Diminuendo

I began to lay-in something new in the studio over the weekend, a painting constructed from painted studies and my own imagination/recollections. Very liberating and fun after my last outdoor piece, which required a lot of physical effort and direct response to natures’ quirky comings and goings, what I call “chasing the light”  for lack of a better description.

Most every plein-air sketch painted after the sun begins to wane will suffer from an under-exposed look. The darks, when later viewed in normal light, will appear weaker than you painted them and there can be a bit of a washed out, timid look to the color, which is simple to understand because in those circumstances the artist is making decisions while painting in what amounts to a darkening studio.

If you want to understand this better, go into a dining room with one of those dimmer switches on the overhead light.  Look at a white object, say a dinner plate, in full light on the table and then gradually begin to turn the light down 30%.  The white object is still a white object, but it’s not white anymore, it’s a gray of some sort, and 30% darker from where you started. So are all the other tones.  This is going in the direction of low-key painting, where the lightest lights and subsequent supporting tones are all subdued, the edges soften, and the darks cluster into shapes and  silhouettes.

For that reason, it’s important for me to study the effects of early evening light with the idea that I’ll be replicating them mostly from memory later.

 

untitled, 18 x 24″, hand-primed linen mounted on panel

I have a number of small early-evening sketches that are adequate to remind me of the effect I want in this painting, but I know I can’t rely on them completely.  So, for this piece I get to dream and recall those precious times alone after I finish working outdoors on a late afternoon piece, when my light effect is gone and energy spent, and I’m just in that envelope of late-dayness, where you finally put everything aside and you are simply glad to be there.

The composition itself is a collection various experiences cobbled together, a tree or two from one place, a cliff from another.  Let’s just keep that between ourselves, though.

I foresee thin and thick paint built up in quiet shape-touches of broken color for this. A rich surface.  I hope I can do it, and I hope it will be beautiful.

 

 

Update: on the easel

Just a quick update, I got another couple hours developing the current painting.  It’s coming along well, and I’m refining some areas while getting more adjustments in the values and shapes.  Great fun to work this large, and the old easel holds up like a champ, in spite of some wind gusts that would send this canvas sailing otherwise.

A skewed but representative image at the end of this morning’s flogging.

 

            A slightly better studio shot…

My friend Geoff Stone was able to come by and work on his painting as well.

                                                               Geoff at work.

That Waimanalo Bay Painting Again

I’m into yet another session on this painting, planning a few more to get it together to the point where I’m (hopefully) satisfied with it.  I’m mainly bringing the colors and values together, like drawing a large lasso around the whole thing and gradually corralling everything closer to the moment in nature that I’m in.

Besides the work on the painting, I’ve had a lot of good times with the visitors to the beach, curious to see what on earth I’m doing, the usual questions and comments to which painters out-of-doors become accustomed. I enjoy taking a few minutes to answer the questions and chat a bit  because I’m always so surprised by the differences in perception that people have of their surroundings. I noticed Saturday evening someone kindly left an unopened Heineken on the log next to me, presumably a little token of appreciation.

 

Ko'olau's over Waimanalo

untitled, 20 x 36″ oil on panel

Because the light is seldom steady here ( I typically have mountains, trees,  and low-hanging clouds over my right shoulder, which is where the light source is), I can only catch the look of light striking the elements of the painting, especially the cliffs,  in snippets…there’s almost no time when it’s visually as I’m portraying it.  So the piecemeal effect has to be fought by moving around the painting and not getting hung up on one area too long.

I spent one session eliminating the lower third of the sky and repainting it.  The clouds I’d painted simply weren’t contributing as I intended and so I scrubbed them out and reworked the area, which is now looking much better.

The shadows are delicious… extraordinary lavenders set against the yellows and bright greens.  I’m gradually getting the surfaces developed in a way that I like, something that is becoming more important in my paintings lately.  I anticipate some glazes towards the end as well.

Here’s the little watercolor that started it all, 7 x 10″

Cinderella Greys

It’s been a while since I’ve had anything large on the easel, and so I’m excited to have this new painting under way, which hopefully will figure nicely into a show scheduled in November.

