Bromeliads

Bromeliads

This was the most interesting and challenging photo I had from Villa Catalana from last year. I've never painted gravel, or bromeliads, and I wanted to try. Once again I turned to copying a photo, because it was a splendid photo, of truly splendid bromeliads in a beautiful environment. I have not yet gotten good at the art of making up paintings out of my head, there are too many things I want to paint that I don't know how to.

I believe it's the colors that I like most about all these plants, and about the painting.

I've been thinking I need to go on a painting binge again, so today I went through part of my backlog of photos and made a point of picking out the ones that I had a feeling about, mostly the feeling that I had when I took them. Not all of them seem like ideal candidates; some are very simple in composition. I want to see if I can put in any of the magic of place I felt in those locations, and make them come alive.

Recreating the light of late evening

Last year's paintout at Villa Catalana Cellars was a really spectacularly lovely evening, despite the presence of too many yellowjackets (fortunately they weren't interested in the food I'd brought to eat),  and as the last light was waning I got a photo from the house patio. It didn't begin to capture the colors my eyes saw in the sunset though, so when I got ready to finish it in the studio, I made myself two references—a dark one that showed the colors and values of the clouds and sky, and a much lighter one so I could see all the foliage and pond details that came out black in the dark image.

Since I usually work from photos in the studio, this happens to me all the time—getting a photo that shows my composition but not what my eyes were really able to see. This is the first time I've ever used two photos, and it really helped me a lot. I really wanted the dark shapes to be somewhat differentiated, to recreate the sensation of being just able to make out things in the dim light. The only really tricky parts were finding the right values for the white tiles on the pagoda roof, and the hanging lights there and on the pavilion. I settle on a muted brownish-orange for the hanging lights.

A wonderful summer evening

I wanted to share this picture I took Saturday evening at the paintout at Villa Catalana Cellars. There was lovely live acoustic guitar music by great musicians, a colorful sunset with drifting clouds and a light breeze, and lots of happy people enjoying the food, wine, art, and wonderful weather.

If you're an artist interested in participating, contact Burl & Cindy Mostel at Villa Catalana Cellars.

PS. I made some progress on my painting but forgot to take any red, so I just worked on the foliage. Next time!

Paintout time again!

It's the annual Art In The Garden party at Villa Catalana Cellars in Oregon City this evening, and I can't believe the weather is this cool! Tickets are still available at their events webpage. Lots of food, wine, artists, and art! I'll be there working on a new painting and bringing along several of my previous paintings of their beautiful gardens and winery.

I'll be trying to turn this value sketch into a real painting:

Maybe I'll remember to bring the right colors this year!

Connecting the audience to the painting

The Upper Pond

My plan was to get this Upper Pond painting all done except for the highlights before the Villa Catalana Cellars Paint-Out last Saturday, and then work on those outside at the Villa, with the sun sinking in the west and all the people walking around and shmoozing. It was a great plan, and I got there at 4:30, an hour before the public came in. It was about 80º—better than I hoped, even—and I carted all my equipment and paintings up to a shady spot at the top of the hill where more people walk around. But when I set up my long-unused French easel, I found I had forgotten to bring my white paint. I walked around to the other painters to see if I could buy or borrow a dollop of white, but they were all either oil or pastel artists. I did a bit of glazing on a few places, but I really needed the white to do any real work. D'oh! It's a line item in my packing list now.

So I leaned back in my chair, listened to the band, and just pretended it was a forced vacation, and the only thing I could do was relax. In a little while people started walking around, and a few times an hour someone would come over and talk for a minute.

I did have a great time, despite not being able to paint there. I finished it up yesterday in the studio, thinking about the things people had said to me about it. Almost everyone who commented on this one of the upper pond with the property and the cabana behind it, said they loved the blue. One teenage girl said it was her favorite painting there, and that I "got the blue perfectly". I found that interesting because I had deliberately intensified the blue of the water and the sky, using pure Ultramarine blue with white to lighten it. The actual colors of the water and sky that day weren't anything like a match for my painting, they were both a warm azure blue, part cobalt and part cyan. So I think what she meant was that it matched something in her memories or her imagination. I was fine with painting the plants and the cabana their natural colors, and the same for the mimosa tree, but I really wanted the blue and yellow to go beyond what anyone would call natural.

Maybe the way to use color to connect to people is to connect to their imaginations, not to the natural colors of the landscape.

No more small paintings till after I get A Bigger Gorge finished, but this was a really useful exercise.

