Finding Light in December

The morning before the storm came in gave the gift of a light show like a Turner painting, and my effort doesn't do justice to the remarkable array of color and nuance that came through the fog hanging over the trees on the east bank of the Willamette River.  But it was a treat, given the many gray and rainy days that we face here in the Pacific Northwest.  

Luscher Sunrise 16x20

This one doesn't feel quite done yet, but I need to let it dry first.

A Merry Christmas to all!

River Light In December

December Morning on the River 16x20

Most days during this rainy time of year are grey and unremarkable beyond their soppiness, more likely bringing discouragement and misanthropy than cheerful spirits.  But occasionally the light is truly magnificent, a blessing and a joy to behold, and one feels so lucky to be out there in Nature when it happens.  When the surface of the river is smooth as glass, unbothered by raindrops or breezes that roil across and spoil the reflection, the mirror of the sky more than doubles the impact of the light, and I pause and let it feed my soul and soften the hard edges.

More portrait sketches done between weight sets:

End of November

Oswego Row Club - early morning, late November

Oswego Creek Lagoon

Deep in the Dordogne

Back Road to Urval 12x16 oil

On our recent stay in the south of France, we often found ourselves on small roads like this, buried deep in a Dordogne forest with little light, and the allure of dappled roadways was too much for me to resist.  Once, coming back late at night from dinner at a little restaurant in Cadouin, a wild boar ran across this very road just in front of us, and we were all treated to our sanglier experience.

When I find myself struggling to spend time in the studio painting, I work on small canvases, 11 x 14 or smaller, and that seems to help; there is less at stake, failures are easier to accept, completion is faster.  But now that winter is coming, what else am I supposed to do with all these short days and long nights?

Back in the Saddle

Looking South From Loubès-Bernac 24x30

After spending nearly a month in the south of France, it has been hard to pick up the painting routine again.  At first I stalled and found excuses, then I tried some very short portrait sketches (below) which helped me remember what it is like to hold a brush with purpose.

With luck, I will be able to focus on the amazing autumn color that teases the eye at every turn, that beckons and calls, full of promise.   But mostly I just hope to get into the flow of the painter's process.

Turning Season

Luscher Fields 11x14

The heat of August is behind us, and ahead awaits the endless rain and gray through which we will need to navigate for the next six months or so.  It is a melancholy time of year because of this semi-dread, but it is not without beauty of light and color.

September River 16x20

This summer I have strived to make it outdoors with regularity, and that may be coming to a close, too.  I will miss the camaraderie of painting friends and the challenge of finding a semblance of the color before me.  It has not been about picture making, but about study, and though I can study all year round, there is nothing quite like standing there before raw Nature with nothing but a paintbox.

plein air 14x11

plein air 14x11

The above painting was done on the boat, anchored up close to Phantom Bluff, trying to stay in the narrow band of shade so that I could at least see what I was aiming for, but the perspective made it tough to make anything of it.  

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 10x8

The above sketchbook study was made from an old black and white photo from shortly after college, a time when I was a bit disgruntled to have left the comforting womb of academia and been thrust into a world that didn't seem to give a damn about my needs and wants.  Looking back, I wish I hadn't been so serious, so disillusioned and so contrary.  It takes some of us a long time to learn that like reeds, we need to be able to bend with the wind.  And yet all the advice we might offer from the benefit of age still falls on the deaf ears of the young.  Life must work best that way.

sketch of an idea 8x10

á la longueur du lac

á la longueur du lac. 8x24 oil

One of the rewards of making paintings is that I find myself looking more, observing light and color in a way that I had not done before.  Sure, I saw the sunset, admired beauty, even noticed nuance, but I don't think I really paid as much attention to the way the sky changes in color as you lift your gaze from the horizon to the zenith, deepening, becoming more blue, more ultramarine blue, slipping along the color wheel.  I often find myself sitting contentedly for long stretches of time as my eyes drift from one thing to another: like the dull, cool greens of the inner cedar branches, and then the warmer, yellower tones at the edges in the sun.  Subtle things, and things we see every day without giving much thought.  It is so easy to take the world for granted.  We will live forever, and there is always another day to feel grateful for it all, or at least we might choose to live that way until it is too late and our time on this earth runs out.  So I am pleased that trying to paint allows me to slow down enough to observe more, and to be grateful for those little things of beauty.

