In case these before and after posts are putting you to sleep, let’s skip the chit-chat and go right to the paintings.
The show hangs until December 29 at CACHE in Exeter. Their hours are Friday 1:30-4, Saturday 10-4, Sunday noon-4. It includes about 50 paintings, 3 original pencil drawings, calendars, cards, coloring books, The Cabins of Wilsonia books, and a few pencil reproduction prints.
Plein air painting #3 was the only one I did that day because I spent the morning trying to solve my easel problem. A new friend at the painting retreat lent me a pochade box, which needed a tripod to hold it up if I didn’t want to paint sitting with it on my lap. I drove to another town and spent time trying to find a tripod to support the wooden box. After several attempts to find a tripod to hold the box (WHY WAS I AT A MALL SHOPPING AT BIG BOX STORES WHEN THE BEACH WAS CALLING??), I decided it was a waste of time. So I drove back to Asilomar, found a turnout, did an impressive job of parallel parking, set up my stuff at this view, and started painting.
I decided that I’d had enough frustration for one day, so I climbed down to the beach, and took a few more photos. If this painting makes your eyes bleed, please forgive me.
Phew. Much better!
Looks as if I forgot to sign it.
The show hangs until December 29 at CACHE in Exeter. Their hours are Friday 1:30-4, Saturday 10-4, Sunday noon-4. It includes about 50 paintings, 3 original pencil drawings, calendars, cards, coloring books, The Cabins of Wilsonia books, and a few pencil reproduction prints.
This is the second plein air painting I did in Monterey. I set up in the shade by the path to Asilomar Beach (another struggle against that easel), and this time I was determined to do a better painting.
This painting gave me hope that I might be able to paint plein air. It also gave me time to decide to look for a trash can large enough to stuff the easel into.
After I got home, I retouched it and finished it to this level.
This one deserved to be signed.
The show hangs until December 29 at CACHE in Exeter. Their hours are Friday 1:30-4, Saturday 10-4, Sunday noon-4. It includes about 50 paintings, 3 original pencil drawings, calendars, cards, coloring books, The Cabins of Wilsonia books, and a few pencil reproduction prints.
This is the first plein air painting I did in Monterey. We set up on Asilomar Beach, and I tried to concentrate on painting when I just wanted to put my feet in the water and enjoy the waves. Instead, I tried to paint while the waves kept moving and my easel kept fighting against me.
Then it was just too hot and frustrating to keep standing there, so I packed it up and took this back to my room.
After I got home, I retouched it and finished it to this level.
That’s odd—I still haven’t signed it. I wonder if I can make it better. . . maybe in another year or two. I’ll sign it next time I am painting.
This is Asilomar State Beach, the first place I set up an easel to paint plein air, which means feet in the sand, wind in my hair, hair in my eyes, and easel fighting gravity.
This is my painting of Asilomar Beach, brought into submission in the confines of my painting workshop (i.e. studio).
This is Carmel Beach, voted the most beautiful beach in California or the US or ???, as first painted while sitting on a park bench, balancing a pochade box on my lap with my palette of paints on the bench beside, all the while wishing I was down on the sand with my feet in the water, minus the painting.
This is my painting of Carmel Beach, brought into submission in the painting workshop, with the able assistance of some photos where things hold still for a pair of minutes and color can be actually seen rather than squinted and guessed at in the bright sun (or deep shade)
But I’m perfectly neutral on the topic, as you can see.
P.S. At the opening reception of my show Simply Home, an acquaintance of many years said to me, “I’m going to tell you something that will make you mad.” Then he proceeded to say, “You draw better than you paint.”
What would he have said if he’d seen my plein air paintings before I retouched them??
CACHE Gallery hours are Fridays 1:30-4:00, Saturdays 10:00-4:00, Sundays noon-4:00.
P.S. This painting is the one chosen for the publicity for the show. Yes, it is oil on wrapped canvas, but I’m tired of typing that and fairly certain that you are tired of reading it too.
Among the 100 or so folks in Monterey at Fall Color Week, there were fantastic painters along with rank amateurs: my work fell solidly in the middle. I am a studio painter, and this whole thing stretched me. I could go on and on about what I learned, but I suspect that if you are not an artist, it will cause you to click off this page, maybe (horrors!) even unsubscribe (but ask me privately if you have questions about the value of plein air painting).
And then there are my paintings. I did 10 total, but only showed 8 of them in the room where we placed them each evening.
And thus we conclude our long series of blog posts “Plein Air Painting in Monterey”.
Now we can return to our regular blogging topics, and maybe I’ll actually finish some of these paintings to where I might confidently put them up for sale.
Here is today’s painting, done in the studio (because I was NOT going to carry my bad easel 4 miles), for Simply Home, a solo show at CACHE.
Although I am still going on and on about the week of plein air painting in Monterey, now that Simply Home has opened, I will show a painting from the show each day until I either run out of paintings or run out of days.
Each evening I ate dinner quickly, grabbed a to-go cup of decaf coffee, and scooted down to the beach for a little time before our evening gathering sessions. Everyone loves sunset at the beach in California, but most people stayed at the tables conversing and having dessert. It was just too loud in there for me, and the beach was calling.
I never did see the green flash because the sky was never clear in the west. Besides, I’ve never seen the green flash and wonder if it really exists or if it is like Sasquatch.
These photos are beautiful, but in Plein Air World, it is VERY BAD to paint from photos. You may use them for reference, but if you aren’t painting on location, your paintings will be SUBSTANDARD. So there.
(Oh yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it, eh?)
There were a few oddities that caught my eye throughout the week. (I used “sundries” in the title because of the alliteration.)
This car was parked near me when I sat on a wall painting. A very dressed up young woman appeared briefly, but I was too engrossed in my work to figure it out. Probably engagement photos.
This was behind the counter where we got our meals.
This house was next to the building where we had our Rah-rah sessions, and one evening it was lit up like this. Too bad about the car in front. I could paint it; our Fearless Leader told us to only paint houses when there are clearly cars there to indicate that the owner is home, because then you are likely to sell the painting! I was too busy to stand around painting houses.
Here is painting #1 from Simply Home.
As we spent time painting or at meals or meetings, we gradually got to know one another and learn names, although there was a lot of name-tag reading all week long. I met John Lynch of Toronto on the first day, so his name got cemented into my overloaded memory.
John spent several mornings working on the same painting. The last morning, I almost shouted, “YOU NAILED IT!”, but I managed to keep my voice down, and he graciously talked to me about the importance of plein air painting. I wish I had recorded his wisdom.
Liesel, my Roomie, cranked this out in one manic session. It sold immediately, and she will be making prints. Here is her website: Liesel Lund Fine Art She is a terrific painter who approaches art entirely differently from me, absolutely committed to making “joyful impressionist” work, which fits with her joyful personality. This is my favorite of her paintings, and although I hinted outright, she didn’t turn it into a roommate gift. (We are exchanging calendars of our work for 2025.)
Eric Rhoads, our fearless leader, is possibly the highest energy, most positive can-do (and does it all) man I’ve ever met. He is the publisher of Plein Air and Fine Art Connoisseur magazines, a producer of how-to painting videos, author of an art business book (out of print), organizer of plein air expos and retreats, and those are only the things that I remember off the top of my head.
I met another Jana, whose last name I never learned. She noticed my name tag and introduced herself on Day 5. We were just tickled to run into someone else with the same not-so-usual name, but I never saw her again. Her husband was there to film an instructional video for Streamline Publishing, and I only got his first name of “Frank”.
And one more reminder of Saturday’s show opening:
We were a group of about 100 people at Asilomar, plein air painting together, walking on the beach together, having meals together, meeting together in the morning and the evening, and sharing living quarters (unless we paid an additional astronomical fee for a private room).
With a crowd of enthusiastic painters, I had to work to find solitude. So, I walked on the beach or on the road overlooking the beach every morning. Sometimes I saw other people with our style of name tags, sometimes painting or walking, but also a handful of other morning folks along with surfers.
Tomorrow I’ll show you some of the new friends I made.
Meanwhile, back to the future:
Many of the buildings at Asilomar were designed by Julia Morgan, the architect best known for designing the Hearst Castle in San Simeon. She is also known for many fine buildings in Berkeley, AND a building at the Springville Hospital (for TB) here in Tulare County, now torn down due to earthquake standards.
Roomie and I were assigned a room in The Stuck-up Inn.
Our room was shockingly small for two people and all the painting gear. The room assignments were a mystery, because some of the people who paid for a single room had rooms that were much larger. Weird.
It had rooms around a central courtyard, where I sat to paint one afternoon after I had a fight with my easel.
I thoroughly enjoyed the living room each morning before the sun came up. It was a place to be alone (so thankful no one else thought of hanging out there!), to stretch, to read, and to experience some solitude before taking a pre-breakfast walk at (or on) the beach and joining the teeming mass of painters.
In spite of the space limitations, I was completely charmed by the age and the details of the building. As Roomie said, it forced us to spend more time out painting. I was very thankful for the fact that we were so compatible.
Next time, I will show you photos of the sunrises and other things that caught my attention in this week of painting in Monterey.
Meanwhile, back to reality: