Exercises

Sometimes I like to just do exercises. It takes me in a direction I wouldn't normally go, and it sharpens my skills. Athletes do push ups, musicians do scales... etc. Right now, I am doing the exercises in a classic book, The Elements of Drawing, by John Ruskin, first written in 1904! The exercises are surprisingly challenging.

 

This tree was drawn from life, and took about an hour. But it caused me to observe the patterns made by the branches. If you were asked to draw a tree from your imagination, would you draw something like this? I sure wouldn't. I would draw something more "artistic" looking. 

 

The tree is in front of the gas company office. It sits in a line with other Monterey cypresses that all look healthy. In fact, the others have so much foliage the branches aren't visible.This tree's trunk is scarred from much pruning, as if the owners have tried to save it many times over the years. It's easy to get anthropomorphic about trees. I started feeling like I was memorializing it by doing the drawing!

If you want to try reading Ruskin's book, get the illustrated edition, which follows the link. Some of the other editions are very irritating to read, because the author refers to artworks that aren't illustrated.

 

 

Portraits and Loss

Andrew Wyeth's father, N. C. Wyeth, died in an accident, when Andrew was a young man. I was really moved, listening to this interview, that he regretted having never gotten around to painting a portrait of his dad before he died. "I made drawings of him, but nothing important, and I think that was a great tragedy of my life when he was killed, that I hadn't done it."

Portrait of the Artist's Mother - gouache - 7 x 9"

It made me wonder, too, how when my mother was dying, I felt like I HAD TO do her portrait. Maybe it was my way of processing the grief... Maybe it was because I was thinking about her so much...
She would have moments when she seemed to be aware, and other moments, gone.

Portrait of the Artist's Mother #2 - watercolor pencils - 10 x 10"

Here's to you, Mom! I love you!

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Melting into Night

Melting into Night - oil on gessoed panel - 12 x 12"

Here was a wonderful moody sunset. The thing I really like about it is the reflections of the trees in the water. They shimmer and look like they are melting.

I've read that if you want to sell your paintings, you should tell the story of each painting and how you came to paint it, because people love stories. Well, I really hope you will put your own story on my paintings. Does this remind you of anything? Can you smell the air? Hear the night insects starting their songs? How do you feel when you look at it? Do you sense a presence here? Is there a memory that you've almost forgotten...

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Break of Dawn

Break of Dawn - oil on museum quality board - 6 x 6"

Some things just ask to be painted. This is my second painting of this location. The other one was also at dawn, and I was a little further away. Here it is:

New Day - oil on museum quality board - 6 x 6"

This is a 10-minute walk from where I live. San Francisco Bay is on the other side of the little bridge. But I like to think both paintings have a timeless quality and could be anywhere.That way, we can relate them to our own life. It's about the mood, the stillness, the beginning of day... 

I hope you are able get out and watch the dawn. It's a great way to start the day!

If you would like to leave a comment, click here. I appreciate all comments! To buy either painting, or both, (be still my heart!) click here. New Day is framed in a black floater frame, Break of Dawn is unframed. Shipping is free. Please forward this to your friends or share on Facebook.

Exhibit--William Keith and the California Oak

I went recently to an exhibit at St Mary's College, William Keith and the California Oak. At first I thought I'd try to talk about Keith's life and the exhibit as a whole... But, you can get a brief overview of his life here, at the St. Mary's website. He was a California painter and a friend of John Muir, and a contemporary of George Inness. He started out painting large, romanticized Hudson River School Landscapes, but later realized there was no way a painter could capture the grandeur of nature. So he began painting smaller, more intimate scenes, characteristic of tonalism, that suggested a fleeting moment, and a reality beyond the surface. Here is one of his later paintings. It is just a moment at dusk, and appears so insubstantial, the paint is like a mist.

Here is a closer view of the foreground. There are no hard edges. It has a dream-like quality. If you step onto that grass, it looks so soft, you would probably just sink in. The cows in the upper left are barely distinguishable. The paint is translucent, with several layers visible.

This is the sky. The color here is more true to the actual painting. The sky is painted solidly, with opaque paint, and that little rugged edge at the top of the trees is the most definite edge in the whole piece. Even the tree trunks are transparent! The warm colors and distant light give a sense of spirituality and comfort.

The Tree Challenge

Moonlight on Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire - William Trost Richards
Photograph courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 Sometimes, we see something so compelling, we feel it in our bodies. That's what happened to me, back in pre-internet days, when I was a university art student. I saw a piece of art that turned my thinking around. At the time, I was subscribed to Art News, a magazine about what's happening in the (mostly contemporary) art world. In one issue, in the back pages, I came upon the picture above.

It was magical! The mood, the mystery, the stillness, the emotional connection, it all came together! In all the years of reading that magazine, I had never seen anything that I connected with so deeply. And it wasn't even contemporary art. This image is graphite and watercolor on green/gray paper, and it was done by William Trost Richards in 1873! In school, at that time, my professors would probably have flunked me if I had done anything so "illustrational."

But, I kept the picture, and still love looking at it.

And for all these years, in the back of my mind was the desire to make an intensive study of trees. Now, I plan to be doing more drawing, and studies, and paintings of trees. I will be doing an online class on drawing and painting trees with Deborah Paris. It will be challenging to do something so "old fashioned" and yet so demanding of both creativity and technical skill.

"The knowledge of how a thing is built induces an intimate sympathy, giving us constant pleasure: and the landscape painter must have as true a knowledge of the branch anatomy of a tree as a figure painter has of the anatomy of the human form."          

 -- Rex Vicat Cole, The Artistic Anatomy of Trees

I invite you will come with me on this exploratory journey, in my blog. What do you think about this? To leave a comment, click here.