Oscar

While at Nicholls Park (in Richmond) the other day, I met a younger man. He said his name was Oscar. After going through the usual questions most people ask of outdoor painters, he settled next to me and  watched me paint for a while. Then Oscar said, half joking, "bet you wouldn't put me in your painting." "Why not?" I asked. "Can you stand for twenty minutes?" "Sure I can!," he responded. "Ok, you're on!" For the next twenty minutes, he stood there, laughing and joking some more, saying he should have married me because I was "unusually open-minded." Then I called him over to see the results. I offered him twenty dollars for his time, but he refused the money, saying he had had "the time of his life."

Moss Landing, CA

We took a short family vacation this winter. The three of us and our dog rented an RV, drove for two hours and stopped at the coastal village of Moss Landing. Every morning I would take the long walk through the estuary to find a spot where I could legally paint the Salinas River flowing out to sea. For some reason the Moss Landing harbor, though very charming, did not cast the same spell. You can see why in these two 16 x 20" acrylics on masonite.

Sausal Creek, Dimond Park, Oakland

This creek runs through the middle of Dimond Canyon and in some parts the children and adult visitors can access it. I sat on the edge of a retaining wall bordering the creek to paint this 20 x 16" acrylic. It was a challenge not because of the many children who stopped to give me compliments, but because I was sitting in full sun. The glare was hard to avoid. The sun dried up my acrylics in half the time it normally takes them to dry. On top of all of this, my eyes had to adjust to the relative darkness of this green tunnel, then back to the canvas's glare. This painting will never do justice to the colors I saw reflected in the water, but it is a good first attempt.

I Love "Ugly" Stuff

This trawler was getting maintenance at an Alameda boat yard. It was enormous! I arrived late because of traffic and painted this 18 x 24" acrylic for two hours before returning home and finishing from memory.

Rainy Days and Daffodils

These flowers were a gift. My mom likes daffodils and it was raining. I had a lot of paint left over on my palette after working on a landscape, so I took a 16 x 20" canvas and spent a couple of hours painting these with acrylic.

Latino Vanitas

This 16 x 20" acrylic was done during class. I was trying to model the depiction of challenging surfaces in this medium, and arranged a still life in the vanitas tradition. Only that this time I used african and european instruments to symbolize my culture.

Abstraction at the Richmond Art Center

I am teaching a beginning painting class at the Richmond Art Center. Hopefully I have organized an environment that lets us sample different ways to engage in the discipline, which is why we based our abstraction in the observation of an object. I modeled this with a small (16 x 20") painting, mostly because I did not want to be looking over anyone's shoulder. I am also trying to cultivate self-awareness as we paint, so I took note of my ow process. It took a long time to convince myself not to go on my "automatic" mode, which is quite representational. But with patience it slowly emerged. I was pleased I was able to play with the essential elements of this still life, and happier still that I left my internal editor in the dust.

Jaloguin

This is another 18 x 24" acrylic done from my memories of Halloween. I am not sure if it will stay like this, but I am really liking doing this research into the recesses of my visual memory. It is amazing! I have focused on remembering the mood and light more than anything. In these memories I am the viewer, so none of these children is me. I am not forcing the composition or anything. The revisions I have done have more to do with values and colors than with content.

Ball Games

This 20 x 16" acrylic was done entirely from a collection of memories I have of my childhood in Puerto Rico. The top one is the most recent version. I took some licence with the houses as I did not want to make the background too distracting. I did not want to remember every detail either. After all, the genre is defined by the absence of small details.

The composition came out ok, considering I did not plan it. I find it very interesting to paint something I remember without a set plan, because you never know what's going to show up, it's like planning an impromptu dinner. So although the painting would look more beautiful if I planned it more, I am not sure "the doors would remain open," so to speak, to welcome stray visuals of my childhood.

Poet Karen

At first, one sees the person who is modelling; but little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model.
Alberto Giacometti

This is a 24 x 24" acrylic that I completed at the Firehouse in Berkeley. It took me six hours because I had a lot of trouble with the hands, but I like the light and the background. I learned a lot struggling with it!

Bay Street, Crockett

This 18 x 24" acrylic on canvas has an interesting story. Manicured places and objects have never held my interest the way deteriorated stuff does, so I pretended I was painting the view of the bay, but I was painting the house directly in front of me. The boat's owner, I overhead, was leaving the following day for Colorado, so I took a cell phone camera picture and left after two hours with just an underpainting and some quick color notations. The challenge was to finish the painting maintaining the color scheme I had seen. I also wanted to preserve the detail I could have noticed while standing in front of the house, but all I had was my memory and a cell phone pic as references. So the brushstrokes aren't as loose as my other work, but I think the colors came out ok.

Our Friend Adrian

If every person who commissions a portrait was able to pose this well, I would be done in record speed and they would pay less. Adrian had never before modeled for a group of painters. He held the pose extremely well! The result was a decent 24 x 18" painting, with good color. I hope he was not in pain when we ended. Modeling is very hard work and it's best to be in shape.

A Berkeley Figure Painting Session

I was invited to a painting group that meets in Berkeley, at the home studio of a local artist. I have painted the model before, but this time, because of the strange size of the canvas (15 x 30") I extended the view to include a fellow painter hard at work. This palette had Titanium White, Pyrrole Orange, Pthalo Blue, Dioaxine Violet, Cadmium Red, Cadmium Yellow, Lemon Yellow and Pthalo Green.

Our Standard Schnauzer

This painting started as a family joke. Kafka, our schnauzer, is a perfectly well-behaved dog until he sees either cats, picas or squirrels. The later seem to flip him into another channel! Standing is his favorite position once he has spotted one. Because I am teaching a basic painting class at Richmond Art Center, I wanted to do this painting completely from references. Thus began a series of life sketches (all interrupted because he is 16 months old and barely able to stand still), diagrams of his muscle system, and a value study followed by a color study. By the time I grabbed this small (20 x 16") canvas, I was feeling much more comfortable working from photos. A friend gave me permission to base the background on a photo of El Sobrante Ridge, and I painted the squirrel from memory. It has this tinge of magic realism, which is what I was going for.

Two Moods, One Lake

We went to Lake Anza in Berkeley for two consecutive weeks and I worked in acrylic again. On the first week it was quite sunny, but on the second week the day was overcast and even dark, with an approaching storm. I revised the sunny painting (24 x 18") on the second week because I thought the water reflections were duller than they should be, and I had time to embark on a second painting (20 x 16") with the same palette: ultramarine blue, pthalo blue, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, pthalo green, cadmium red, alizarin crimson, permanent violet and titanium white. It wasn't exactly a split primary palette or even a colorist's palette, but it worked well for this subject. The woman in the background is a colleague who recently joined our East Bay Plein Air group.

Bruce at The Firehouse

I occasionally visit the Firehouse group on Tuesdays to do figure painting. This 20 x 16 acrylic painting felt wonderful, because it flowed. The model was excellent! I was happy with the light and the modeling of this figure.

Still Life Process

The way to form transcends its own destination, goes beyond the end of the way itself. Paul Klee

I set out to paint a still life this week. Since I have northern light from a large window, I placed a large piece of foam board on top of a table right by it. I had a birch panel that I had primed with gesso, the cheapest acrylics available on the market, and some cheap nylon and hog brushes. I experimented for a while with various household objects as subjects, because their properties attracted me. Wanting to demonstrate certain principles in figurative work to my future students at the Richmond Art Center is what propelled me to go beyond my comfort zone.

I settled for a lineup composition and began painting. But I didn't bother to check some important things, such as whether my lines were straight, because I was too excited by the beginning. I was not thrilled at having to watch things like symmetry and whether or not a reflection makes sense or not, but this is what we get into when painting man-made objects. I "forgot" I have astigmatism, which means that when I am not wearing glasses I distort lines. And I don't wear my glasses because I like not seeing all the details so I can concentrate on other things.

So towards the end of the ten hours it took me, instead of looking at the overall values, I had to spend time correcting the vertical lines in two of these objects with a straightedge. Ugh. Then I noticed there was a lot of room for play in this painting and my mood lightened up. The reflections were subtle and so was the lighting. There was some color, but nothing too dramatic. So I could contribute much to the painting merely by making subtle choices in execution, values and color. And best of all, I could spend as much or as little time as I needed, which is the biggest advantage of working indoors.

I have "desaturated" a picture of the finished painting in Photoshop (the black and white photo). This lets you see pure value and you can check if the values work. One of the purposes of studying painting as a discipline is to train your mind to do this on its own, without Photoshop. You want to develop the ability to ignore color at will, and ignore value to concentrate on color if you need to evaluate either. I started out with a palette composed of eight colors, but ended up using mostly titanium white, pthalo green, alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow and cerulean blue.

If you compare the photo of the setup with the finished painting, you will notice all of the values and color an artist's eye can see, versus what the camera captures. This is why it is much better to revise from memory, because the colors I remembered were much more vivid than those in the painting. Even though painters are limited by the pigments with which we imitate the effects of light, it is still possible approximate those effects with good pigment choices and good value work.

Finally, I feel I should say this was not a mere exercise. I love the juxtaposition of forms in this still life, and the subtle color. But mot important for me is to train my perception to think of all of these factors.

Annie's Annuals

I gave this painting to my mom because I know she loves flowers and she loves this nursery too. The truth is plants are always a challenge! The place was lovely and they were very nice to the seven of us who showed there to paint. The light changed midway through the session and the nursery posed compositional as well as time contraint challenges. This is always a good exercise, but can feel overwhelming. Acrylic, however, lets you work rather quickly and so when the sun came out I had worked out the composition, the perspective and some of the underlaying color. I am happy with this piece.

Kiva Beach, South Lake Tahoe

I have never revised as intensely as I did with these two acrylics. Maybe it was the unusual sand color, or the fact that the light was so strong. The one with Sarah, Kafka and my mom (16 x 20") was done quickly because they didn't know they were posing. The one with the mountain (18 x 18") went slower. Intense light and many interruptions were big challenges, then I went home and finished them from memory. I keep finding that memory is much more reliable than photos when it comes to color.

What I Learned From Watercolor

Benicia's Waterfront, Acrylic on birch panel, 16 x 24"

I don't know if many of you know that for years I did not have a proper studio. Because oil and acrylic demand a certain amount of space, I felt I had to paint in watercolor all of those years. Now, I made this choice joyfully as one of my most admired art instructors happens to be a superb watercolorist and he influenced me. As a result, through high school and for the next 15 years, I saw the world through the demands of the medium. So what did I transfer once I was in my forties and financially able to build my own studio? I asked myself that question and the results were amazingly rich.

I am impervious to the seductions of heavier media. Let me explain. Oil and acrylic are so sensuous, it's like playing with lotion, or butter. It's hard to get on with the program. But watercolor, specially when you are doing figurative work, forces you to draw, to make at least a primitive plan before you begin. You must also take care of all the midtones before you lay your darkest values. So you learn patience and delayed gratification in several ways.

I never stopped observing. Because I was continuously presented with practical problems (now how do I depict those palm fronds?), I got into the habit of observing with these in mind. I may have not had a studio, but I painted with my mind when I was not doing watercolor.

My colors stayed pure. I learned to make the maximum use of the white of the canvas. I learned to stay away from muddy colors and use transparencies. I used the same pigments you would find in acrylics, trying not to overwork the surfaces.
Now I know when to stop. There is a point in watercolor when you've done all you can. Because it is a demanding medium, you learn to tell. You learn this the hard way too, by ruining nice paintings in a manner that is often impossible to disguise or scrape.

I think this is all. Whithout considering myself a real watercolorist, there is much I owe to this medium once considered appropriate only for field scketches and preparatory studies.