Art In The Garden at Villa Catalana Cellars this Saturday

The Lower Pond

Once again—fingers crossed that the temperature doesn't jump back up again—I'll be at the Paint-Out at Villa Catalana Cellars this Saturday from 5:30 to 9pm. I've suspended work on A Bigger Gorge to work up a couple paintings to bring—this one, which is almost finished, and hopefully another one that won't be so far along. I expect there'll be another dozen or more other artists there as well. You'll be able to purchase food and wine, and art if you like. If you'd like to go, you can find out more and make your reservation here.

A loose-ish landscape

This was my only painting of Villa Catalana this year. I missed the paintout because of the too-hot weather, but took several photos of their blue gazebo a week before. I worked on this for a week before setting it aside to work on my dog paintings, and just picked it back up last week. It was close to being finished but really lacked any dynamics; it just sat there on the panel, too flat and dull. I thought some yellow and yellow-green might lift it, and that worked, contrasting nicely with the darks and adding to the feel of late afternoon light.

I got really brave and added a couple figures in the background to balance the structures on the right.

I had fun painting the reflections, keeping all the foliage and trees loose and poorly defined, using them more as a color foil for the blue tiles and red-brown soil. But I couldn't manage to leave the structures as loose as the rest; I don't yet know how to do loose structures.

Just a little bit off can look a lot wrong

The Lotus Pond

12"x16" Acrylics on linen panel $175
You can purchase this painting HERE.

It took me what seemed like a long time to get the right color balance on this one. Mostly it was too light, but the greens were off, the reds were off, and the grays on the wall were really hard to get right. I reworked the shrubs above them a few times without making them look good, and it wasn't until I noticed in the reference photo that the bottom half of the wall was a shade darker than the top. When I made that correction, that whole area clicked. Getting the highlights on the top of the balusters light enough, the roof color right, and the background dark enough finally made the painting look like it was in bright sunlight. At last!

This was a really good lesson in how little it takes to keep a painting to come together, and you just have to keep looking for those tiny adjustments to get the look you want.

For those paintings that take a long time...

Lunch In The Arbor

12"x16" Acrylics on linen panel $175
You can purchase this painting HERE.

The second of the Villa Catalana paintings from last year is finished. I did a lot of glazing on this one to build up the colors on the stonework and the fuzzy grasses in the foreground. I was frankly surprised at how fluffy they looked when I finished. I started with a couple layers of light greens, and then the pale yellow tufts, and the yellow ochre tint in the center, trying to get the translucency of the clumps. I worked similarly on the rest of the painting, especially on the stonework, trying to give it the look of bright shade, between the brighter back- and top-lighting and the deep shadows under the heaviest vine foliage. The stones were so many different colors I couldn't decide which to paint first—the grays, the golds, the blue sky reflections, the rosy beiges. The vines were a similar problem,  greens in a half dozen colors, plus highlights and shadows.

Even though it seemed I was doing more experimenting than painting, somehow the painting looked a little better, but it never came to life. I intensified the colors of the tablecloth and the people, added new hues of blue, turquoise, and more yellow highlights on the leaves. I deepened the shadows with red-violet, and it looked better, but it still looked flat. I felt as though I'd thrown every color I had at it, and had simply run out of ideas.

Then last weekend I went to a show opening of Leland John, a well-known artist and former teacher from this area. I stayed a couple hours, and did a lot of staring at his paintings up close, looking at the brushstrokes and the amount of paint he used on each stroke. Then I noticed something that all my favorites had in common—that you could take any 4-inch-square area on the paintings, and count around fifty different colors.

I thought about that a lot the next day, looking at the arbor painting again. Maybe I just wasn't using enough colors. I thought there must be one or more colors missing from it, and suddenly I looked at the grasses and pale scrub in the foreground, and realized how yellow they were, and thought that was the missing color—the complement of yellow—violet. I painted virtually every middle tone and shadow with some violet, and the more I put on, the better the painting looked. When I washed the thin lines of violet into the center of the big grass clump, that finished it.

It doesn't look anything like a Leland John painting, but I'll never look at a painting the same way again. When I look at it now, I can't see the violet at all—but it looks alive. It's not flat any more.

Realism without detail?

Garden Steps

12"x16" Acrylics on linen panel $175
You can purchase this painting HERE.