It began a few weeks back with a fast, last minute sort-of watercolor sketch when the light unexpectedly illuminated the grove of Ironwoods on the right.

light effect/composition sketch 5 x 7″ watercolor

I find it profitable to do the first round of composing in watercolor…I experience the effect and get it under my skin quickly,  and if it doesn’t work, I see it without a big commitment of time, plus I have a sketch for the archives and to pull out down the road when hunting for some fresh inspiration.  I think I use sketchbooks and watercolor somewhat in the same way that a lot of artists have used the camera, which I’m still unable to get enthused over.

Since this was promising, my next step was to return to the location and work up this small oil painting  to see what the possibilities were.

sketch, 8 x 10″ oil

That went well enough and the final painting, shown below,  was begun last week, this image showing the second session’s development

untitled, 20 x 36″ oil on panel

Now that I’m on to the final piece, there’s so much to respond to in this subject…the constant fluctuations of light and color at this beach keep me moving all over the painting, trying to allow the light effect to remain the principal thing;  how it passes across the face of the cliffs and the very real inner illumination it provides the grove of trees.  Textures are everywhere in the lights and halftones, many opportunities to be pretty rugged with the paint itself.  I hope to get some real surface charm into this painting.  But these strange greys are the thing that are making this painting work.

Mysterious, evasive, improbable combinations of cool blues and warm reds that would be unattractive if isolated from the sun-drenched passages that they are joined to, but that perfectly support them when unified.  Maybe I should regard them as the Cinderalla colors of painting…I believe I enjoy dwelling over them more than the obvious, luscious colorful sections.

Two Ideas

Two principals I’ve come to understand over the last few years:

There are no unattractive color combinations in nature.

Crazy thought maybe, but I think it’s true.  I cannot recall seeing any naturally occurring combinations of color in nature that were not somehow harmonious and appealing, though the individual component colors may not be, and often aren’t.

The novice seeks to improve his paintings by adding details. The artist does so by simplifying and refining relationships.

I put that thought out for my students, many (if not most) who are struggling with learning to work with the great generalities in their paintings first.  It finally came to me while laying in a landscape painting and took me a good long while to get it into two sentences, and it probably could use refining.  But it’s true.

Any thoughts?

 

New moonlight studies

I was excited to take myself on a field trip Saturday, May 5, to head to the high cliffs nearby and take a shot at the spectacular full moon that was promised.

I loaded up my oil painting gear and my small pastel kit and was at the Lanai Lookout on our Eastern shore by about 4:30 PM. Folks were already assembled to watch the much-anticipated moonrise over the ocean, and so I was fortunate to grab a parking spot, and from there hiked with my gear about a quarter mile across the old basalt flows to a high point that I’d decided in advance was a good place to work from.

From previous posts, you may know that I try to define my mission in advance. By this I mean that I decide whether I’m going sketching (looking for a general effect), making a study (fact-finding), or doing a finished painting.  Since this was a sketching trip, I brought small oil primed panels along, as well as pastels, hoping to capture colors that would be of help later. Because of the brevity of the sunsets here in Hawai’i, I already realized that seizing any shapes, except the simplest ones, would be more than I should expect.

As the wind was quite strong on my location, I opted for oil, and I didn’t get anything terribly fancy, but was pleased with having caught the general color mood.  I worked as hard as I could, loving every second of it.  The sketch (9 x 12″) was done with Liquin as a medium, which I rarely use outdoors in Hawai’i, but it helped in this case.  This small piece will serve as an important reminder of the color I experienced for anything I do later in the studio.  DSC_0002

By the time this oil sketch was done, it was too dark for more painting, so I hiked out, loaded up my gear and backtracked in my car to another favorite piece of shoreline about a mile back.  For perhaps the next hour, I sat on the shoreline making mental notes of the rocks, the action of the ocean against them, and the effect of the light, which gradually become much cooler as the evening turned to night.  Drawing was hopeless, but I felt that I had formed a pretty strong mental picture of the values and colors.

