Back to Horsethief Butte

I still have at least 100 pictures of the Columbia Gorge that I want to paint, and this time I went back to Horsethief Butte for a south view showing late afternoon light on the western part of the butte, plus the vegetation farther from the walking trail near the massive outcropping. I went with friends just before sunset and I shot many images as the sun slowly dropped behind Mt Hood and the Columbia River. Most of the grass was long gone dry, just the tiny water-hoarding groundcovers still showing any green. Gray, Tan, Ochre, and Orange were the dominant colors. Horsethief sits in the rain shadow of the northern Cascade range so it dries out mid summer to glowing golden slopes between the blue sky and the river reflecting it. It was a beautiful evening and made a lot of memories for me.

The challenges of painting clouds with softness and subtle color variations

Catherine Creek Cloudy Day

 I was at Catherine Creek State Park with a friend one March morning a few years ago when clouds were moving across the sky, blocking and then revealing the sun. We even got drizzled on for a bit, but had a lovely 2-hour hike through the basalt bluffs and weathered towers, with spring wildflowers blooming throughout the meadows and the oak trees still bare. I did one painting soon after that of Wankers Columns, but had several other photos I wanted to paint, including this one. When I took the photo, looking into the sun, I was really happy with the shapes and density of the clouds, framed below by this small rain-shaped gully bordered by rough basalt ridges and thin stands of white oaks.

But the photos themselves were complete duds, no color whatsoever in the clouds and the landscape completely silhouetted against the brilliant sky and almost-revealed sun. I loved the composition but hated the loss of color. For the years since, I knew I didn't have the skills to recreate the scene, with the brilliant spring grass and the subtle hues of the backlit clouds. In the last year, however, I've been practicing on clouds, working to develop a technique that would give me the look I wanted. I don't know how many times you have to paint a subject before you know it well enough to create it from your imagination, but that is my goal with my subjects, like the landscape and clouds here.

Acrylics have a lot of challenges in the best of circumstances, and more for slow painters like me. I have neither the experience nor the confidence to paint a new subject boldly and quickly, before the texture of the paint becomes either too dry, or too wet from trying to keep a mixed color from drying out over a period of several days--or weeks--while I work out the details of the composition. I almost never want to use the straight tube colors--I end up blending them, adjusting the value, and mixing colors freely with both their complements and their neighbors on the color wheel--whatever I have to do to get just the colors needed to work together.

I also like to layer colors to mix them. On this painting I used more than a dozen different mixes of gray, white, black, two blues, two purples, yellow, orange, and green to get the hues I wanted. And I frequently misjudge values, even with the reference photo on my iPad for the best color, and end up having to lighten or darken whole areas after I've painted them, to get the scene right. Sometimes it feels like I've painted the whole painting three different times, slowing bringing everything into the right balance.

My latest discovery has been that once I have the basic pattern of the painting done but the colors just aren't right, and they need just small adjustments, I can tweak them by picking a very small amount of paint on the right-sized brush, then wiping the brush gently on a piece of paper towel, so there's very little paint on the brush. With that, I can put the paint onto the canvas very carefully without it globbing or running, or me leaving so much that I have to wipe it off (which is also a useful technique.)Then, of course, I have to let that bit of paint dry so I don't smear it with additional strokes. That way, I can adjust the value or hue by small amounts. And when you do finally have the value relationships right, you can get amazing depth and subtle textures of colors.

Big fish: How to solve the biggest problems

Do You See Me?

I recently read the book "A River Lost: Life and Death of the Columbia" by Blaine Harden and was persuaded to enter an art show about the topic of the book, which was all the engineering projects that were done to the Columbia, with their resulting human and nature costs and consequences, the small benefits and the big losses. I was moved to try to give 'voice' to the inhabitants we rarely see outside of plastic-wrapped food packages—the salmonid poopulations that are hovering on the edge of extinction due to the consequences of the slowing of the river and the consequent increase in water temperatures, exacerbated by global warming.

When we view the Columbia River, we see many different types of work and play, but unless we’re actually fishing, we usually don’t see the salmon there. They are an inextricable part of the ecosystems of the entire Columbia watershed, feeding many of the peoples and the other animals, yet they are nearly invisible to us. This painting is to give viewers an up-close and personal view of what salmon look like in the river. It is based on a photo taken by Mark Conlin and published in Hakai magazine on the web.

Forest science studies show it was the fish spawning and becoming food for land mammals that provided the nutrients for the great forests; fish that used to come upriver in groups so dense "you could walk across the river on them," a perfect and seemingly inexhaustible food supply for the entire region, and this year the run was so small that fishing had to be closed months early. I keep wondering what it will take for us to mend the damage we've caused.

There was a great special on OPB this summer about two groups who were fighting over the "owls vs. loggers" dilemma who started spending happy hours together, drinking, becoming friends, and talking about each other's viewpoint, and wouldn't you know, they worked up a solution between them for how the loggers could do their harvesting and at the same time protect the owl populations.

