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.

Why cell phone cameras are a good thing

Underwood Fire, 7:14AM

I was at my friends' house and went out early my last morning there to take some pictures of the city lights across the river, and I noticed sky light reflecting on the river so I turned to the east to shoot one of the pre-dawn sky, and this is what I saw. After I pounded on the window to get their attention I whipped out my phone and took 3 quick shots, two of which were blurred. Sitting in the living room, occupied with books and computers, none of us had noticed it.

The fire was about an hour and a half old at this point, and I was definitely anxious as we watched a new, big flare-up about every 3 minutes for far too long, as the packing plant fruit boxes and parts of the pear shed caught fire, one after another. We got on the radio and found that our guess from looking at maps was correct. I really felt helpless watching the destruction continue, wondering if it could possibly jump to the trees and head toward us. When I heard they had six engine companies on it and more were on the way, I relaxed a little. About an hour later, they had all the flames out, leaving a smoldering, smoking ruin.

Another blue and orange painting! (With a little teeny tiny bit of yellow.)

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.

A big loose-ish landscape

I was thinking I would try doing a photo-based landscape in the same brushstroke style I used on Wild Iris, but as I was painting in the sky and tree foliage, I decided to reduce the amount of texture by having fewer brushstrokes and more larger, smoother areas of color. Most of the water is pretty smoothly mottled, but I tried to delineate most everything else.

The location is the Catherine Creek State Park in WA, northeast of Hood River. It's a great wildflower area I go to with friends most years in May. As far as I know, only the elves use the stones to cross—there's a wood plank bridge for humans. It's where I took the photo from.

It was a pretty straight-forward effort, using a lot of glazing to get the myriad of greens and blues that are in here, and a guess at how many highlights to put in. They could change. This one took me a week, the longest painting I've done all year. I would personally call it "impressionistic" because it really is all about the light.

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.

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.

Red Sky, Blue Planet

Mystery Of Water

Ink & Colored Pencil  22x30  $550

At last—a new painting! It feels good to finish one again. It's an ink painting, one I saw an image of in my mind before I started planning it. I let the idea settle for a couple of days, before I laid down the first layer of color on paper. After the first layer dried, I did a second layer to create the dark blue textures. It took several days for that layer to dry, before I could do the finishing work with colored pencils.

I had a new challenge in this one. I wanted to develop the foreground textures enough to be interesting, but I didn't want them to distract from the drama of the simplified background. It took me a few days to decide how much interest was enough. It's a personal choice, and at first I wasn't happy with having to make a choice at all, between doing what I've been doing lately—making the most of every possible detail—and directing all the strength to the main theme—the contrast between the landscape and the sky.

I used to joke about paintings that depend on having a spectrum of colors for their impact, and now I've made one that has little else. That's what comes of poking fun, I guess; the turkey comes home to roost.

What does it mean, The Mystery Of Water? Water connects us to every life form on the Earth. The storm in the sky is water, the lake and the river are water. Trees, grass, birds, bugs, humans—we are all made of water.