In the case of the above painting, I was struck by how the sky in the west was so lemony yellow, but as the eye tracks eastward it shifts subtly greener, and then into a deeper blue.  These same changes are reflected on the lake, and I often notice that it isn't just the beauty of a scene I admire, the warm glow of light, the blue of the lake against the green backdrop, but it is the subtle changes along a distance, how the morning light to the east sings one note while the still sleepy light to the west sings in harmony, and each are beautiful in their own right, but together they are something more, something that feels like an understanding, and an acceptance and a need for the balance.

And then again, it's nice to have a faithful companion who is always willing to enjoy the beauty with me:

Below the Powerhouse 11x14

Oswego Creek 12x12

Unfamiliar Faces

The above is a recent notebook sketch, from a photo gathered somewhere on the internet a long while ago and saved in my computer; I have no idea who this is, but I do love his eyes.  I get asked why I don't paint people I know, and I sometimes do, but frequently I just want a face to begin with, a reference from which I accept the challenge of quickly finding a likeness, a way of exercising my paint-mixing and application.  Often I paint these portraits between sets on the weights in my little exercise room.  It is a balancing act, because if I get caught up in the painting and spend too much time on it, I lose the benefit of the workout, but if I speed too quickly through the motions of painting, I end up with a mess.  Sometimes a mess is okay, as in the one below, where I was interested in the effects of aging.

It's obvious that I took less time and care with this one, but that is not always the point.  Time, as seemingly endless as all the sands in the world, seems to slip through our fingers just as easily, and I find that I can guard it jealously and also waste it like a brute.  Time leaves its mark on us all, steals from us, gives us everything we have, and yet we simply cannot ever understand it fully: does it form a loop, is it an endless line, can we ever travel back and forth on it?  We seem destined to remain ever ignorant, left with a sense of loss at the end.

Here is One Art, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; 
so many things seem filled with the intent 
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster 
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: 
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or 
next-to-last, of three loved houses went. 
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. 
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident 
the art of losing’s not too hard to master 
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

On A Dark Pond 12x16 oil

And finally, a recent plein air from along the banks of the Tualatin River.

Trees, trees and trees

It's been a good summer so far for getting outdoors to paint, and I've been out at least once a week for the past couple of months.  I'm fortunate to have a couple of painting buddies who also want to get out, and while I haven't managed any brilliant painting, I've had a great deal of fun doing it, which is really the point.  Having fun painting encourages me to keep painting.  Voila!  That's all the reason I need!

Randall Tipton focused on his watercolor

Several recent plein air attempts:

More Sketchbook Portraits

In the lulls of the days, with no time or inspiration to do a landscape, I still try to find a little time for portrait studies on paper.

Working the Plein Air

From the Rocky Shore 12x16 oil

There are painters, it's true, who can knock out a plein air painting that is ready for hanging, a little jewel, and there are the collectors who snap them up.  And there are painters who use their plein air work as studies for larger paintings to be completed in the studio.  Those plein air paintings are for color notes and compositional ideas, and many of them, too, could be hung on the wall.

I, on the other hand, tend to think of my painting outdoors as an exercise; it is a way to try to hit the hue and tone and temperature that I see, a coordination between my eye and the brush that needs training, endless, endless training.  Occasionally I will find that I like something I have done enough to let it hang around so I can look at it.  This one above I might hang up for a bit in the studio and ponder.  (Compositionally, though, I think having that band of rocks across the bottom makes it harder to enter the painting.)

Other times, it's simply a disaster: Nothing works, I jab and push and the paint won't dry quickly enough to go over it, the color is off, the drawing is crude.  Those times, I cut the session short and pack up my gear in disgust, trying hard not to be discouraged.  The painting below fell into that category.  It was too hot where I set up, the sun had gone too high (I find the sunlight at noon to be the least interestng of the day) and I was struggling with the matted grasses in the foreground.  So I quickly packed up the gear and literally muttered to myself "Well, that was a waste of paint."

