Beach painting...

Monday I loaded up my car for a “painting” trip as you can see above. Actually, I have been doing mostly painting since the waves are flat right now. The surfboards are sitting idle. Yesterday I got a bit of painting in to make the most of the sunshine. Below is the painting I was working on into the evening, despite the freezing cold breeze off the ocean, and the fading light. You can see in the photo how much warmer and sunnier the painting is than the view. It started off sunny with beautiful warm light on the rocks and water, so I decided to stick with that. I’m pretty happy with this painting. I’ll try to get a good pic of it posted when I get home from this trip.

Sorry to leave such a short post, but I have to get back to the house to meet a buddy who’s coming down to surf this afternoon, and I have some homemade cookies that someone made me for this week… YUM!

Cezanne in Philly....

Cezanne painting of Mont-Saint Victoire.
On my recent trip to Philly I managed to get to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the show “Cezanne and Beyond.” The show turned out to be a wonderful surprise. I kept reading that it was a great show, but I thought it would be hard for the show to measure up to the hype. I was happy to see how much work was there, and how many of the paintings were really lovely pieces in their own right. The intent of the show is to explore Cezanne’s influences on a wide range of artists, from Matisse to Giacometti to Gorky to Ellsworth Kelly, and 15 others. Some of the connections between Cezanne and those he influenced seemed like a stretch to me, but my interest in the show had less to do with those connections and more to with the quality of the work. I loved a room that focused on the still life, with some paintings by Matisse, Cezanne and Charles Demuth. There were also some great landscapes and figures… but what grabbed me in any of these was not the subject matter as much as the execution of the painting; the spirit of the endeavor to make a painting of an apple and do everything possible to capture the essence of that apple. It’s not about rendering every piece of the subject in perfect detail, but trying to convey what it is about that object that moves them. Some of the paintings were so simple, but had a powerful presence. Some of the works in this show may have been ground breaking when they were made, but I think that the reason they still hold the interest of artists today is that they are capturing something wonderful and moving about the world that we can’t verbalize, but will feel when we look at the painting with open eyes and an open heart. There is a resonance in these works that is so much more important than anything we say when we try to describe our work or justify it in an artist’s statement (something I’m trying to work on these days.) The things we talk about when we describe our work are important and are often great reasons for making the paintings, but they are less interesting to me than that quiet power that an excellent painting can have…some kind of  a deeper beauty. That all comes back to why I was so surprised to get excited about this show. I knew that there was a good chance that the premise of the show would require it’s curator’s to hang some works that fit their idea, but were not necessarily top-tier paintings. There was some of that, but for the most part, I think they did a wonderful jobof putting together a show that gave me pause several times, as I had to stop and lose myself in a Van Gogh landscape, or a Giacometti sculpture, or a Matisse still life, or one of Brice Marden’s large lyrical abstractions, or a small colorful canvas by Gorky. I almost missed the show but I’m glad I snuck it in to my trip.

From one thing to another....

This was the first of two night paintings I did in Philly last week. I went out after dinner and did this and one other quick sketch. I was doing these by the light of street lamps because I forgot to bring my headlamp and booklight that I like to use for illumination. And the secon painting I did is the following image.

I know these photos may look a bit muted, but the colors I used were pretty dull for the darks. I was struggling to see small differences in the value of my darks, so I kept them a bit on the softer, lighter side. It’s a really interesting challenge painting a night scene on site. It really tests my knowledge of my palette, and my ability to guess the amounts of a certain paint that will make the intended color. I was pretty happy with these, and think I can use them for some studio paintings later on. I have some other images and stories from Philly that I’ll share in a future post.
So I got back from Philly this past Thursday, late at night, and had to get my self unpacked and turned right back into work mode to teach a workshop this weekend. I taught a two day workshop in Damariscotta at River Arts. I really like working with them. They are a great organization that has invited me to do alot of fun (and challenging) new things, and they were very helpful this past weekend.

There were twelve participants in the workshop who were all very hard workers and alot of fun. I was lucky to have such serious students who were already good painters. We all had a good time painting, despite some pretty chilly weather on Saturday and getting forced indoors by the rain on Sunday. Saturday we worked on some tonal studies in the morning and did some work with a limited palette in the afternoon, painting some very overcast scenery, which is no easy task! It was a tiring day as the elements wore away at us, but there were some very nice paintings made. And Sunday I was nervous about, because I’ve never been forced inside for a workshop, so I was not sure how it would go with still lives… but I set up two tables full of fabric, flowers, vases, fruit, and some other random objects I could put together. It turned into a good way to work on alot of the same ideas I use in plein air painting. I spent alot of time this weekend working on getting my students to look much more carefully at the values and colors of the scene they were painting, and then worked alot with paint handling, applying clean colors, being more intentional and clear with your brushwork, looking at edges in the painting. By the end of the weekend I felt like everyone was making much stronger images and I’m really proud of how everyone did. I’m pretty sure we were all completely exhausted by the end. I know I ended the weekend with a nap when I got back home.

Streets of Phila....

I made a last minute trip to Philly this week. I’ve been trying to find time when I could get down here for a couple of days, and when the weather would hold up for me. Things finally came together and I got my stuff together and drove right on down here. I’ve spent the last few days painting all day. Sunday I found some fun new spots to work on Broad St. And then also saw some nice scenes by China town on my walk home from Broad. And yesterday I did some painting in the Italian Market on 9th st. in south Philly. Then looked for some new places to work between there and old city. I’m pretty excited about some of these new paintings. I’m doing more work on linen panels, for the ease of getting wet paintings around, and it’s working out well. This morning I was working on a rooftop scene, but I got rained on a bit near the end so I decided to pack it up and take a break. After getting some lunch in, I’ll hit the streets and go walking around with some smaller panels to see what I can get done.

On my way down here I stopped into LL Bean in Freeport, looking for a more comfortable bag to haul everything around in. I found a nice camping bag that is working out really well. It’s a big enough bag that everything fits inside, and with the belt-strap buckled, alot of the wait ends up on my hips instead of my shoulders, so it’s fairly comfortable, considering how much I’m carrying around. My back is still a littel sore at teh end of the day of painting, but part of that is from these marathon days of standing in front of the easel, and part is from carrying the bag. Either way, it’s a big improvement over my old system.

The painting above is one I did last year on a trip to Philly. That was done on the Ben Franklin Bridge looking out over 2nd St. It was a fun challenge to paint, and is kind of similar in some ways, to the painting I worked on all morning.

Well, I just saw the sun peak out, so I better get back outside!