The following evening, I returned in the very late afternoon with my pastel sketchbook to make some quick sketches, such as this one. moon sketchbk

I didn’t have the moonlit effect in quite the same manner as the previous night, but had already fixed in my mind what the effect was, and began the following morning to produce this pastel study, 14 x 18″, in-studio from my sketches and memory/imagination.

pastelmoon

This should serve me pretty well if I decide to work up a more involved and larger  painting from the experience.  Right now, I’m able to envision a large pastel or something along the 30 x 40″ size in oil.

Early Morning

Began this yesterday AM, at about 7:00, and am now a couple hours into it.

P4200003

untitled 12 x 16″ oil

It’s surprisingly one of the most constantly transitioning subjects I’ve ever painted, which is odd because all of the shapes are as stable as they come. One would imagine I might claim that about the ocean, which certainly doesn’t sit still, but this mountain takes the prize.  It’s the light and color that is absolutely schiz-o  from one minute to the next.

Anyway, I find it as challenging as can be to find the color notes. Because of the difficulty, I again find myself experimenting with a method of organizing my color mixing…creating a large middle tone for for an area I wish to paint (say the mountain) and bring touches of color around this base that can be dragged into it (scrambled a bit); light from above the mixture,  dark from below the mixture, warm from the right side, cool from the left.  It’s a game, but The Idea is to be systematic in adjusting the values and temperatures, which I find gets me using more paint (a good thing for me), and hopefully lends a more decisive and cleaner look to the painting.

This is the idea, if you can make any sense of it:

P4200002

The painting surface is one of my beloved homemade lead-primed panels, and it’s perfect for the kind of painting I’m doing, which is tiled-on notes with straight paint over a warm wash.

Can’t wait for tomorrow A.M. to get cracking on this again.

Change-up my game

For many year I’ve persisted in painting from life whenever possible.  This has included everything from landscapes and ocean pieces to the commissioned portraiture that comes my way.  I tremendously enjoy the engagement that comes from being in-the-moment with the subject I’m painting, and will continue to do so as long as I’m able.

But recently I’ve been looking to improve on some of this because there is an obstacle within my approach, that of becoming overly-occupied with the purely visual (which I do love) and not allowing enough consideration to other matters.  Working with the subject constantly before me has at times led to some poor decisions in composition, color, and emphasis over the years.  The more I look at the paintings that I admire, the more I see my future progress in terms of designing more unique and thoughtfully composed paintings, if I am able to.

What’s changing

The approach I’m adapting is to create paintings by starting with an imaginary sketch of what I think is an ideal design.  From this point, I gradually gather my other resources (drawings and color sketches done at the location) to combine and develop a third and final work. This tips the see-saw in favor of a structured and inspired composition, and away from relying on finding a decent arrangement  in nature where one may not really exist. This final amalgamation may be painted in-studio over time, with the advantage of the color sketch done from nature providing actual color notes and shapes.  This is different than relying on photography, because I’ll have mixed the color combinations before when sketching and will not have to skirt the yawning trap of reliance on photographs.

In case you were wondering, this is nothing new; it’s actually an older approach than the generally  impressionist approach I’ve been cultivating for so long. As I find myself getting older, I’m looking  to make use of all of my accumulated experiences painting before nature, but also to be able to direct my energy to the larger, more carefully composed paintings that can’t be done in the wind and weather.

DSC_0124

This small (5 x 7″) watercolor sketch, based on a scene I’ve painted before, is an arrangement that I thought I’d like to impose on the actual subject.  It’s from my mind’s eye, an arrangement of simple shapes and colors that I think are better than what I see at the location. This allows me to move shapes and emphasize what I find helps the painting. All of this is studio work done in advance, employing a little daydreaming and composing that I can’t do when I’m outdoors, primarily chasing the light effect.

Later, I went to the actual location and painted this oil sketch (9 x 12″, below)  This contains enough factual information, like color of water, shadows, rocks,  to combine with the imaginary sketch above for the composition of a final piece, which may be in watercolor, oil, or pastel, and at any size I decide.

DSC_0119

This will be a great advancement if I can make it work.   I’m planning a full-sheet (22 x 30″)watercolor from these two resources which would be quite difficult to achieve outdoors. A small scale version of the final piece in pencil is today’s project, and I may get to the final piece later this week.  I’m enthused!

I’ll keep you posted.