Gaviota Bluffs Reprise

"Gaviota Bluffs"

I am fortunate enough to post my work on a website full of other artists who critique each others work. I had Gaviota Bluffs posted there and received some very helpful feedback. I've since gone on to push the distance more on the back trees by repainting a mix of lighter green and greying down other parts up in that area. I've also gone back in to slightly darken the foreground bluff as well as add more detail to the grasses and small plants growing down the side. Works better now.

Gaviota Bluffs

Still on my quest to paint the bluffs along the coast. One thing I've learned from this last painting...bluffs are hard to paint up close, hahaha. I suppose that is why most artists tend to paint them at a distance....many painting them at a very generous distance too. The bluff nearest the viewer here took most of the work and there were some very frustrating moments painting that area. Painting bluffs require a very loose approach which for me doesn't always come easy. I guess I like control and it is almost best to let that control go out the window and concentrate on just massing the color into the basic shape. Still, doing any detail after that takes less control...it's like approaching the detail with a loose brush and a "heres a highlight...so take that" attitude, hahaha. I'm' glad I hadn't started this painting doing that foreground bluff first because I probably would have wiped it down with turpentine. Sometimes it is best to leave the hardest part for last so all of that other good work will force you into finishing it.
Here is a demo as the painting progressed.....
The sky...easiest part. I block in my white and blues letting them slightly overlap and then fan it till it looks good to me. I left the tree area unpainted at this point. The distant landmass is just a darkened mix of the blue sky color.

After that I added the basic distant bluff color and then added the foliage. I get the colors close to what I want but I'll go back in later to adjust it near the end...greying down the greens and adding little specks of white here and there to suggest detail. A while back I used to try and paint these sections as finished sections but I've found it is easier not to waste all of that time and to allow myself to dial in the colors once the painting is just about completed. It's easier to tie in the fore,mid and backgrounds together as the painting is in that almost completed stage. Now I begin blocking in the foreground bluff and then using a knife to apply thicker textures of paint and small details. I will go in and smooth areas with a large brush switching back and forth between filberts and flats. It was a chore here and I'd go so far, stop...go check my email or eat and then come back for another look...or another beating, haha. I didn't like that right top corner of the bluff and lowered that area. Eventually it came together and got to a point where you say "this is it. it's time to take the lessons learned on this painting and move on to use them in the next painting". That is how I usually end a painting. You see where you concourged and where you were just along for the ride....you have to stop and really study where you were just along for the ride so you can make improvements there. Ususally, you can't really see the answer to the problem there because if you could you'd get out your brushes and fix it. So, you just take a good look, think and make yourself try that area in another upcoming painting. You go look at other artists work to see how they handled it. I don't subscribe to the theory that if you paint paintings like a machine gun spits out bullets that somehow you will suddenly one day do it right...you have to actually stop and think. You have to be intellectual and figure out what is going wrong. Call an artist friend and ask how they handle it. Get out your art books and read...look...and paint again. Hey, they aren't always going to end up a masterpiece but you give it the best try you can...each and everytime you paint. Keep doing that and you can't help but get better. I'm happy with this one and think it will enable me to one day crank out a masterpiece.... "Gaviota Bluffs"

22" X 28" Oil on Canvas

Eaton Canyon

"Eaton Canyon Repose"

22" X 24" Oil on Canvas

At Christmas time I was visiting my parents in Pasadena and had the chance to run up to Eaton Canyon to take some reference photos. Eaton canyon is a great place to go and I've been doing that since I was a kid and raised 5 minutes from there. I think my first memory of the San Gabriel mountains was when my Dad took my brothers and I hiking in Eaton and up to Henneger Flats a few miles above the canyon. That was a hike and half because I was really very young when that happened.....maybe 10-11? Back in the 60's. Yes....they had hiking back then and no it wasn't because they hadn't invented the car yet.
I love Eaton in the evening because the light is intoxicating then. The mountain sides light up in pink and orange tones while the canyon floor goes into this wonderful shadowed look of various ochres, pale violets and crimson with great olive drab greens of the oak trees. All of that with these splashes of flaming yellows and oranges in the fall months. The Eaton color display and best yet....it's free!