But when I got home and cleaned up the palette and pulled the painting out, put it on the easel in better light, I realized that there was something there in spite of the troubles.  It isn't a good painting, and there are still many things to resolve, as we painters say (in layman's terms, it still looks like shit) - for example, that mess at the right-hand edge, the blotchy grasses, the values that still need to be distinguished from one another.  But still there was a truth to it somehow.  It spoke to me of what I saw, and there was an honesty in the color, the temperature of the day, the dryness of the fields and hillsides.  I find it fascinating that a painting can be a lousy painting and still have something to offer. This painting tells me to not give up, because somehow the practice of trying over and over again to mix color has led me closer to being able to do it in a successful way.

Champoeg Park 11x14 oil

Reworking the Past

The Road to Cunèges 11x14 oil

This above is actually a painting from three years ago, never finished, because I was discouraged when trying to recreate the dappled light.  But I let the painting float around in the studio, something about it that made me feel warm (partly due to the personal connection of walking on the road after having just arrived at our gîte in the south of France, and having a car zip by only to slam on the brakes - I heard a voice cry out "Meetch!", and it turned out it was André Bonhomme, a friend who was taking this little back road shortcut to his town of Cunèges).  So when I look at this painting, I feel the warm reassurance that the world feels better to me when it feels smaller.  I finally decided I wanted to give it another go, and I reworked the entire painting, but tried to retain the warm reds bleeding through the greens.  I think I could do a better job on the dappled light if I painted in a larger scale and was more deliberate, but the feeling I was after seems to come through in this small sketch, and so I may just leave it at that.

Ron Reads Yourcenar 11x14

Not an old painting, but an old reference, so it is even more a visit to the past.  This was at one of my old houses - I don't even remember which one, but I recognize the chair, the table, the lamp.  As I age, I am unwilling to forget about the past, and I revisit it often enough (though I have maintained a connection to the past for most of my life, so I don't mean to imply I'm feeling desperately old...). Life has been too rich and too full of important people and meaningful events to simply never look back.  The hour or two painting this allowed me the gift of imagining what we were up to then, what thoughts filled our heads, what hopes we had.  Ron is now retired and living his dream in the south of France, but thirty years ago, when he was reading this book, that would probably have seemed too fantastical to consider.  Isn't it wonderful that our realities can soar even beyond our dreams?

Revery aside, I look at the painting and wonder if I will ever learn to get rid of those hard edges when they don't belong, I question little bits about the drawing, and the likeness is never truly spot on.  But if I can just believe that I am making incremental progress, I am encouraged to pick up a brush again.

Field and Studio

Along the River 16x20 oil

With the warm weather I am making a serious attempt to spend some time outdoors with the easel, and though the work may not be making the headway I would like, the efforts are rewarding in their own way.  I've found, for example, that Greta, our German Shepard, makes a terrific painting companion; she is patient and calm and happy to be along and out of the house, and she never complains.

Crown Point, 8x10 oil

It may take an hour to drive to the Gorge, but every time I do, I regret not doing it more often.  It is such a magnificent natural wonder, filled with drama and scale and amazing light.  This quick sketch doesn't do justice to the scene, but it was dead-on noon, and the light was not the best, and I was in a hurry to get to Hood River to meet with friends.  I need to go back here with a larger canvas and more time.

And finally, a couple of portrait sketches from the sketchbook:

Plein Air Weather

Phantom Bluff 11x14

Now that the weather has turned warm and sunny, it's hard to resist the temptation to drop everything and get outdoors to paint.  The most reliable subject, painted while sitting on the comfort of my dock, is Phantom Bluff.  I never tire of its special beauty, but when I look back over the various paintings I have done of it these past few years, they seem very much alike.  It's as if I have only one sort of vision and can only see what my mind allows.  Other painters have done series on the same subject, but normally they paint differences in light or in hue or something to challenge them to see more.  I guess I will have to be satisfied with the nuanced improvements I see gradually taking shape as Time goes by.

Mary S Young Trail 9x12

But after that brief preview of summer, the faintest base tan established, the gin and tonics enjoyed and dinners on the deck, the rains are back, of course.  There is always the work in the notebooks, portrait sketches to fill in the pauses of workout routines: