New Work

In the final state of this print I removed the hill shapes in the background because I thought they were too distracting. I took some of the prints I pulled before removing the hill and added color using colored pencil. The effect reminds me of hand colored photographs, and it was an interesting way to play with different color combinations.

This is a picture of the block before I started printing.

“Launch for Hire” block print on Owara Mulberry paper, 8×10″, edition of 10. Available at my Etsy store.

The building sticks out into Tomales Bay and last time I drove out to Pt Reyes I managed to get a photograph of it with the tide out. In the photograph you can see the hills in the background, but I decided to emphasize the pattern of the light patches visible between the pilings that support the building. I may still come back to this image and play with changing the background.

“Cypress Shadow” oil on canvas, 18×36″

I’ve always found working from photos to be awkward. The colors never seem to be the same as what I remember, and it feels really different from working from life to be peering at a little photograph. But there are times when working outside poses distinct technical difficulties, like having a large canvas in a windy location. (Can you say sail?) And then I read Ed Terpening’s blog about using a television to view reference photos for painting. He hooks his camera to the TV, and then his reference photos are large and full of light. So I set up my laptop in the studio to do the same thing, and it worked great. I could stand back and get the overall picture or zoom in on sections at will.

“Distant Hills” 11×14″ oil on canvas panel

I drove out to Pierce Point Ranch again on Sunday, and did a couple of paintings. It was very windy, so I didn’t attempt any large paintings, even though I’d brought a couple big canvases. In fact, I chose the location for this painting partly so that I could shelter from the wind in a corner of two buildings. Even with the wind there were a lot of people around and I don’t know whether it was because I was wearing forest service green pants, or just because I was stationary, but I fielded a lot of questions about the location of the bathrooms while I was painting.

“Striped Bowl” 8×10″ oil on canvas panel SOLD

“You Say Tomato” 5×7″ oil on canvas panel [$75+shipping]

The classic song “Let’s call the whole thing off” was going through my head this afternoon while I was painting tomatoes. Now you know my ipod is full of Gershwin, Cole Porter and Billie Holiday.

“Red Tomatoes” 5×7″ oil on canvas panel [$75+shipping]

Red is not a color I usually use a lot of. There’s not a lot of pure red in the landscape, unless it’s a red barn, and then there’s usually a lot of other colors interacting with that red. I found mixing interesting colors more challenging with this painting, because my temptation was to just make the tomatoes all red, straight from the tube. The new tube of Sennelier cadmium red might have something to do with that. But in any case, I found it was harder to see all the other colors in the tomatoes because I was so focused on their redness. This is of course the fundamental challenge of realism – the brain has a lot of information about the objects you observe (tomatoes are red, chairs have legs of equal lengths) that as an artist you have to ignore in order to just see what’s right in front of you.

“Hay Barn” 5×7″ oil on canvas panel SOLD
This is the last of three paintings I did out at Pt. Reyes. The building is the same hay barn I painted in “Pierce Point Ranch”, but from the other side of the building.

“Blacksmith Shop” 5×7″ oil on canvas panel [$75+shipping]

This is the second painting I did Sunday out at Pt. Reyes. I really liked the intersection of the buildings and the pattern of the fence. One of the buildings is the blacksmith shop (thus the title) and the other was part of the dairy for a while, and then used as a calf shed for a while.