There have been a lot of changes in there since I was a kid. The only thing they had there was a really simple indoor/outdoor nature center where I saw my first rattlesnake...stuffed of course. They used to have this cool series of pictures of a hiker who had been bitten by a rattler and you could see how bad the leg got as the time went by...awesome stuff for kids to see. Aside from that you just hiked around the canyon's riverbed and along it's walls. There was usually hardly anyone around that I remember. On a busy Saturday they might have 10 cars in the parking lot. I was almost run over by surprising a mule deer hiding in the bushes. That dude was hugh!!...well, when you are inches away from a frightened hopping mule deer it looks hugh...and smells gamey too.
Nowadays they have a brand new Nature Center...and indoor one with air conditioning and snack machines and a gift shop, hahaha. They have a nature walk with various plants and picnic tables. Joggers and power walkers abound cluttering up the trails. You see people there who have come by for a walk after going to dinner wearing very nice clothes. It's almost surreal at times and I always find myself wondering where did they all come from and why is every other one carrying a waterbottle. Do people seriously believe they are going to somehow run out of personal water or dehydrate from a simple hike at Eaton canyon??? I think people are watching too many fitness commercials. They even have the president doing it now at the podium. Whatever happened to a glass of ice water for the President as he gives a speech.
I took my daughters to hike up to Echo mountain a few years back and it was the same way...a million joggers, power walkers and even mountain bikers...pretty soon they will pave the trails up there because people will begin to complain of the wear and tear on their Nike, New Balance and Ugg shoes. There was a time getting up to the mountains was a way to enjoy some solitude. You have to hike back further now to do that. Sorry to gripe but I liked it back then when rustic meant dirty and people didn't dress up to just hike, hahaha, and besides....it's my Blog.
Well, here are some detail shots of the painting.

Bluffs at East Mesa

"Bluffs at East Mesa"

12" X 16" Oil on panel

Finished this one up tonight. This is an alla prima painting of the bluffs at East Mesa near Ledbetter Beach in Santa Barbara. There is a very pretty view of the ocean and Santa Barbara harbor from there. A nice little park winds along the bluffs so it would be a cool spot to paint from....a little too many people though. I am determined to paint coastal bluffs better so I'm sure these will be popping up from time to time. It's not like I don't have enough reference material either. The California coast, especially around here, is full of nice bluffs to paint. I feel guilty that I haven't painted them more often. I love how they look and when the morning sun or late afternoon sun hits them they just glow. There is an artist named Richard Humphrey who has done some wonderful paintings of coastal bluffs...some of his work wll make you drool.

Summerland Beach

Thought I'd try another beach scene from my trip down to Carpinteria with a stop off at Summerland Beach. It was early in the day...still morning actually, and the water was pretty calm for ocean water. Some people were walking down the beach looking for driftwood or other treasures. I like the bluffs and wanted to work on them in a painting. These are farther than I wanted so I'll do another scene with closer bluffs to paint. All of the beaches where I grew up in Southern California had no bluffs at all...ocean, beach sand and then parking lot...from there it was suburbia all the way to the foot of the San Gabriel mountains 30 miles inland. You know, in the early days of California there would be hugh storms and the rain came washing down from the San Gabriels and flood the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. Eventually they built two large washes to carry all of that runoff water to the ocean...they are known as the LA River and the San Gabriel River...or San Gabriel Wash as we called it.
Anyway, here is the painting....

and my fun to paint birds near the waves....

Koho, Santa Barbara Harbor

My Reference Photo taken abour a week ago.

