Every painting a new learning experience

 

White Salmon River in Husum, WA
Oil on canvas panel, 18" x 24"

On this one I learned how to wipe off oil paint so I could repaint things I didn't like. I tried scraping it off with the palette knife, but I don't use enough paint to scrape off, so I used small cut-up pieces of paper towel, being careful not to scrub so I don't leave paper fibers in the paint. A little bit of turpentine on the towel helps stubborn paint. I always cut up a paper towel into a couple sizes of small scraps and stack them next to the palette on my table. A stack usually last me a few paintings, and they're really handy when I get paint where I don't want it. I also keep a roll of good, sturdy toilet paper there for wiping knives or brushes, or cleaning the palette. Most of the tricks I learned painting in acrylics also work for oils, but I'm having to relearn how to work with slow-drying paint. Sometimes, I just have to wait for it to get tacky--like when I have to rework small detail. The older I get, the more my hand moves in strange ways, and the more blobs I make.

I also got quite a bit of practice on this one doing blending on the canvas, and I recommend the Paint Coach videos on YouTube if you're new to oils. It is definitely easier to lighten than it is to darken something.

One thing I've learned in all these years is that it's REALLY important to have the RIGHT amount of paint in the RIGHT color and the JUST RIGHT consistency, to make a successful brushstroke, no matter what your style is. I guess it's only experience--millions of brushstrokes, or maybe billions--to figure out what that needs to be, every time you pick up your brush. Too much paint, it's a blob, too little, it's a stutter. But in creative hands, even blobs and stutters can make amazing paintings. In any case, I hope to be painting for several more years!

I finally found myself a painterly approach

For years I've been trying to loosen up my painting style and stop being locked into a purely realistic approach, and this painting feels to me like my first truly conscious achievement of a naturalistic painting that used brushstrokes as a fundamental element of the design. Participating in the Van Gogh immersive show last year was perhaps the final impetus to making that happen. Having the oil paints with their workability definitely helped.

I used mostly two brushes, a 1/8" flat and a 1/4" bristle bright, and adding a small 1/16" synthetic round for the foreground flowers and grass. Normally I would have switched to the small round to try to get the distant trees to look more like trees, but I've finally accepted that that's not what makes a painting good. What makes a painting look good to me is a good composition, an interesting or pleasing color combination, and some opportunity of mental or emotional connection.

I'm finding that I really enjoy painting the magnificent landscapes of the gorge and I want to paint as many of these beautiful places as I can. Coyote Wall is part of the Washington Syncline, a U-shaped fold with the youngest layers of rock on the inside. The other half of this U is on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge. I'm not sure how the wall formed but it looks like a slump/slide to me. It's another famous climbing site, one of several in the Gorge. I took the reference photos in April of 2019, the year of the Balsamroot Superbloom.

It was a bit of a revelation to me when I first brushed in the trees, to find that they looked just like trees to me, and I remembered what I've heard many times from artists I admire that engaging the viewers' own imagination helps them connect with a painting. A realistic or naturalistic painting is an illusion that invokes a response from the viewer, and imagination is what makes that possible. So there's no reason to feel like you have to paint detail, unless you want to.

Recovering the Joy of Oil Paints

Catnap

A few weeks ago, a friend gifted me with a full set of Oil Paints that her son no longer wanted, and got me painting with them again! I had switched to acrylics because in the predominantly wet weather here in Beavercreek, they were taking more than a week to dry. This was before Alkyd paints were popular, and I'd had enough of water-miscible oils that I wasn't going to mess with that any more. But a few years ago I got a heat pump, and it keeps the humidity inside low enough that they dry in about half the time they used to. And I'd been thinking about wanting to get back into them since last fall, but was dissuaded by the cost of buying a good big set.

So I picked up some turpenoid products and spent a couple hours watching The Paint Coach on YouTube, and started my first painting. I picked the most complicated composition I'd ever tried, which was a mistake, and it took me almost 4 weeks to get it to an acceptable state, but I'm working on a second one that should be a lot more fun and relaxed. I'm wanting to play with them more, try out some new techniques, and just relish the gooiness and pleasures of oils.

One thing I've really missed with acrylics is the possibilities of brushstrokes! It's really fun to use brushstroke to mimic actual texture in the subject, or to add structure to the painting as a whole by changing how a particular part of the composition reflects the light or attracts the eye of the viewer. Think of Van Gogh's brushstrokes. Ever since I was immersed in the superb Van Gogh show and display last year, I have repeatedly enjoyed strong visual memories of how persuasive his sculptural brushstrokes are, how they attract attention and reinforce both the colors and designs he created. I wasn't able to do use brushstrokes in this painting, I was too overwhelmed by working on an intimidating combination of unfamiliar subjects—the person, the cat and the fabric--but I'm trying to use them in the painting currently on my easel—a landscape of the famous Coyote Wall in the Columbia Gorge. I'm sure it'll take me some time to get used to thinking about every single brushstroke as I load the brush and apply the paint, but it's a skill I look forward to getting good at.

One creative choice I did manage to assert in this painting was to eliminate two thirds of the stripes on this duvet. Putting them in would have added another month or two to the painting time, and given the shakiness of my hands these days, would have made it a lot more chaotic and difficult to look at.

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.