How about more photos today? We can talk about the business of art some other time.
Loving April Around Here
Sources of Inspiration
Today’s post is about beauty, because April is beautiful around here. Color and light is a source of inspiration for paintings. (Detail and light inspires my pencil drawings.)
On my way down to work at the Mural Gallery I stopped in the usual turnout for a photo of the lake.
On the way home, I drove over Rocky HIll and took many photos. This is a small sample, and there are lots of painting ideas here.
Any one of these photos could be turned into a painting. There are even more photos that I didn’t show you.
My Favorite Things (as in Subject Matter)
When I started my art business, I named it “Cabin Art”, or perhaps “Cabinart*”, because my favorite subject matter was architecture, mostly cabins.
As my skill and confidence grew, my favorite subject to draw (and eventually paint) was the Oak Grove Bridge.
During a particularly wet winter after several dry ones, I became enamored with rushing water.
Next, it was orange groves with foothills and mountains in the distance.
After a handful of years of painting multiple variations on this theme, I seem to be transitioning into beach scenes.
More on that later. . . Monday is time for a monthly Learned post.
*For a typo-psycho, I certainly am ambivalent about the spelling of my own studio name.
BUT WAIT! ONE MORE THING FOR YOU! MY FRIEND HANNAH IS OPENING A NEW SHOP IN THREE RIVERS!
This and That: Wandering Around Three Rivers
There is an excellent museum in Three Rivers, and parked in front are some old fire trucks plus this tow truck. I had to wait for a couple of friends stuck at one of the many ongoing lengthy roadblocks, so I wandered around with my inferior phone camera.
On a recent walk, I took this photo because it reminded me of my painting titled Swinging Oak. You can see it below with a convenient link for purchasing from my website. It’s just business. (I’m tryna earn a living here!)
Where’s the other chair?
Why am I not showing you any paintings or drawings? Because I am spending most of my time in the studio, editing another book for another writer on another topic.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Mental Acrobatics While Painting
A good friend, mentor, and wise man asked me if I have a relationship with my paintings. I wasn’t sure what he was seeking, so I just told him what goes through my mind while painting. Then I looked at the email conversation and thought, “Hmmm, this might be an interesting blog post”.
When I start a painting, I have photos to look at, and I copy what is there while also trying to improve on it. Move a tree, brighten a color, ignore a tangle of branches, don’t get too weird about making those rocks or cracks in the cliff perfect, increase the contrast, make that insignificant part blurry or leave it out. . . on and on and on, a continual mental conversation about how to depict a scene realistically but cleaner than real life. Real life is pretty messy, and I try to clean it up.
Often I think a painting is finished when it isn’t. It takes awhile of studying it, sometimes a couple of years, before realizing that it can be improved. This isn’t improvement to make it look more like the photo, but improvement to make it more appealing to the viewer.
My method of painting is to layer and layer, over and over, tightening the details, correcting the proportions, remixing the colors with each layer. Usually when I start, it is very sloppy, getting better with each pass over the canvas. This is similar to writing, where you tell yourself the story in the first draft. Then as you edit and rewrite, you refine your words, rearrange your paragraphs, realize that something can be misunderstood so you correct that piece, decide that something sounds foggy or stupid or unnecessary so you delete that sentence or phrase. Then you think it is done, until you look at it the next day or the next week or after you hit “Publish” and WHAM! THERE’S A TYPO! Or you wonder “why did I say that??” Or you think, “Nobody cares, why did I write this?”
I’ve never thought about it as a relationship with a painting. It is a project, separate from me. I talk myself through it, talking to myself rather than to the painting. Sure, occasionally I’ve said to a painting, “Buddy, you are toast!” just before painting it out entirely.
But the conversation is entirely to myself—“WHAT are you doing?? Stop licking the canvas! Choose the right color, get it carefully on the best brush for the job, and decide what you are doing before you just dab and jab. Okay, that is looking good, so now do it again over here. Your brush is too small and this will take forever. Whoa, I thought that part was finished and it looks really weak. Oh great, now you’ve missed entire pieces of the conversation on the podcast you are listening to because you were trying to mix a better green.”
So now you know what goes through my brain while I am painting.