I was trying to fight off the "boat bug" but that's not going well. Funny story, I always worked in pen & ink in my very early days doing horses, the occasional portrait and a lot of boats. During break at work I would sketch boats really quick and then add color using highlighter markers just for fun. Somewhere during all of that I thought it would be even more fun to learn to paint boat scenes using oil paint so I began to take painting classes in college. We never once painted water or boats.....to learn that I ended up going with Walter Foster books. I have wondered many times if Mr. Foster ever had any idea of just how many millions of budding artists he helped with his series of art books. There just has to be a killer story behind those books and Walter Foster....I'll be off to Google soon.
Anyway, I decided to paint one of the fishing boats in Santa Barbara harbor. I wanted a cool looking boat with some of the dock in it. I didn't want an image showing too many boats because that would need a ton of editing by me and I'm so detail-retentive that I like to leave too much in. I've seen this boat a zillion times down there and I really like her looks. Learning to handle the water was fun and I think I'm getting better at it. So much of it is really just an illusion. I thought about leaving out the floating kelp but I need to learn painting that too so in it went. Not the best looking kelp but I could have done it much worse too, hahaha.
Up top is my reference photo. Here is my final painting. I sketched this directly on the 12"X16" canvas covered panel which I hate doing when it has to be detailed. Not much room for mistakes which causes a lot of erasing. One of these days I will try painting one of these boat scenes with no initial sketch...forcing myself to paint loose as a goose.

"Koho At High Tide"

12" X 16" Oil on panel

Details of the painting.....

Chalk Hill

"Chalk Hill"

9" X 12" Oil on panel

This is such a familiar scene to me...this is the view once I pull out of my driveway. I see this seen everyday and have seen it in all sorts of weather. Those big clouds are a pretty common occurence most of the year. I really like the contrast they give the hillside with that one big eucalyptus tree. In summer the grasses are wonderful ochres which really pops the cloud formations. Here is my reference photo I worked from.

This one was done alla prima in a little over an hour. Christmas is almost here and it is really difficult to work on a larger painting. Too many errands popping up! I hate starting and stopping on paintings. I was in Santa Barbara a few times this past week which gave me time to run down to the harbor to snap some reference photos. I've been going through them and there is some really nice ones which will probably become paintings in the next month or so. I'm dying to paint another boat scene while I'm still in that Marine Art mode. I spend so much time throughout the year concentrating on landscapes I don't seem to find the time to work on things nautical.

I was speaking to an artist friend yesterday and the subject of seascapes came up. We both seemed to agree that they are very hard to sell. One of the gallery owners I know wouldn't even carry seascapes because she said they couldn't sell them....here we are not 10 miles from the ocean and it is hard to sell anything with water in it. I remember once deciding to show my work in Morro Bay because I figured it would be the place to sell my marine work...the first year I was there I only sold one painting and it was a scene of the mountains behind Sana Barbara! There might be something to Marine art taking a back seat in sales to most other subjects. So, if you are a painter of seascapes living in Kansas and think heading to the coast would be the thing to do to sell your work you should think twice about that, hahaha.

Before Sunset

"Before Sunset"

9" X 12" Oil on panel

This painting was finished and left to dry before glazing a final layer of light orange tint. This process is something I have recently been toying with to achieve an overall color to the painting. I've done a few other paintings I had drying with a light Indian Yellow tint and it worked great. I'm now tempted to try it with a light pink tone using Alizarin Crimson and Titanium White. When sales are slow....experiment! Hahaha.

A couple of details of the painting....