Right now we have separate populations arguing their needs are the greatest, the most important, and that others' needs should be set aside. Maybe what we need is to argue instead that all the interests are important, and start working on ways to cooperate to meet everyone's needs. As soon as we recognize the equal importance of all the things we want the river to do, we can stop wasting time defending our interests as "the right ones" and start working on balancing solutions that allow us to do all those things--maybe in different ways--so that all those goals are achieved.

A new series with lots of trees and foliage

 

Mt Adams Early Light

Some friends asked me for paintings from three different photos they took on a July 4th camping trip, taken on different days and at different times of the day. I love Mt. Adams so I was happy to take the challenge. I took some liberties with the composition, bringing the mountain more forward (and larger) behind the middleground, and also making sure the dead branch was the same in each painting, as it was a feature for them. After taking the photos they noticed that it was always there even though the locations were different, so they asked me to put it in.

Mt Adams Sunny Day

The most interesting part for me was the difference in the lighting and how to capture that. The foliage in the sunny photo was a real test of patience, as the mix of white oaks, pine, and firs created a tapestry of greens and leaf outlines and textures. I didn't want any more detail than I needed to convey the mixed forest. I ended up blocking in the dominant color shapes before I worked on the detail. That and trying to match the subtle gradients in the sky colors took twice as long as I expect. The blues in the sunny photo were so close I literally couldn't tell if I had the right color or not as I was putting on the wet paint, and I had to wait till it dried and darkened to see if it was right. There was a very slight hue difference between the mountain and the sky, that also helped me get the colors mixed up occasionally. There was a lot of repainting on that one.

Mt Adams Sunset

The sunset picture gave me some good practice with shadow colors. As I've found before, shadow colors in the afternoon and evening are frequently warmer than one would think. All in all, it was a fantastic practice in drawing, painting the pine trees, and in color mixing. And I still love Mt. Adams.

Learning to paint clouds

I made a commitment to try to learn how to paint clouds this winter. I'd like to get to the point where I know them well enough to be able to invent realistic looking clouds. My goal is to finish ten small cloud paintings. I've just finished my third and have started my fourth. I forgot to put the first two up here, so here they are. Both are of Spring clouds in the Columbia Gorge, looking north from the Oregon side of the Columbia River, in the vicinity of Tom McCall Preserve, west of Hood River.

It's all about the Composition

Goat Mountain Sunset

I've spent an awful lot of years learning to get the colors I want in a painting, and I'm getting good enough results now—not necessarily easily, but eventually—so it's time to get on to the next part of learning to paint: the paramount importance of composition, and how to create a good one. I take thousands of photos a year, and maybe 1% of them I recognize instantly as having a great composition. I've watched other people do value studies, and I've done some myself, but only a couple days ago, as I was contemplating what to paint next, I finally understood that it's during the value study that you adjust the composition until it acquires what it needs to attract attention. I always end up trying to fix the composition in the last third or less of the painting process, because I've been so focused the whole time on getting the colors right.

I frequently repeat the saying I read long ago, that "Painting isn't hard—you just have to get the right colors in the right places." So I was focusing on the right colors; now it's time to focus on the right placing.

I did a monotone value study for this last painting as the first stage, and I think it's been this experience that's made me fully absorb the process, and be able to think about it clearly. The study looked like this:

Then when I started painting over it, I first went with a blue violet palette, looking for something dramatic.

I decided I didn't really like that, and shifted more towards aqua hues, as I kept reworking the shapes and adding details, until I had the underpainting finalized.

And then I finished it, using a new trick to make sure I was capturing the composition that attracted me to the photo in the first place. I like to use my iPad as my color source now, but looking at an image that large (anything bigger than 5" on the short side) makes it really difficult to see the larger shapes—my brain just gets lost in the detail. So I print up a small image of the reference, no more than 4" on the long side, and tape it to the easel post right above the painting. When I stand back 8-10', I can easily compare the shapes in the painting to the shapes in the photo, and see how to fix things if I've gone wrong. Ta-da!

This view is not in the Columbia Gorge, it's from near Cornelius, at the edge of the coastal range.

Getting the lines right from the start

White Salmon Canyon Overlook (SOLD)

I've only been realizing the last couple paintings that I've done a poor job of the overall lines and shapes from the get-go, before I finish the painting. It never used to dawn on me till well after I'd finished glazing and framing it. This one, I figured it out in time (I hope) to partially fix them. The problem was, I had made the outlines of the yellow hills too rounded, making the composition look cutesy, and not the impressive vista I had seen. I also made the foreground slope not steep enough, but was only partly able to correct it. However, the change I made was enough to drop the cartoonish look and make it more true to my memory. I hope next time I'll make more certain of the major lines while I'm still at the drawing stage.

I've felt all along that the overlapping triangle shapes was the big attraction about this composition, along with the opposing blue darks and yellow lights, not quite a harmony but interestingly close. I'm thinking that having those lines and proportions correct is key to capturing the visual feel of a landscape--not to mention the demeanor of the whole composition—the big zigzag here is what I always think of when I see this, or remember first seeing it at sunset on a brisk fall day in the gorge.

This view is looking north up Washington Hwy 141 from White Salmon, with the river off the left side.