With drawing, things are much easier, more automatic, and it is easier to talk to other people, or listen to a podcast while drawing. But I don’t feel as if I have a relationship with my drawings either. Many years ago I had to learn to keep emotional distance, to stop viewing them as something fabulous and irreplaceable or it would have been too hard to sell them.
And here is your reward for reading to the end of this very long post.
Walking in Nice Places
Let’s just enjoy some photos today, no chitchat about going to town, no stressing over prices, no struggling with plein air painting.
Another walk, another lake, in another town.
A Walk on the Lake Bottom
Trail Guy and I went to Lake Kaweah— “The Lake” —for a walk. It was a crystal clear day.
Stay tuned! I might do some painting here soon with my friend Krista who needs to do a few examples of plein air painting in order to qualify for a job. Like me she is a studio painter, but unlike me, she wants to expand into plein air. I have more experience at it than she does, so I can help her, we can hang out together, and maybe one day, I will actually improve my plein air skills in spite of my less than stellar attitude about it.
Walking in Three Rivers
Walking isn’t as easy as it used to be. I walk shorter distances more slowly than I used to, wearing Crocs instead of these shoes, which I now have listed on eBay.
Until the time change, my friend and I walked in the dark. Sometimes it felt adventuresome, as if we were getting away with something. On the days when her schedule isn’t tight, we still go 4-5 miles, although that’s nothing compared to when we trained together for a 1/2-marathon. Still, we are happy that we can walk and can do so in places without traffic, traffic lights, or sidewalks.
One day recently, Trail Guy and I poked along our street where he pointed out a peculiar sight on our neighbor’s lot.
I found a small sparkly on the ground, which I ended up securing to the fence of the former day care at the Presbyterian Church.
While admiring the view from the Catholic church, I wondered what the bright red was in the distance. It most likely is a truly spectacularly bright tree. We weren’t so fortunate when we chose our own Chinese Pistache trees, nor when they created volunteers on our lot.
I’ve always admired this barn across the highway, and being November, I also admired some red trees in the distance.
Walking more slowly and going shorter distances does increase one’s awareness of the surroundings. That is a good trait for an artist to cultivate.
P.S. Yeppers, two churches in our neighborhood, neither one “ours”.
SIMPLY HOME
CACHE Gallery hours are Fridays 1:30-4:00, Saturdays 10:00-4:00, Sundays noon-4:00.
Tuesday, November 12, 6:30-7:30, I will give a demo/talk called How To Draw at CACHE. It is full.
Assorted Photos with Chit-Chat
If you look in the shadows between (and beyond) the 2 chairs, you might be able to discern a doe with 2 fawns, probably born that very day.
While getting gas at the Four-way (local vernacular for an important intersection), I snapped this photo. Barns this classic and oak trees this majestic, quercus lobata, are standard but disappearingTulare County items, and when seen together, they should be painted or drawn or just photographed. (If I paint this, I will edit it severely.)
This is called a vitex tree. Doesn’t that sound like some sort of diet supplement? We tend to refer to these as “lupine trees”.
I finished 2 more Mineral King paintings, both 8×8″, drying quickly in the heat.
My friend with the Hume Lake cabin sent me this photo, which might possibly be the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen. Maybe I shall paint it. . . yes, I KNOW it is in Fresno/Fres-yes County but it is a well-loved place, even among us ignorant, fat, uneducated, poor, diabetic Tulare County hon-yocks.
First Mineral King Stay of 2024
On the drive up the hill, I was just astonished by the abundance of yellow flowers, particularly bush poppies, covering the areas that burned in 2021. There were also blazing stars, common madia, flannel bush, and monkey flowers, all yellow. There were some other colors too, but yellow dominated.
I have been working on a painting of a scene, incorporating every cabin below Timber Gap and Empire’s outcropping, in spite of there being no actual place to see everything at once. So, this was a good opportunity to really observe each cabin before all the foliage had leafed out.
I spent several sessions standing in various locations, sketching how each cabin might look in relation to its neighbors.
But I bet you didn’t come to this post to see me go on about my work.
The Mineral King road is still under construction with a fluctuating schedule of closures. As soon as I think I know when it will be open and when it will be closed, the schedule gets rearranged. There were many pieces of equipment parked along the shoulders (such as “shoulders” exist on this road), many piles of dirt, and many places of dropping down to gravel where sections will be repaved. But compared to last summer, it isn’t scary.