Michelle Goodrich of Mandarin Design

In working on my blog today I was hunting down a website called Mandarin Design and an old online friend, Michelle Goodrich. Michelle's site had all sorts of codes for free to use on your blog or website...a site designers heaven. Michelle taught you the how to do's of creating a better site of your own with all of her knowledge. I discovered her website way back around 1998 when I was first building my website and trying to promote it. I wanted to leave a banner link on the links I was creating to my website and Michelle had a code to create a really nice banner. I had problems with it as I was still very much learning "computereeze" and contacted Michelle for advice. Michelle helped me figure it out and we kept in touch. She liked the site I had made and offered more help. We sent emails to each other and eventually she bought some of my notecards with horses I had drawn....or I might have just gave them to her for all of her help. Michelle also used my website in an article she had written for her website and offered a free link to my site in return. Naturally, I used the banner above to link to Michelle's website from mine.
It has been years since I last spoke to Michelle or had been to her website. While looking for it today I found that her site was offline and that she had passed away back in June of 2006. Terrible would be an understatement of describing how I felt. I spent the last hour or so reading through various blogs of the other people Michelle had helped over the years. Michelle's generosity was above and beyond that of most people. The closest I ever came to meeting Michelle was when she and her husband came down to see the Long Beach Grand Prix...back in the 90's. I only found out because I was trying to contact her with yet another problem or to ask a question and she mentioned they had just returned from that trip. So at one time we were just 30 miles away from actually meeting each other.
I feel bad that it took me so long to find out she had passed away from cancer, breast cancer I believe....You know, the thing about the internet is you have so many people you can meet in various ways, but more importantly, is that they are all very much real people. Michelle was as real and down to earth as you could get. Willing to share her knowledge which is the most beautiful thing about the internet. Beautiful things come from beautiful people. Michelle epitomized what the world of the Internet could be to all of us...a place to share, learn and teach without always expecting something in return for it. Helping your fellow man is always good karma. I will very much miss my friend Michelle.

Motor Lifeboat CG

Motor Lifeboat Training
18" X 24" Oil on canvas
Just finished up this painting that I will be submitting to the Coast Guard soon. This is a Motor Lifeboat training in the heavy surf up in Bodega Bay in Northern California. You've got to admire Coasties for their determination to train for the worst in their efforts to help out the stranded mariner. Who you gonna call?....the Coast Guard! My reference photo for this painting was taken by a CG member and he caught this ML in a great scene busting through a hugh wave that evokes the danger and the determination of these men to do the job they train for. All I did was try to capture the scene on canvas.
This type of painting is very different from my usual soft landscapes. Detail and crisp edges are best for this type of work and my training with pen & ink has long prepared me for detail and sharp edges. Using a brush is just a bit slower. Going larger, 18" X 24" made the detail work much easier too. I like doing these CG paintings as it fulfills my love of Marine art and gives me a nice challenge to learn painting water and waves. I admire the work of Blossom and Thimgan, both now gone. I also like contemporary painters Byron Pickering and Martin Clarke. Both have a unique way of painting the ocean....plus I actually know these guys! hahahaha. Marty was the first artist to help me out when I was learning to paint the ocean and has been a great inspiration and friend since those early days and I have a great DVD by Bryon who is a wonderful gentle soul.
Some details of the painting....

Nocturne Verde

" Nocturne Verde"

6" X 8" Oil on panel

The title sounds like something you would order at a Mexican restaraunt. This is another painting done with that eerie green glow that the night is sometimes portrayed with by artists. Done for variation in the studio....I like the color and the change of doing nocturnes with my usual dark mix of Ublue, Acrimson and Twhite. Variety as they say is the spice of life. Ever since seeing this color back at the nocturne show in Los Olivos I've wanted to mess with it and so that's why green...I like it. I'm going to try a reddish tone soon (Nocturne Rojo!). I've seen that used a few times too so it would be cool to try that variation. By the way....that yellow area near the moon is barely perceptable on the actual painting. It stands out like a sore thumb here because my camera snags that color up like it was whipped cream. I tried to edit it down but I lose too much of the other colors up there when I do that so imagine that yellow much less than you see here....yes, you have to do some of the work on this Blog.

Foxen Canyon View

" Foxen Canyon View"

8" X 10" Oil on canvas

Painted this small 8X10 to capture the wonderful warm tones of the hills around Foxen Canyon. Foxen canyon is such a great canyon to take a drive through. The valley floor is lined with vineyards, farmlands and grazing cattle. It has a twisting 2 lane road that runs all the way up to the Santa Maria valley. I like the area due to the great colors it has in the summer and fall months. Wonderful varied ochres accented by the olive colors from the stands of oaks.