I started this one last August at the Villa Catalana paint-out in Oregon City. That day was so hot, windy, and dry that the paint practically dried on my brush. All I managed to do that day was make a bunch of smears and blobs on the panel, so it was a kind of enforced looseness. Somehow I managed to keep that feel when I started reworking it in the studio, and every time I worked on it I browbeat myself into not getting all tensed up about making it look realistic, and yet it still came out as realistic  as anything I've ever done, maybe even moreso. When I did the stones I made the lines rough and sloppy, really trying to do as little as possible as I put the colors on. Up close I see dozens of blurs and blobs, and yet when viewed as a whole, the general chaos and blocked shapes turns into recognizable plants and architecture. I couldn't resist putting in some real detail in the tree trunk and the rose stems; at least it makes a sort of center of interest. I think any more detail would have killed it.

I still have two other paintings from that day to finish up.

Villa Catalana Cellars Paint-Out this Saturday, August 22nd

The August Paint-Out at Villa Catalana Cellars is this Saturday, and I'll be there. It will open to the public at 5:30, and there will be live jazz music again, and catered suppers and their award-winning wines to purchase, and a new treat this year, ice cream creations. Admission is $10 per person, and you can reserve your spot online here.

For you gardeners, this is also the home of Rare Plant Research, and you can see many hardy tropical plantings on the grounds.

I've picked out the compositions I'll be working on there, and there will be a lot of different artists working this year. The weather predictions are for sun and mid-to-upper 80's, and probably a light breeze. Watching the sunset from the patio there is tough to beat by itself, but add in a glass of wine,  the lovely strains of talented musicians drifting over the lotus pond, and the chance to watch and talk to a couple dozen local artists, and you've got a memorable evening.

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.

Priming with texture

Firs at Hoyt Arboretum

I tried something different for a forest scene I've been wanting to paint. It's a photo of a douglas fir grove at Hoyt Arboretum, and I was looking for a new approach because I'm not very satisfied with the paintings I've been getting recently. It happened that a couple years ago I accidentally ordered a 5oz tube of red oxide acrylic, which is twice the size of a standard sized tube. I really want to use it up, so I primed a panel with it, but instead of brushing it on I used my knife, and for no reason in particular used the knife to draw the significant outline of the scene in the wet paint. I put so much paint on it that it took overnight to dry. When I started painting on it the next day I quickly realized I could use a lot less paint because of that priming, and I worked fairly quickly just blocking in some general colors, and using sweeping strokes that were vaguely suggestive of typical fir branches. I had several different colors of green already mixed from my other leaf paintings, it all went pretty quickly.

When I stopped to take a look at it, it looked more than half done. I got lucky with the highlight brush strokes on the ground, but wasn't so lucky with the ones on the tree trunks, so I had to go in today and paint over them. Clearly, there's a lot to getting those lucky strokes to happen, instead of the unlucky ones. But I'm thinking that's what I should really be working on.

I have to admit that I really liked painting on the knife texture of the primer. It reminded me a lot of the texture I get with the ink on paper paintings. I think the texture marks and what they do to the paint on top of them is as useful an element as any paint stroke. They can add energy and visual depth to a work. And they're an encouragement not to add a lot of unnecessary detail.

I like the idea of combining painting with three-dimensional effects; I don't have a problem with combining different forms and techniques of art. It's all art, after all. Like any other technique, physical texture can either support the impact of the painting, or completely overwhelm it and turn the whole thing into a bad joke. Sort of like my famous chocolate covered tortilla strips. Fortunately, most bad paintings are small enough to be safely and legally disposed of, unlike bad architecture.

On the other side of things, I finally finished the third Villa Catalana painting. I didn't do any of this on site, it was all studio work. There is at least one more image from there that I want to paint, but later.

Young Vineyard And Pond

Inspired by Autumn

Fall Fantasy

I was playing more with watercolors, try out my new hake brushes, and decided to use them (but not the hakes) on an inspiration I got this last weekend. I wanted to do an abstract of leaf shapes, but then as I was drawing it out I decided to make one of them more realistic. I stole its coloring from one of my O Isami leaves, so it's all pretty made up. But it does represent how excited I am to see the fall colors, especially in the local maples, and the leaves coming down in the wind. I love leaves, but I'm a sucker for the bightly colored ones. I really love them.

As long as I'm posting, I'll put up a poster for the next art fair I'll be at, in SE Portland at Ardenwald Elementary School on Nov. 22, and a couple of other things I've been working on lately.

I'm not sure if this painting of the grape arbor at Villa Catalana is finished, but I'm done working on it. It's as good as I can make it now.

