallery wrapped canvas. To date, this is my largest painting. Large paintings come with a whole other set of problems to deal with. The biggest problem is trying to paint the image in your head to the much larger scale. I used a reference pic to work from but you have to translate all of that to such a large scale...think bigger, paint with much broader brush strokes...use larger brushes...sounds like it is no biggie but when you are used to painting smaller works going larger is way more work!

Here is the beginning of the whole process.

Here is the final painting....

To see how it would look on the wall I went ahead and snapped a pic of our fireplace and then added my ref image to it in Photoshop. Looked pretty cool so I grabbed the brushes and painted away. Below, you can see the photoshop image and final painting on the right. In the finished painting on the right the bottom and very top are washed out due to my excellent photography skills! Those areas are actually darker and resemble the reference photo on the left. Anyway, it was a good project and will work very well for the show in November.

Carpinteria Show

Carpinteria, California....this is a cool town to have an art show at. The artist community down there is one of the best group of people I have ever worked with. They are a close happy group with a love of being from a special small town...one of those beachside towns that has kept it's small town look and feel....not an easy thing to do for most towns that "once were" on Californias coast. If Santa Barbara had hung on to what Carpinteria had that would be a great place to hang out. Parking in SB is worse than any part of Los Angeles and I have been all over the LA basin and all of the outlying cities.
Anyway....I have a painting in this show and the reception is tomorrow, Saturday 27, 2008. It is from 5-7 PM so if you are in the area drop on by. It's on 855 Linden Ave, south of the 101 freeway.

Atmosphere, Wind and Shadows

***855 at the Arts Gallery***

Sep 27 - Nov 10 2008

Tel - 805-684-7789

A Summers Day

An 8"x10" frame is usually very inexpensive which was the sole purpose of doing this painting at this size.....well, that and I don't usually do that size very much. I'm not crazy about those dimensions for landscapes and it is very limiting in how much canvas you have to actually paint on. The one good thing about an 8"x10" is it makes you really think in the planning stages. It also is fun to see how much of a scene you can squeeze into it. I went vertical with this one just wanting to do a tree and once again practise grasses.

This painting was done strictly from imagination. I suppose these scenes can be monotonous but I think if you want to get good at them you need to do them a lot. I've noticed some of the works of California painters, namely Grandville Redmond, and their backgrounds seem to have as much work in detail as the foregrounds. I tend to "diffuse" my backgrounds leaving the detail for the foreground. I think I'm going to begin to work more on the backgrounds with added detail but paying attention to aerial perspective. This should start happening in work to come.

Night Tree

This image was inspired after I saw a small detail from another nocturne I painted a few days ago. The detail image looked very much like it's own painting so I decided to go larger with just that detail as my reference. This experiments with a dark sky and low light below the tree. Nocturnes are done on so many light levels so it is fun to experiment with that aspect of a nocturne. The light adjusts the colors and shadows and you could really paint the same scene a dozen times and no two would look the same. If I painted this scene plein air I could move my easel 5 or 10 feet to either side and have very different paintings due to the dark shadows.

"Night Tree"

12" X 16"
There is a slight bluish glow right above the trees that my camera picked up but you can hardly see that at all in the original painting....the sky just looks very dark there. Here is a detail of the same painting. This is the foreground grass area which I think came out great...a little grass and a little dirt.

More foreground grass and some of that low light foliage work. Pushing the dark shadows on this one was too fun. Hoping to get better at it....to the next painting!

Summer Meadow Nocturne

" Summer Meadow Nocturne"

9" X 12"

Being on the nocturne craze lately I did this one last night in record time, (for me), about 2 hours tops. All I wanted to do was do another nocturne with a lighter sky and that's how it all happened. Not much planning at all. The nocturnes I'm doing all teach me things and they really are experiments on variations not so much being painted to be paintings at all....makes sense??? I did this one for varying the sky colors....the one below was done to splash light in a nocturne....the next one was to go with a darker sky and throw shadow/contrast more. These are all lessons self taught to me by just painting them and seeing how it goes. In the least it is damned fun!

Nocturne...A Splash of Light

"Santa Ynez Nocturne"

9" X 12"

This nocturne was painted for the purpose of 1) having fun with another, and 2) wanting to practise adding a splash of highlight in the otherwise usual dark nocturne. Well, I guess it makes sense...you must first learn to paint the night and then comes the part of starting to have fun with it. Adding visual interests...spicing it up...making it pop...adjusting the mood or light. Soon I'll start to play more with color in the sky.

a detail....

I am starting to do grasses better I think. Grasses are funny, my best grasses seem to be when I am almost just throwing the paint on there with a knive stroking vertically. After that I just sweep up in short strokes with a fan....scumble in some dirt patches again with a knife. It seems the more haphazard I do them the better they look. If I approach them with some sort of planned pattern or concerted effort they suck and in the end I go back to my "could care less" sort of method and BAM! Good looking grass. I've seen some artists who do grasses so lifelike it is amazing! I'd love to learn that method but it looks like it is done in that preplanned method and feels like a ton of dissapointment coming on, hahaha. I'll stick with my careless method for now. It has a more impressionist and painterly feel to it anyway.

