Category: How I Paint

The thinking and practical side of the works I create.

Konahua’nui -third session

After a week of overcast weather, I finally have been able to return to work on the painting. The conditions this morning were ideal, and so I essentially spent an hour session going after the biggest color notes and biggest shapes in the mountain itself, trying to get them established more fully. I’d placed the sky color in the studio, allowing a lot of breathing room with the warm underpainting.

The paint takes on a nice quality as I develop it, one touch over the next, hopefully bringing it closer to truth. I need to build carefully to avoid notes that take way from the large effect, which is such an easy thing to miss. Some knife work will be in order; some of the textures and planes receiving the light have just that sort of feel, as if the color were spread across the rough mountain face with a trowel .

Konahua'nui Konahui’nui oil on linen, 20 x 24″

As for knife work, I seem to make a distinction between palette knives and painting knives. I use a palette knife for cleaning the palette, either a big 3″ trowel or an actual hardware store paint scraper. The painting knives are too delicate for anything but painting, and I reserve them for the occasions when I want the surface qualities they offer. I’m still pretty cautious/selective in their use, but can see that changing as I become more familiar with them. I’ve seen some remarkable use of painting knives in the hands of Thomas Moran, Frederick Leighton, and others.

pal knives

One idea is to mount painting knives onto the handles of paint brushes. I find it works wonderfully, especially if you have hands as large as mine!

Konahui'nui 2

Because sometimes you have to.

This particular painting has had some reconsideration since I declared it finished a while back. As I always like to do, I gave it a rest by putting it out of sight, moving on to other work, and returned to reappraise it objectively after some time had passed.

In this instance, I decided that it was falling short of what I was after.

I find the effects of light, color, and motion in Hawai’i to be so beautiful, in and of themselves, that I’m very conscious of the danger of caricaturing those aspects. One sees that enough…exaggerated colors and stereotyped images of the sea, drained of any actual reality or meaning, as if the artist has lost contact with the subject.

While I never felt I was running that particular risk, I found that there were improvements to be made in the color of the water, which was running a bit too green, and some compositional additions that would be positive .

Lanai Lookout

Sunlit Surf- Lana’i Lookout Oil on Linen 24 x 32″

I made some appropriate adjustments in the color, some additions in the foreground and the introduction of a white wave in the background on the left horizon, which adds more of an incentive for the eye to travel there. Finally, I noticed a very pale, waxing crescent moon one evening, and decided that if painted very subtly it could be a beneficial addition. I’m now much happier with the piece and am willing to let it rest for final varnishing and to be framed.

Lanai Lookout2

First Lay In

I’m finally back to some oil painting after several months that have been predominated by watercolor work for an upcoming show and magazine article that are in the works. More on that later.

This is the lay-in and some second -day work on a new painting I’ve started. It’s decidedly not a new subject for me; I’ve painted various interpretations of this mountain over the years.

However, I’ve never been entirely through with it as a subject…it’s monumental presence, practically in our community’s backyard, is delightfully transmuted hourly as the sun and the atmosphere play their games across it’s face. Whenever I look at it, I find myself wanting to give it another shot. My goal is to capture the truth of the color in the early morning hours, on the rare, clear sort of day when the entire mountain is visible. I want very much to make this a painting which makes it’s stand on beautifully observed color and shapes.

The two main difficulties in this painting are the speed at which the color in nature changes, and the unusual combinations of pigments required to get the right shades. Combinations of pigments that easily can go dead have to be applied loosely, reds and blues and yellows woven or scrambled together into rather odd scarlet-greens in the lights, and shadow-shapes of violet greys that seem to be equally troublesome to get a handle on.

My solution for all of this is to repeatedly get to work on the painting in the same light and at the same moment of the day, and gradually build the painting in touches of color as best as I can, allowing the truest notes to show through and adjusting the shapes and carving out the form gradually. I’m really not sure how different this is than a portrait approach, in all honesty.

Mtn lay in

untitled, 20 x 24″ oil on primed linen

I will probably need about eight clear mornings to get a good grip on this, and hopefully the weather will be accommodating for another one or two days this week.

The canvas is a medium linen with a somewhat absorbent oil (lead white) ground that was single primed at least six months ago. It’s taking the paint well.

detail

As an added inspiration, I’ve just re-read Ives Gammell’s “Dennis Miller Bunker”, a wonderful biography of one of my favorite American painters. Revisiting that book, I find myself again connected with the idea of going after the “big look” of nature wholeheartedly; that it’s a worthwhile and precious thing to obtain a beautiful result through a patient and thoughtful impressionism.

Roadside Watercolor

I’ve been in the watercolor groove for about two months now…something that seems to happen about every year and a half or so. I’ll either treat myself to a period of somewhat careful drawings in pencil, which I feel sharpens me and re-centers me, or go the other way entirely and try to hammer out a group of small, fresh watercolors, which is what has occurred this time.

Erik Spearfishing Erik Spear Fishing, watercolor 11 x 14″

This piece was a complete roadside impromptu. I showed up in the morning with my son’s Scout troop, who were going spear fishing for the first time as a group. While they were out in the bay, I trudged around looking for a subject that I could pull together in about an hour or two.

I finally decided to set up on the side of the highway, shaded by a few trees and parked cars, and get to work on this scene, hoping to find the group returning here, the spot where they set out from. I thought it would supply me with great material, all these wet people clambering about on their return, hauling their gear and excited from their adventure. I had my sketchbook out and ready, but instead, they came ashore behind me, and so I convinced my son to come over and pose for a few minutes while I worked out a sketchbook drawing, which I then placed into the painting.

In typical Hawai’i fashion, I had two pre-teen girls wrapped in beach towels sitting in the shade at the foot of my easel, texting their friends and snacking on treats from the crack-seed store. I almost bailed on this piece and went after that subject instead; it was beautiful…dark hair and skin, white, yellow, and pink towels, and dappled blue shadows over everything, but experience has taught me not to jump ship once I’ve left the dock.

The fishermen came back with some fish, by the way, including a nice octopus which ended up on the barbecue for lunch.

Sunlit Surf-Lana’i Lookout

seascape Sunlit Surf-Lana’i Lookout 28 x 32″ Oil on Linen

Other than some minor adjustments, I consider this painting finished. Now is the time where I move on to another painting and get this off my mind. I love this point, because ironically, that helps me come back to this piece with a fresh, objective eye after some time has passed, to see if it’s really finished.

I make that judgement based on a couple of factors. Going back to my original intentions, that sense of weight, power, and energy are as close to what I’m after as I think I can manage. I’ve made some changes from the sketches; choosing to keep larger areas in shadow, shaping the rocks differently than I planned. The main thing is that the eye moves through the composition as I wished it to, and the handling of the paint seems to me to be energetic and varied, without arresting the movement of the water more than necessary. I remember while doing the plain air sketch that there was a sense of the water actually “galloping” forward, and I’ve tried to capture some of that.

While I move on to the next painting, I may come back to build some of the impasto areas more heavily after some drying, and possibly a warm glaze over the rocks in sunlight.

I always seem to hold out the great hope that “this time, I’ll really get it.” “It”, for me, is the sense of creating a convincing, shimmering reality, all the while keeping the viewer fully aware that this is “only made out of paint.” It’s the duality that one gets with good impressionism…it’s the absolute look of the thing being painted, and the paint itself, and you can’t decide where the thing ends and the paint begins…the awareness of both are simultaneously present.

I’m not there yet, but trying.

Watercolor day

Makapu'u

Today is a dedicated watercolor day. My friend and fellow painter Roger Whitlock and I have a project we’ve developed in which we get together and paint a wide variety of subjects, each delivering our own take on the theme or locale. The final intention is to show them side by side.

A watercolor magazine is interested in our project as well (which means an upcoming publication deadline), and so I have a lot of partially completed things to pull together from our outings.

Today will see me working on three paintings; the one illustrated here is a plein-air piece done just after sunrise this morning at a very dramatic location, Makapu’u beach. We’d worked there yesterday, where I took a stab at this subject after a false start on another piece. Basically, I hadn’t followed the advice which I give my own students, which is to avoid “drive-by” painting, where you rush into something without sufficient preliminary thought. Circumstances being what they were, I plunged ahead, which rarely yields the best results for me.

But I used yesterday’s flops as a stepping stone, and decided to return bright and early and see if I couldn’t get this worked out a bit better. I’m pleased with the result, a vertical sea painting with a lot of rather foreboding darks. I think it will nicely compliment the beautiful piece Roger is sure to paint when we return here Monday.

Now, I’m off to tackle two more half finished pieces before sundown.

Sea painting revisited

Fifth day’s painting

After some delays, I have images from the last two sessions.

There has been more work in every area, beginning with a scumble over the foreground water of Viridian mixed with some Cerulean blue. This allows me to deepen the tone, which needed to go a bit greener, as well as giving me a thin layer of fresh paint to work into. From there, I brought down the shadows in the whites of the waves to a deeper value, and added more warmth to the whites with the addition of Cadmium Scarlet and some orange and yellow as well. I’m still utilizing my original plein air sketch as a guide for color, as well as other sketches from that area and my recollections.

I love building these whites slowly, adding a bit of linseed oil in the impasto areas, and developing texture in them with some selective painting- knife work. I admit I originally was a bit biased against the use of painting knives, associating them with method-painting approaches, until I became aware of some marvelous effects in older landscapes (William Lamb Picknell easily comes to mind). These were strong effects that I couldn’t get with brushes, and so I decided that I’d better get of my high horse and start making use of them.

I needed simplicity and roominess in the sky to create some relief for the chaos in the water, but at the same time the strong warm notes of orange in the low lying clouds were great to complement the blue-green sea mass. The clouds I chose to paint are simple, directional, and typical of that time of early evening. I’ve allowed a bit of the warm undertone of the sky to show through the pale blue, which lends a subtle vibration in an otherwise quiet area of the painting.

An interesting lesson in how I paint skies…we were members of a wonderful German church when I lived in Brooklyn NY, and they had some fabulous stained glass windows that had been imported from Germany back in the 19th century. I noticed that to get a particular sky effect, the glass artists had cleverly juxtaposed various pieces of warm and cool blue of the same value against one another, in varying sizes, which from a distance gave an optical color effect unobtainable had a single blue been used. That’s an idea I’ve used since then, placing brushsrokes of varied blues of identical value side by side.

Here’s a reminder. It’s good to see how far things have come since the original sketchbook drawing of late August.

Sesketch059

Paint, scrape, and paint again

Third day’s painting

I got an early start on this day’s work. The morning light in my studio is congenial to this piece, and so I managed about three hours of painting.

Keeping the water moving is an ideal that I always try to realize. In every way I know how, I want a sense of life, to avoid that ice-sculpture look of “frozen” waves, and I think it’s a design problem and a seeing problem as well as a knowledge problem. It’s one of the reasons I’ve avoided the use of photography in my paintings. The wonderful stories of painters like Frederick Waugh and Charles Woodbury, who would take themselves out in storms or lash themselves to the decks of ships, all that crazy stuff, to indelibly impress the movements of the ocean into their minds, is pretty inspiring.

I’ve got a good handle on where I’m going in the painting, and I think that it’s expressing some of what I’m hoping to convey. As I get more involved with the various sections, I’m keeping that eliptical movement in mind, and I’ll need to practice restraint where I might be tempted to overstate and hang the eye up. Paint, scrape, and paint again.