Grape arbor in summer

I wanted to share my first painting with the hake brushes, not because it's any good (it isn't) but to give you an idea of what your first experiment might look like. It is possible, and fun, to use them to get something that looks like tree foliage. I think I can get better with them in time. At least I've still got the back side of this that I can use for another painting.

First try with hake brushes

I used to do watercolors before I retired, and I do like not having to throw the dry paint away. But, when you screw up something on an acrylic painting, you can always just keep painting on top of it. So they're both fun, in their own way.

At last - the first paint-out painting

Tree Grove, Afternoon

I've been working on my paintings from the Villa Catalana paint-out off and on since I brought them home. I worked on two of them that day, but knew neither one of them was finished. I spent a few sessions working over this one and I feel that I can't make it any better right now, so that means I'm finished with it. At least for now. I'm still working on the second one, and I'm also working on a third one that I didn't have time to work on during the paint-out. And I still have more photos that I want to do paintings from.

Looks like we still have more warm weather coming, so I'll have more time to paint. As soon as it cools off though, I have a big list of garden work that's going to take precedence. I expect at this point I'll have a lot of painting I want to do over the winter, while it's cold and rainy (and kind of looking forward to that!)

What an INCREDIBLE paint-out day this was!

Wow. It was a fantastic day--only a bit too warm for about an hour, and then it cooled down and the sun went down very slowly, very calmly, and very beautifully. It was a double treat for me, and "treat" is really an understatement. First, because it's such a beautiful place to paint, and second because there was an array of artistic talent and skill there that I've certainly never seen before. If you EVER have a chance to go to one of these paintouts (anywhere) where there are so many artists with 20+ years of experience, I can't even imagine that you wouldn't love it. Take those two things, throw on some good wine, beautiful food, and a most excellent jazz trio—with a lady saxophone player and one guy each on guitar and standup bass—and, well, words fail me. Burl and Cindy Mostel pulled out all the stops.

I didn't talk to every artist, there were at least half a dozen I didn't get to, but I did get to these, and I really want to share them with you. In no particular order, they are:

Carrie Moore - artist and designer, in several different media, including leather purses. Close enough to call a neighbor.

Jerry Dickason - Went from oils to watercolor back to oils. I really loved his watercolors that he had there.

Susan Spears - A funny watercolor artist who also teaches, from Lake Oswego. And she does Tai Chi.

Anton Pavlenko - Has an unerring eye for color, paints bold and big, and paints in the gorge in the winter. Brrrrr!

Yer Za Vue - Awesome skill with a brush, just awesome.

Randall David Tipton - One of the best art blogs I've read to date, a great painter with a bazillion paintings of places south of Portland in all seasons.

Jude Welter - Also teaches, has some exciting new work on yupo, really is a neighbor, and just keeps getting better and better and better.

Ruth Armitage - Another neighbor, and yet another local teacher—we have it so good here—holds workshops regularly, paints big and small in several mediums, and does some of the loveliest small oils I've ever seen.

Bruce Ulrich - He does abstracts! I love his abstracts! Hooray for abstract painters! Yaaayyyy!

My meager descriptions don't do justice to any of them. They're all amazing, and really nice. It was a total blast talking to them all.

Gosh, I hope I get to do this again sometime.

Going to my first Paint-Out Party

Next Saturday, August 23rd, I'm participating in a paint out and party at Villa Catalana Cellars, aka Rare Plant Research for plant-o-philes. I think there are going to be 8-10 artists there from the greater Portland area, and we'll either be engaged in paint-flinging brush fights for the prime locations, or peacefully painting the picturesque buildings, plantings, and gorgeous views out on the grounds. There's no other place like this in this area—it's as if you've space-warped to a Mediterranean clime, just for an evening.

The party will feature a jazz trio, catered dinner items, and wines from Villa Catalana Cellars. The cover charge is $10/person and you can sign up on the Villa Catalana website all this week. Reservations are required. The weather is supposed to be sunny and warm with a light breeze from the northeast. The party starts at 5:30 and runs till 9pm. The artworks will be for sale, and you'll have plenty of time to watch the artists, find your favorite place to sip a glass of wine, and enjoy the music and some food. There's plenty of parking and the directions are on the website. If you've never been out there, I can tell you it's a FABULOUS place for sunset viewing.

If you can make it, please look for me and say hi. I've already staked out the places I hope to work from, so we'll see how lucky I get. I think that painting as the sun goes down is going to be a real treat.

Hope to see you there!