Morning in Green and Gold

"Morning in Green and Gold"

16" X 20" Oil on canvas

The season is going to change and the trees are starting to show it. This large sycamore is close to where I live and shows some of the leaves just starting to turn brown. I love the trunks on these sycamores. Sometimes white, blue, pink, brown, and a huge assortment of greys. They are dusty and have bark flaking off at times...awesome textures too. I could probably paint oaks, sycamores and eucalyptus trees for the rest of my life and never tire of doing it. These are the trees I can remember growing up with in Pasadena. Many were here before I was and will be long after I'm gone. You have to respect that!

Trees are like huge ancient elders put here on earth to watch the trouble us humans get ourselves in! Imagine the stories a tree could tell us if they could speak.

some details....

Wine Label

A year ago I was approached by a local vineyard to do their wine label for the 2007 wines they would produce. I thought that was totally cool since at show receptions I had heard suggestions to do this with my pen & ink work. Trouble was I didn't know much about approaching a vineyard to do their label. I knew an artist who approached a vineyard to do their label but they were having them made by an artist in Italy and they were sold on his work. I figured I'd just keep working to get better at painting and not worry about it.

The winery owner and I tossed some ideas back and forth and in the end agreed on adding their sheep they were raising and training to mow the grass that grows between the rows of grapes. It was Winter so I had to borrow grape leaves off of reference photos I had taken at another vineyard the summer before. It all worked out and I handed over the label drawing in about a week. I was told they would not bottle the wine until August of 2007 and I could get some bottles for myself then. They sure look cool and I got a big kick out of doing the commission.

A Morning Sycamore Tree

" Morning Sycamore"

8" X 10"

Oil on canvas covered panel

I usually toss between two trees, eucalyptus and oak, which is a bad habit but in my defense I love both trees and they are plentiful where I live. Still, if Lennon & McCartney only wrote love songs we'd have never heard Sgt Pepper, I Am The Walrus or Glass Onion right? So, it was off to paint a Sycamore tree for me.
This one was found close to home in the local mountains. There is a stand of trees of mostly sycamore and oak right before one of the valleys. It's my favorite part of that drive and I've stopped there many times to get reference photos or just drink my coffee and enjoy a very special place. All of the land off the road belongs to local ranchers and No Trespassing signs line the gates on dirt roads that go in. It must have been a much better world back when ranchers did not fence in cattle on their land...have you ever wondered how many very cool things must be on private property that the public will never see? Not that all of the public would want to but there are those that would. Artists, writers, poets, photographers...all stop at the No Trespassing sign. Maybe there is a good point for trespassing to begin with.

Ecstatic...by Association

...my pen & ink piece. Around the corner was one of my paintings and across from that "The Widow Maker" by Thomas Hoyne! "

The cool thing about being in an art show in a museum is just that...it's in a museum. Museums usually have rare and wonderful things in them....hence, your work will be in a venue with such items. I am in a show at the Ventura County Maritime Museum and they have an awesome collection of Marine Art. 2 pieces of mine, a pen & ink piece and an oil painting, were not 5 feet away from the painting "Widow Maker" by Thomas Hoyne! AWESOME!! Even better, they were not 10 feet away from "Shaming The Gulls" by Hoyne. In this same room were pieces by John Stobart, Roy Cross and Christopher Blossom not to mention the late David Thimgan whose painting "Abbie off the Northern Coast" was there.

A detail of "Abbie Off The North Coast"
Artist, David Thimgan

I also have to mention they had paintings in this collection by some of the most incredible Dutch painters too. One who comes to mind is artist Hermanus Koekkoek Sr. whose painting "Mending Nets by the Shore" is simply amazing. Some had the most luminous quality. Just having my work hanging in the same room with these artists was one of those bonuses in life that you never forget.

A detail of "Mending Nets By The Shore"

Artist, Hermanus KoekKoek

I am compelled to urge anyone living near the California coast or who is visiting it that has an appreciation for Marine art to visit the Ventura County Maritime Museum...which is actually located in Oxnard, California. Seeing this wonderful art is worth the trip.

R to L - Sylvia Waters, Louis Stephen Gadal, Me. We are all members of the International Society of Marine Painters as well as members of the Coast Guard Art Program.

Syrah Vineyard Light

"Syrah Vineyard Light"

8" x 10"

Practicing to get better at doing morning light in a vineyard. This was the early morning light hitting the Syrah vineyard at Tres Hermanas Winery. Not sunrise light...more like 10:00 am light. The reason for that was the show we were in didn't start till 10AM so I hadn't got there until just before that and had to set up. Due to the lack of any crowd (wine at 10AM?) I decided to poke around snapping pics for later use.


So, this is my version of light in a vineyard...not a big old vineyard scene either...just working on light up close....doing vineyards up close like this is a whole other animal too. This is one of those paintings that looks really cool from about 5 feet back, hahaha....try it!

A California Landscape

The working title of this painting is affectionally known as "20X40". No name yet so the size of the canvas works just as well. I borrowed some of the ideas from the last 2 paintings and used them on this one. Nice to do a large piece now and then...I think I'm gearing up to do a really large painting one of these days...maybe 30" X 60". The trouble with large paintings is where to put them not only in drying time but in between shows. I've only got so much wall space.

