Painting Zion Canyon

I just finished my first painting of Zion Canyon. I spent a week there in November of 2004 and took about 800 photos. I didn't try painting them sooner because I had no confidence that I could do justice to the rock formations. But I finally decided to try this spring (and hey—it's spring!) so I sorted through them several times and pulled out ten that I think have pretty good compositions. I liked this one for the soft light and the rich colors. This photo was taken in the morning on one of my last days there, when the temperature dropped about 30º and I woke up to a quarter inch of solid ice all over my car.

If you've never been there, it's definitely worth a trip, and as long a stay as you can manage. Going in the off-season was particularly nice. I was entertained by the fact that almost all of the people I saw there, especially early in the day, had cameras, tripods, and varying amounts of other photographic gear. That was the first trip I had ever made where there were more photographers than tourists. I didn't do any real hiking, just followed all the roads I could find. I think a committed visitor could spend 3 months there—or as many years—without running out of new sights.

And I have a special fondness for it because it's the setting for my story book, Take The Wind Up With You.

Finished—after 5 years!

Blue Ridge Railway

Six (I think) years ago, I flew to VA to visit my older brother, and he took me up to some of his favorite photograph-shooting places on the Blue Ridge Parkway. One of them was this old—very old—railroad track, just off the parkway near a tiny creek and pool. I started painting it the next year and worked on it for several weeks until I lost confidence in my ability to finish it the way I wanted it to look. It came off the easel and went into the stacks for later. Much later, as it turned out.

After finishing my latest painting, I finally felt good about picking it up again. I was pleasantly surprised that I could get back into the style I was using then and didn't have to do any repainting, except for the color of the sky I had previously chosen. The foreground leaves that had scared me enough to make me stop turned out to be just a matter of continuing painting on it until I got just the right mix of colors and shading.

My biggest problem was with the overall color scheme, which was so warm that I always felt like I needed a glass of water every time I looked at it. It only took a brief moment of meditation with my color wheel to realize that all I needed was some blue violet and and violet and viridian to balance it out. Ta-da.

I'm pretty happy just to say it's finished, and I'm planning on entering it in the County Fair show this August.

If I were starting it now, I think I would approach it very differently. I did have a fleeting urge to redo the whole thing and make it softer and looser. But, as the saying goes—the urge fled. I want to move on to my Zion photos next, and it's an early gardening season this year, and there's never enough time for everything I want to do, especially during gardening season.

Painting sun and fog

Foggy Sunrise

We get a lot of foggy mornings in the winter, and once in a while there'll be just the right amount of low-level fog to make the woods look foggy but the sun can still come up above it. We had one of those mornings a couple of weeks ago and I happened to see it, and it was calm enough so I went out with my camera and got some photos.

Once I got the trees and foreground blocked in on this, it took me at least five passes to get the light right. I probably repainted the whole thing three times. I think that's just how far off I was in my head about how to get the effect of bright light in a dark garden—repeatedly, the ferns were too big, too bright, too colorful, too attention-grabbing. I kept thinking I had it right, and then I'd look at it for a little while and see that I really didn't have it.

Yesterday I got it really close, and I spent more time last night scrutinizing it, and decided that it needed more darkening. So this morning, still fearful that I was going to have to repaint the whole thing again, I started blacking out more of the foreground, and darkening almost all the fern foliage until it finally—finally—blended into the whole composition and let the sun dominate the painting. Whew!

Leonardo da Vinci reportedly said, "Paintings are never finished, only abandoned." I'm abandoning this one, quickly, while I can get away, and pretend that I won this battle.

Painting isn't about reality

Juniper #2

12"x16" Acrylics on linen panel $90
You can purchase this painting HERE.

I watched my Joan Mitchell video again  yesterday, and wrote down this quote from Elizabeth Murray, a NY painter who knew Joan Mitchell: "Painting isn't about reality, it's about life. There's a level where you cannot explain it with words; it's visual." I was thinking about that a lot yesterday, and also what Joan said in the video: "I don't think when I paint." She was talking about people who ask her what she was thinking when she painted a particular work.

