"Overflowing"

6x8. Oil on canvas board.

Wildflower season is down to the very last few flowers around here. I wanted to capture a bit of that sense of explosion, the way wildflowers don't grow in neat, tidy rows with every bit just so. The challenge on this one, frankly, was painting around the flowers (leaves, stems) with the dark background color. I love cutting in and letting a little of the base color show through (if it's not white), but it can look contrived if it takes too much effort. Also, it took courage for me not to refine the pitcher more. I wanted to perfect the curves and the shadows, but decided to let go. So, no, this doesn't look polished, but there's a slapdask appeal to it.

"Reaching"

6x8. Oil on canvas board.

I haven't been posting much the last few weeks, but I've been painting. I think I've been desperately trying to fit in paintings of spring wildflowers before they go away, while in final rehearsal for a show (I also do theater).

In this piece I was trying to paint more loosely. Of course, so many artists try to do that that we should just make it an acronym or number it or something: Artist's Goal 21-A. :) This one does a fair job of it, especially in simplifying the reflections on the glass. Below is the work when it was part way through. As usual when I do an underpainting, there's a devil-may-care noisiness to it that I like.
I wonder how many artists have tried to figure out how to keep that freshness? The nice thing about this particular draft is that it almost works as a composition. Nice trick, and I wish I'd planned it.

In other news, I live in Northern California, and we have a fierce start to the wildfire season, with more dry lightning coming this weekend. There's a constant smell of smoke in the air, and that's likely to continue for another week. At first it was creepy and felt dangerous. Well, we are tracking the fire reports, thanks in part to a Yahoo group devoted to our area, and we're having our shrubbery cut back. But also, now that sense of danger has settled, I'm wondering if I can paint the amazing visual effects the smoke is adding to the landscape.

"Headlights"

6x8". Oil on canvas board.

I did this a few weeks ago. I had painted a daisy and still had some growing wild in my yard, so I did a couple more. This painting fame out in two phases. The first was below, and I found the colors to just be uninteresting. So I took a picture of it and mucked with it in Photoshop. I didn't get exactly what I got in Photoshop, but the colors are more unusual and more interesting. I especially like how the orange shows through the green.

First plein air and I forgot my red paint

6x8, oil on canvas board

I recently found a plein air painting group to hang out with, and this was my first work in a long time. Heck, I think I can count my plein air paintings on two hands. But I'm not displeased, especially since I forgot my red paint. I guess if you're going to paint outside and you need to forget one color, red ain't bad. It's better than blue or yellow/ochre, which you need for sky and plants, which features are very common outdoors.

I did this piece at the Baylands, a protected marshland in Palo Alto. It's a wonderful preserve where critters who frequent brackish water have a safe haven. The white structure in the distance is the Sea Scout Building, built in 1941 in the streamline moderne style (not that I know what this is) and it has a colorful history. The day was, as you can see, cloudy overhead, with puffy clouds over the mountains. I don't know that I nailed the scene (I'm not happy that the composition is split in half so evenly), but there is goodness in it.

"Peering," 6x8, oil on canvas board

This is one of the best things I've done to date. I am really happy with it. (I hope this doesn't sound arrogant, but with most of my paintings I can see ways to improve them, or see that they need improving, but I'm not sure how.) This might look like just another floral, and it has its flaws, but to me there's a sense of physical weight and depth. Maybe presence? Naturally it almost painted itself. Like Tom Brown said in a workshop I attended, "I just held onto the other end of the brush."

How did I do it? Luck, I think. Well, that's not fair, really, given how hard I've been working, but sometimes things just come together. The interesting part for me is to look at what happened, so I can do it again (that's very important). After all, you consciously learn, then internalize:

• The pitcher has a sense of heaviness to it. That comes from how thick the ceramic looks along the rim, as well as the fact that it's earthenware and people know how those feel.
• The reflections on the lip and water edge add dimensionality. (That inner wall of the pitcher was the hardest thing to do.)
  
• The flower shadow below the pitcher has a sense of sureness about it, coming from not fussing too much (a bad habit of mine). I must have gotten it pretty close to right in the first attempt. Also, the red underpainting shows through just enough. I did the shadow partly by cutting in , and I'm learning how powerful that is. And fun.
  
• The daisy itself looks dimensional, partly because of the shadows. This yolk on this daisy stood out like a button, so it cast a wonderful shadow. A couple of other crossing petals cast shadows that add to the dimensionality. I've been experimenting with warm vs. cool shadows; these are warm and it works better, although I don't know why. But I just love the petal at 4:30. I guess I painted it in shadow, then did one stroke of white.
  

What else did I learn (or relearn)?

• Sometimes an outline makes something look fuller. But you have to watch it a bit. A painting can look cartoonish in a good or bad way.
• While I was working on this, I read somewhere that shadows should be full of color. I totally agree, and shadows were where I first started to add strange colors. But shadows also can have defined or fuzzy edges, and lighter or darker patches.
  

I'm not sure whether the blue reflected light works, but that's how it looked.

Anyway, I've done a couple more daisies since then, but not with as much luck.

"It's Twins!" 6x8, oil on canvas board

After all the recent hot colors, I apparently wanted to take a break and play with a neutral. I do like the way the red looks against the taupy background. I'm working on getting better at neutrals.

I have been painting but not posting the last couple of weeks. There are times when I feel like I just don't have enough time to paint. At times like that I'll sometimes just eliminate what I can and paint. Of course, then I have to swing back and take care of the things that got dropped. Anyway, I'll be posting more of the paintings I did the last week or two.

Also, I found a local plein air painting group! I've done a couple of outdoor paintings. While I clearly have lots of room for improvement, there's enough of a germ there to make it encouraging.

"Cots in a Bowl," 6x8, oil on canvas board

More apricots. I'm afraid the bowl might actually be a spa-style soapdish, but the fruit fit in it so nicely! I did this last week, shortly after my prior post, and in between I sacrificed two of the 'cots to appetite. Below is the painting in process. I still think I'm covering up too much of the underpainting. And sometimes I like the underpainting more than the final. Maybe there's something about the spontaneity. Hmm.

Last weekend I was in LA and got to visit the Irvine Museum. It features work of the California Impressionists, whom I am only now coming to appreciate. I especially liked the work of Franz Bischoff. There's just something about the way he puts the colors down that I love. Maybe it's his background in painting ceramics that gives his work a graphic feel. I don't know. But I get breathless when I look through the book I bought of his paintings. I'm finding other artists like that, too: Euan Uglow, John O'Shea.

One fun thing about the California Impressionists is that I live where a lot of these painters worked, and there's scenery across the street that looks like their paintings. It's giving my hikes a whole new experience. Must. Get into. Plein air painting. . .

"Scattered Apricots," 6x8, oil on canvas board

I seem to be into hot colors right now. Maybe it's the season, or maybe it's the color of what I'm painting: fruit available in the season. Is spring fruit yellow-orange? I'm seeing a lot of that color and blue in recent paintings. Whatever! Apricots do that lovely blush thing, and I thought these would look good on an intense blue.

I shall wax philosophical for a nonce. I'm noticing an interesting factor in my painting: I'm having to use my emotions instead of logic to figure out what I want to do. And if I don't do what appeals to me -- what I want -- I lose the desire to paint. It becomes drudgery. And I refuse to let that happen.

I think that, in this society, using our emotions is not that natural. We're used to figuring things out with our brains, mostly, while using emotions for energy or validation. And the working world certainly is brain based. So this is an area of growth for me that I had not anticipated. That's actually kinda cool.

"Orange Reflection," 6x8, oil on canvas board

I'm still playing with the reflections. It's an interesting challenge. Now, I have a lot of colors of construction paper, and when I create my setup, I often use sheets of it behind or underneath the item. In this case I used a sheet of aqua paper behind the orange and ultramarine paper under it beneath a sheet of glass. The reason I'm explaining this is that the backdrop sheet reflects in the glass and the colors go catawhumpus. It can make your eyes go wacky trying to figure out what the colors are, not to say values (as I mentioned in an earlier post). I have one of those neutral gray viewfinders with the slider that lets you change the aspect ratio. The viewfinder also has a couple of holes, and you can look at colors (or values) through them. This has proven very helpful.

Another funny thing I noticed about this piece is that the size of the items painted makes it look like this might be a much larger work. I think that in the smaller works we tend to do close-ups; it gives the work more punch. This works well in something small, but might be too much in something big. Depends. Many artists have made it work.

One thing I'm pleased with here, though, is that I let the orange underpainting show through more than I usually do. I like doing that, but often go overboard on covering the canvas. When I do that, another favorite tool is my little pencil squeegee.

"Floating in Glass," 6x8, oil on canvas board

These are the same tomatoes I posted yesterday. I really liked their color, and was remembering how I enjoyed the combination of reflection and shadow from a recent post. That painting is leaning on some books in a bookshelf across the room, and even from here I like the depth, and the way that where the reflection and shadow overlap you get the darkest colors. So I used the same tomatoes as yesterday and set up another reflection+shadow. But apparently that wasn't complicated enough for me. I had to add a colored glass bowl, which introduced transparency. Then, while I was playing with the setup, what I fell for was the color combination.

But working this one out was pretty tough. As with the prior work I linked to, I really, really had to pay attention to values. Yes, they're darkest where shadows and reflections overlap, but other areas are more complicated. I also found that there was a shadow that reflected the red background, and in the setup the red was really bright. But that was terribly distracting, so I darkened it.

It was also fun how the tomatoes seemed to float in the glass. So I used that for the name.

Here's the piece with the underpainting in place.

It looked awful on my easel, but here it looks kind of geometric and decorative.

I have to say, this one looks like it would be interesting if I painted it big. These small pieces are often used as studies. I blew up another one recently. I'll post it soon, and think about this one.