Here is a work in progress pic and one of the finished painting.

"20X40"

California Impressionist Feel

"California Poppies"

8" X 10"

Oil on Canvas

I don't know why but everytime I grab a small 8"x10" canvas and plan to just whack out a painting in an hour or two it becomes a multi-day monster! I started this one 2 days ago late at night. My thoughts were to just do a quicky to build up smaller pieces for the Artist Studio Tour in November. I had just finished the last wide-format painting and still had good wet paint on my palette....why not do a quick one with the left over paint! Makes sense eh? Not to be had.

At first it all went well and I was almost finished but then kept looking at the sky wondering why it didn't look right. I've been looking a lot lately at the works of Early California Impressionsists such as Grandville Redmond, Edgar Payne, Angel Espoy...and more, and felt compelled to do a sky more to that liking. Once I added some warm Indian Yellow to my sky I began to see a different completed painting that I now wanted. So, I went back down to the mid and fore grounds and began redoing, adding, deleting and experimenting with small subtle changes that would give the painting an older turn of the century look and feel. It's not quite on the money but to me the feel is there and if I pursue this some more I can see dialing it in more to my liking. I won't go for the exact same look because I have my own style that will stay in the paintings but the combination is something I'm excited about seeing.

a detail of the painting...

Central Coast Poppies

Going wide again and using one of my earlier paintings as the study to work from. I actually entered the study into a show but won't know for a while if it gets juried in so I want this one to show locally. I was hoping to do maybe an 18"x24" on this one but didn't have a canvas laying around. I had 2 12"x24"'s leaning against the wall so that explains the wide format. Besides, wide is always cool.

I like doing the trees in this type of lighting and I always have a fun time experimenting with the various shades of green and darkness at the base of the trees. Having fun while you paint sure makes it worth doing and gets rid of the stress. The background mountains look more like the San Gabriel mountains down near Pasadena than the Santa Ynez mountains up here. Guess my roots are finding their way into my painting. This scene could very easily be looking across the San Gabriel Valley from the hills in San Dimas or the Covina area....but way before we jacked it up with a zillion houses and businesses.

"Central Coast Poppies"

12" X 24"

Oil on Canvas Covered Panel

Some detail shots of the painting....

Santa Ynez Vineyard Scene

"Evening At The Vineyard"

9" X 12"

Oil on Canvas Covered panel

This vineyard is located off of Refugio Road near Santa Ynez. I've done 3 paintings almost in the same spot here. It's great because there is so little traffic on this road but it is sort of on a plateu so it is always breezy and you have to watch your rig from being blown around. This scene was painted Alla Prima from a photo I had taken one night while on a photo hunt of the vineyards. Just a fun painting of a sunset over the vineyards...

Solvang Hillside

"Morning Hills"

9" X 12"

Oil on Canvas Covered Panel

I live in an area surrounded by rolling hills. In Winter it looks like we live in Ireland and in Summer it has that classic golden rolling hills look of California. I'd say it is my area only but these hills are found all the way up into Northern California. I decided to try and capture early morning light diffused with the haze we get a lot from cold ocean air drifting into the valley from the Pacific Ocean.

Our distant valley mountains to the north are the same dried grassy golden color but due to Aerial Perspective turn a great shade of pale light blue...this makes for a great contrast against the foreground oaks and eucalyptus trees with their dark greens and browns. The colors used here are my normal palette of Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Yellow Pale, Alizarin Crimson, Yellow Ochre and Titanium White. A limited palette that keeps color uniformity in check and has enough colors to produce most of the landscapes I paint. The key to doing a painting like this is simple, keep your background and mid-ground colors less intense than your foreground colors. To achive this I use a mix of light grey that I add to the background and mid-ground colors. You can either use Paynes Grey mixed with white to get a light grey or you can mix it with spare paint off of your palette....some white, UBlue, ACrimson etc.... I use whatever is handy or available at the moment.

A detail of the painting....

Valley Nocturne

I've painted this scene in it's day setting and it came out pretty cool. 2 paintings down the line I decided to try painting it in a night scene. As I started to do a very rough sketch I decided to do it from memory and change a few things that I didn't think I needed from the first painting, moved a few things around and elliminated a few others. I just needed the perspective of the scene not the original painting.

The purpose was to try another experiment in painting the colors of night skies. Blues, blacks, greens etc. I'm trying to find a version that really strikes a chord in me that I will use more often. I will use various hues but I'm sure there is one that will excite me more than the others.

"Valley Nocturne"

9" X 12"

Oil on canvas covered panel

Foxen Canyon Vineyard

" Foxen Canyon Vineyard"

12" X 16"

Oil on canvas covered panel

While doing the show at Tres Hermanas winery I snapped some reference photos during one of the many lulls. This scene came from one of the ref's in early morning of their vineyards producing the grapes for their Syrah wine. I'm pretty happy with it except I wish I had subdued the sky a little more to keep that bleached out sky look from the bright morning sky. Seems lately I always aant to add some blue to produce some cloud formations no matter how light they are.