In Spring there will be California poppies and lupine scattered throughout the canyon. Alisos canyon connects to Foxen canyon and offers incredible meadows of lupine and grazing cattle.

Here are details of the painting....

Studio Tour 2009

Paintings on display at the entrance to the studio.

Artist Studio Tour 2009

Well, it has come and gone! A weekend of putting the studio and my work on display for those interested in art, artists confines and the info an artist cares to share with them. Preparation for this began way back in Spring as I began to paint specifially for this show which comes every November. Overall, I think I painted some really good pieces, desert scenes from the Carrizo Plain and Mojave desert, some additional nocturnes and some large Central Coast scenes. The studio looked great, the work looked great, framing was working and I was ready. Maybe I should have spent more time on preparing myself for the low sales this last year has produced.

The National and State economy are keeping patrons from enjoying art purchases. I knew this going into the show but maybe didn't expect it to be so severe this year. I have always done well in this show with each one being more succesful than the previous year. This year I was down more than 75% in sales. I actually shouldn't feel so bad as many artists on the tour had no sales at all. Not a good year. I could write much more on this but that is going to get totally negative and won't solve a thing...depressed...you bet! Still painting though.

Here are some pics I took just before the show started on Saturday morning.

Normally the drying wall, paintings were framed and ready for public viewing in the studio

My easels used for plein air painting in the studio.

I got some really nice comments and signatures in the old guestbook. Copies of my book were available and sales made of that.

Studio Show Painting

"Eucalyptus in Evening"

9" X 12" Oil on panel

During the lulls in our studio show I used the time to work on another painting. Time is not to be wasted so I jumped at the opportunity to use it wisely. This painting allowed me to work more on eucalyptus trees and pushing distance in my paintings. This painting is another in a long line of paintings working to paint better and I'm pretty happy that each painting in that line teaches me.

Details of the painting....

Nice rich darks which I love painting...not black, it's a dark mixture of French Ultramarine Blue/Alizarin Crimson/Cadmium Yellow Pale. The tree trunkss are simply Titanium White with a dab of FUB to add the shadowed color of the truck shaded by foliage.
Rock practice...that's right. I added these big boulders more for my practice than for the composition of the painting...they work and I'm a happy camper......a very fun painting!

Eucalyptus

I have somehow managed to start a new routine while getting ready for the show this weekend. In staying up late, drinking tons of coffee and after doing things for the show I have managed to do another painting before bed...I always loved painting at night anyway, hahaha. Actually, all the fuss in getting ready for the show causes me to feel guilty I'm not painting so I end up just staying up late to paint. This one was finished at 3:30 AM. I should call it "The Nightowl Eucalyptus".

Not from any reference photo, just painting away in hopes of completing another painting and brushing up on trees. I'm not a fan of the eucalyptus trees that look like this...I call them pom poms....but I have to try painting them anyways. I like the bushier ones that are commonly used for windbreaks on farms and ranches around here. So many trees...so little time.

"Near The Foothills"

9" X 12" Oil on panel

I really like the foreground in this one as well as the background...really fun parts to do. The tree was painted a little differently than I normally do these so it took me a little longer to paint. I think it will take me a few paintings to get used to seeing them this way...

Here are some details.....

Trying the Pochade Box

Was up late last night readying for the show and decided I couldn't wait any longer to try a painting out with the new pochade box. I decided to get the easel setup and do a painting. I chose a ref photo I took of the oak scattered foothills below nearby Grass mountain. The easel worked great but I need to build an attachment to hold my wet brushes. Seems to be a good steady platform though so I'm looking forward to getting out before it gets too cold to do it.
How organized huh!?...Don't sweat it...a few paintings down the line and that area for mixing will be a mess that only I can make my way through. I took this photo right after the scene was blocked in and I had started working back to front.

Here is the finished painting before I took it down to get a good photo. Sorry for the glare.

And lastly the finished painting...I'm pretty happy with it and trying out the new pochade box was lots of late night fun.
"Oaks Below the Figueroas"

9" X 12" Oil on panel

Evening Scene

"Near The Eve"

12" X 24" Oil on panel

I am readying for a studio tour and have been doing all sorts of things other than painting. You just have no idea how cluttered and unorganized your studio can get until you have to straighten it up for a studio tour....and then there is all of the framing and hanging involved too.
I decided to stop for a bit to paint a scene yesterday. I wanted wide and I wanted to do some trees again since I have been doing so many vineyard scenes lately. I needed the tree practice...still do! hahaha. A couple of months ago I did a scene of Santa Ynez looking across the valley at the mountains all lit up at sunset and decided to try that again but in a more muted way. I wanted the focal point to be on a trail I would add and not so much on the blazing mountain colors.

Lately in my work I have been trying out thicker, impasto, foregrounds or around my center of interest. I really enjoy impasto work especially on these little trails. It brings a nice bit of realism to the painting and adds to the viewers interest I would think. I find it hard not to enjoy that thick texture. The composition on this one is really like a full circle-type comp. The eye should be led from one part to the next until it returns again. Well, that was the plan anyways.
A detail of the trail. I was dragging that shadow from the tree across the grass and decided to drag it across the trail too.
In the past I rarely did a lot of trunk and branch work...I'm pushing myself to add these more and more now. I hated my early results but they are coming along nicely.

Tres Hermanas Vines

" Tres Hermanas Vines"

9" X 12" Oil on panel
This is a plein air piece that was done out at the Tres Hermanas Vineyard in Foxen Canyon. I did a show out there a couple of years ago and thought I'd go back up there to try some plein air work...this is the third one I've done up there. It's a good spot because there isn't much traffic, no pedestrians and I can just pull off to the side of the road to set up my gear...no hiking! Bonus!!

I like the vineyards in the morning light because the tops of the vines get this great morning light and pop the heck out of the green against the dark undergrowth. I also like this angle of the vines too and my spot out there is right at the end of the rows.

A detail of the painting........

Homemade Pochade Box

My Serrett Pochade Box
I've been wanting to build a pochade box much like the $300 models you can buy without spending the $300. Jim Serrett had built such a box, the Serrett Pochade Box, using simple contstruction methods and scraps of wood keeping costs down and making building the box as simple as you can get. I've got to admit the reason I kept putting this off is that I kept thinking the results would be very unprofessional and look it. I couldn't understand how the lid hinge would work without looking like some contraption from a Jules Verne novel. All of the ones I saw that were homemade really looked homemade. Jims looked pretty good so I decided to just build it and make it work but keeping it as affordable as possible.
I downloaded Jim's instructions and worked from those. I couldn't find the piano hinge he used so I used normal brass hinges. The table hinge that I bought was different and I had to cut off a bracket on mine and hammer part of the other end to make that work but it works great and looks good. Both of these parts came from Home Depot. I used a piece of hardwood (oak) for the mounting block underneath that holds the T-nut for mounting the box to the tripod. I'm not a fan of this though and if I did this again I'd probably use the Judsons mounting plate that costs around $19. It's an all-welded aluminum plate that would last longer than the box itself. I'll give the T-nut a try and see how that goes. I also added a strip of wood to accomodate my longer hinge screws for the lid. No biggie there.
The lockable hinge worked out excellent. I was worried about the single bungy cord holding the panel to the lid...looked kind of weak but it actually works great. The panel is snug against the lid and not flopping around at all. Simple and effective and the wind won't blow it loose at all.

Overall, if you want one of these types of pochade boxes and don't want to part with $300 you can build it for hardly nothing. I don't think I paid more than $20 for all of the material. I used an air powered brad nailer but you could do this with small finishing nails and a hammer. I have a table saw too but all of the wood can be cut with a hand saw. It's a great little box and can handle anything up to 9"x12" panels.