Sky Tide

On a recent journey to southern California I spent a wonderful afternoon exploring the tide pools of Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma in San Diego. The abstract qualities of line, shape, shadow and color in this dynamic landscape of stones, sea and sand caught my attention and I took many photographs with the intention of painting some later.

The first small sketch I made used a limited palette to enhance the contrast and abstraction of one of the deep crevices in the boulders:

To some, the image "reads" as verticle rather than horizontal, like an archway or cliff, rather than a crevice - especially with the sky I've added at the top. This was such a satisfying subject for me, that I decided to tackle my first ever Full Sheet (30" x 22") watercolor. I first selected another of my reference photos, a complex and disorienting jumble of beach rocks and water at the bottom of cleft between the boulders:

Next I stretched my dampened paper on a large sheet of Gatorboard - this is a dense, water-resistant kind of foamboard that stands up to repeated stapling around the edges. I must say, it was very intimidating to have a staring contest with such a large blank page, exponentially larger than I usually work. The reference photo clipped in the corner is the size of the painting above! The challenges of scale in watercolor, as I've written before, are still quite daunting for me - brush size, the size of the puddle of paint that needs to be ready, the speed that I can get it onto the paper without it drying and the color-shifting on me... those are all factors that increase the tension. At this scale, I can't really leab over the page, and must work from an easel. Mine doesn't lay back to near horizontal, so gravity working on the paint and water becomes a major factor too. But still... the paper blinked first and on I went.

Very quickly during the drawing phase I came to see just how large a challenge I'd taken on - there were more than one hundred stones in my scene, and each needed to be depicted somewhat convincingly! As I drew, I knew that each would be a potential landmine, ready to blow up the entire painting if I couldn't procede confidently.

I wanted the larger boulders on the sides of my image to retain their abtract qualities, and I knew that the darker one of the right would be particularly crucial, so I started there - laying-in a kind of loose abstraction. It was close to what I was after, but I'd need to make the space convincing later if I could:

Next I tried my hand at one of the larger stones in the bottom of the crevice, and began to delineate the boulder on the left, being careful to stay as minimalist and abstract as I could get away with:

I kept plugging away in each of the next stages, trying to keep a pleasing arrangement of warms and cools going in the stones, feeling my way towards how to paint submerged rocks under the reflected sky, how I might pump up my contrast, my darks, my color intensity without the whole painting becoming unbalanced.

Here I decided I needed to exaggerate the darks on the left boulder in order to more convincingly create depth near the water:

From here I continued work on my shadows, darkening the values of many stones and adding a thin cerulean blue wash to the reflected sky in the puddle in the bottom:

And that... is just about the limit of my skill. This was a daunting experience, and I'm glad I navigated through it safely  - even though it was touch and go at a few stages. I hope you like the results. Surely this won't be my last large one!

Seeing with an Artist's Eye

One of the more rewarding aspects of a renewed period of intensive art-making for me is the reactivation of what I think of my "Artist's Eye". I'm spending so much more time looking carefully at objects, arrangements, the details of the landscape around me and then constantly evaluating my adaptation and depiction of it in my paintings. And like any other skill - or even any muscle - practicing the habit of mind, the evaluative concentration brings so much more into focus.

Athletes who train and musicians who practice find that their skills improve. The same is true of artists, of course, but the specific phenomenon that I'm experiencing is a sort of enhanced visual and evaluative state of mind. A walk through the woods or a walk around the house can lead me to a state where I'm constantly looking for art and design all around. This is perhaps not such a welcome "distraction" while I'm driving... but it's a vast improvement over the blinkered sort of tunnel vision that many urban dwellers develop as a coping mechanism, a way to filter out the visual "noise" and become less visible in the midst of density. Everywhere I go now, I'm scanning my environment, voraciously gathering data about line, texture, balance, depth, color, contrast and all the other elements of design - and then trying to find a place to file it all in my mind. My hope is that the more I do this, these elements will find ways to blend together harmoniously and present themselves effectively in my work with increasing regularity. So far I seem to be making "design salad" rather than "design soup" - collections of these elements side-by-side rather than always producing a rich and flavorful stew with lots of interactions between the elements. But it is satisfying to see the journey, the process at work, to feel it grow and change my perspective inside.

Perhaps the best example I can offer of this enhanced Eye comes from a recent afternoon at a local pond. Even in the city, and here in the depths of a Boston winter, adventurous types can hike into the urban wilds of Allandale Woods and find a picture perfect and hidden pond for skating - as if we lived in some idyllic countryside of long ago or far away. While the rest of my family carved arcs in the ice, I used my phone to capture the lines and shadows, the traces of the paths left by them and the weak but beautiful late afternoon sun. I don't mean to claim any of these as Art on their own necessarily - but to me they are evidence of a mind and an Eye seeking the essence of, well, just that. Perhaps they illustrate what I mean.

The Haunting of Eucalyptus

For forty years now one of the guiding lights of my life has been the five years I spent as a youth in Australia. Perhaps not quite so obvious to those who have never been there, the flora of the land is as unusual and different as the fauna is to most of us who spend our days in North America. Many Californians are, to me, blessed with eucalyptus trees in their midst, but sadly my Boston climate won't sustain them (as I'm reminded on snowy days such as this one).

These trees evolved in an arid world, frequently ravaged by fire. Consequently, the trees developed defense and survival mechanisms that make looking at a hillside of them very different than looking at a hillside of pines or maples. Because of the mortal threat from burning underbrush, they exude an inhospitable chemical that hinders competition "underfoot". Their nuts are rock-hard, sending their seeds to the ground only after the heat of fire threatens the parent tree. For these reasons and more, when you look at a eucalyptus forest, you truly can see the "trees for the forest". Individuals can mark a ridgeline like so many whiskers, can speckle a distant hill like so many sentinels. A forest in Australia is really a sometimes motly and loose collection of very large specimens that seem to have gathered for some sort of sporting event. They are beautiful trees that command attention in all their varieties.

Over the years I've done many paintings of them since their biology fascinates me, and their shapes are alluring all these years later. Here are a few, some from a time when I was a little less skilled than now:

Fields of Winter

In many holiday seasons I drive my family back and forth between New England and the Midwest - nearly 1,000 miles each way, much of it on the New York State Thruway. Navigating through and around the potential for bad weather, especially in the lee of Lake Erie, can often be a challenge. This year's trip outbound gave us sleet in the Berkshires (which did indeed look "dreamlike on account of that frosting", as James Taylor would put it) and then a blustery but dry snowfall between Albany and Buffalo.

One of the prettiest parts of this journey in winter is around the towns of Herkimer and Mohawk, right where one would exit for Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Erie Canal runs parallel to the highway here and the valley opens up to rolling hills gridded with evergreen forest and farmland to the north. With snow on the ground, and one eye on the road I can let my other eye memorize the high-contrast features of the land, and recall the wonderful snowscapes of Russell Chatham - one of my favorite contemporary landscape painters.

This year I've put in a little more than a week's work to try and capture something of the allure of this scenery for me. I used hastily snapped phone photos of that drive for reference, adapting freely.

 I started with pencil value sketches, combining features and altering them to end up with this 7"x10" sketch:

I then tried to move up to a half-sheet (15"x22") to see if I could capture the same sort of thing. Very similar at first glance. Some parts worked as well, others less so:

 The second close-up detail shows (to me) how I almost always stiffen up when I move up in scale, and how my free and loose style doesn't benefit from operating in fits and starts...

Later I tried another scene back at 7"x10" again. There is still lots to learn about making flat light on snow work!

Imagination and Memory

Sometimes imagination is as useful to me as memory - both can be wonderful aids to breaking through the two-dimensional picture plane of the photographs that are often my source material in the winter months. A place I've never been, if it's the right kind of place, can invite me in and make me want to explore a landscape, to capture something of it's essence. Even if I don't know what a place sounds or smells like, and even when I have no idea what's just over 'my' shoulder with these static points-of-view, a pleasing combination of colors and contrasts arranged by nature 'just so' (or manipulated by me to alter the view a bit) can still work it's magic.

For a couple of weeks I've been working with photographs of the national parks of Wales:

There seems to be a bit of New Zealand in these views to me - a folded landscape with deep clefts - and the presence of moving water gives them a built-in sound that's attractive too.

In February, we're off to Joshua Tree National Park for a day, so I've been researching hikes and landscapes we might want to investigate if we can. This view of a sometimes dry reservoir called Barker Dam had wonderfully dark late afternoon shadows coupled with the golden glow of sunset on the rocks, but it started with a drawing that nailed the depth and motion of tumbled stones. Some days things just work - even if the drawing was dashed off in the front seat of my car while waiting for the kids to get out of school:

As always, clicking on any of these gives you a larger view...
Clay