One of the things I really love about painting is except where you're consciously trying to make it look like something in particular, where you're doing a lot of comparing or measuring, the activity of painting is pretty much a thought-free zone. I'm pretty sure that images and thoughts/words come from separate areas of your brain. I use music or old movies to distract my verbal brain so it doesn't think about what I'm doing, so it isn't constantly worrying about whether or not what I'm doing is working. My eyes do the thinking, and that's not verbal thinking.

This juniper is from another photo I took last spring in north central Oregon, like the other juniper I did last summer. This one is purposely painted in a much looser style, except for the bleached "bones" of a shrub in the foreground.

I'm happy because this is the 4th painting I've finished this month! I think that's a record for me! I'm looking forward to my show at the new In Bocca Al Lupo Gallery this October, in its new location in downtown Oregon City. Speaking of which, here's the flyer for the first show there, opening weekend after next, the first weekend in February.

I bought my first plants of the year this morning—perky little primroses for my hanging pots out front. So my new little car does work for carrying plants, as long as they're not too big. That's a good thing. Happy almost-end-of-January!

Villa Catalana at Sunset

Next day update (1/20/15):

As soon as I posted the painting (see below), I realized that it really wasn't showing the "color feel" I saw in my original photo of the scene, nor was it evoking the mood of the twilight. But, the difference was so subtle that my eyes couldn't register it, just looking from the painting to the photo on my computer. So, I took the original photo and the photo of the painting and viewed them side by side on my computer screen, and got this very interesting comparison:

Left: Painting  Right: Original photograph of the scene

The light bulb finally came on.

This morning I took the painting back into the studio and corrected the colors of the sky, the water, and some of the foliage, including taking down the turquoise of the spiky plant in the foreground. And after that round of corrections and yet another photograph, I realized that I had also not conveyed the warmth of the pavilion area and its reflection, and that they were also very important to the color scheme. So now it looks like this:

I may go back to it tomorrow and tried to even out the water. It was so pretty in the too-blue painting; at least the colors are correct now. Maybe I can make it pretty again.

It's all grist for the mill. Must keep grinding. How could I ever learn to see color without my computer?

END of update.

The Too-Blue Painting

This is the other painting I really wanted to do of the Villa Catalana paint out last summer. I took the photo from their patio, looking toward the west, in the long twilight. The lights were on in the pavilion, and although I couldn't see them from that angle, they were reflecting in the water. I was in love with all the colors, and the water, and the trees, and the perfect summer evening.

I'm staking out another desert painting for my next one.

Figures, loosely—an experiment

I've had this panel sitting in a pile with an outline sketch on it for the last seven or eight years, from the last time I worked from a live model. I'm trying to use up all my old panels this winter. I haven't finished a painting of a figure for almost twice that long, and the last one I started got painted over with a sunset. I was curious to see if I even could paint a human, just loosely, and again I started with the texture, just seeing what would happen.

Originally, the panel was to represent the Three Muses. I think it still does, but I don't feel they're talking about work; they don't look as though they're talking about inspiring anyone. I feel they're talking about themselves. Maybe that's what they're doing when you can't find anything to inspire you. But surely even Muses deserve a little time for themselves.

I do think I'm getting the hang of working with drier paint, at least, scumbling and dragging it around.

Winter time is imagination time

It's January, and the perfect time for playing in the studio. I'm back to working with abstraction and lots of color. Outside it's gray, gray-green, gray-brown, and gray-blue, but in here it's all about rich, bright, and stimulating colors.

Still playing with textured surfaces, having fun with that. And I'm planning on making the most of my imagination in my painting, too. Imagination is the best kind of bank account—the more you take out, the bigger and better it gets. Turn on your idea machine and start using it, and you won't believe how great it works. All it needs is for you to not be afraid to use it.