The Plein Air Zone

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                   Lemons to Lemonade

I’m not sure how many painting casualties I’ve had in my painting career, but I’m pretty certain I’m into four figures by now. Early on, I would agonize over each and every one. It was like each failure hurt and there was no place to rub. I would sulk for a while, pitch them in the trash and ultimately begin planning my next endeavor.

It took some time, but eventually I began to notice that these failed attempts were not complete disasters. There were spots in the paintings where my mind checked out and I actually got some things right. I began to find small areas that were miniature achievements, interesting color harmonies or potential designs for future works. I started treating my failures as stepping-stones to future successes.

Even to this day, I take paintings that don’t meet my expectations and explore ways to either salvage some part of them, or utilize a portion of the painting as a springboard for another painting idea. The following are just a few examples of how I try to make my castaway paintings work for me.

The first thing I do is look for a crop: some part of the painting that can stand alone as a finished work. I recollect one, less than satisfactory, 24x30” oil that ended up as a dazzling 12x16”.

I keep some “L” shaped mats in my studio, and I’ll move them around the painting until I find a section that is finished and frameable, could be finished with a bit of touching up or, at the very least, a potential design for a future painting.

In this example, I have a plein air piece that seems a bit humdrum. So I take my mats and find a section on the right hand side that isn’t really a finished painting, but contains a vertical design element that may ultimately prove to be a stronger piece.

Click on any picture to see an elarged view

I found this old half sheet watercolor lying in the bottom of one of my flat files.

I was about ready to pitch it, when I noticed those floating specks in the trees on the upper right side of the painting. Something about them made me think of flowers. I put my mats over there and began to see the makings of a flower garden.

	I took Hansa Yellow Light, Naples Yellow, New Gamboge, Viridian and various blues, and started orchestrating the foliage.
	At this point, I still hadn’t touched the pure white specks from the initial painting. I needed those hard edges for a focal point. So with a little titanium white and a mixture of other pigments, I dabbed in flowers of various hues and values until I felt I had the proper movement through the painting. I like the final feel. The hard and soft edges of the foliage lend semblance of depth to the finished work.

Several years ago, a friend gave me a piece of newfangled, lightweight board to paint oils on. He thought it might be a good support to travel with. It ultimately turned out to be too brittle to be of much use. Nonetheless, I started a painting on board, and shortly after beginning, I was pretty disgusted with the start. So, in frustration, I grabbed an inch and a half bristle, picked up a gob of burnt umber, scrawled a huge scribble over what I had painted and tossed the board over in the corner of the studio.

About a week later, I headed off on a two-month painting trip to Indonesia.  Shortly after returning home, I went into my studio one evening to get something and noticed the board lying in the corner. When I took a closer look, I saw something interesting in the mass I had scrawled two months earlier. So I slapped the board up on the easel, and, about an hour later, I finished this sweet Balinese portrait in oil. You can still see the original scrawl behind the head.

The longer I paint, the more I raise my expectations about my finished work. The result is that I still end up with tons of paintings that don’t make the grade. What’s changed is that I now utilize those duds as a means to further my growth. Sometimes I paint over them in order to practice my values or color control. Other times I move mats around on them, looking for abstract designs that I can develop into other works. There’s a myriad of uses for those dead soldiers that we so cavalierly throw away.

So, next time you paint a lemon, see if you can find a way to turn it into lemonade.

Paint on!

                  Las Flores de La Mancha

I’ve often been asked whether I ever have “artist’s block”. For some reason, I’m always a bit amused by the question. I mean, how can an artist, living in this world of beauty and wonder, lack for creative inspiration?

 I’ve seen the whole universe reflected in the faces of the wild California poppies that spring up at the edge of the woods, next to my house. The same is true for the reflections of the morning sun bouncing off the sprinkling can in the garden. We are surrounded by countless images waiting for the interpretation of the artist’s brush.

We are like the Magdalenian cave painters, reaching across the ages to describe their environment and share their experiences with contemporary viewers. It’s a daunting responsibility, but our world is full of subject matter waiting to be utilized as a springboard for our artistic expression.

I derive my inspiration from many sources: scenes I paint on location, photos from my travels, flowers around the house and the stacks of sketchbooks I’ve amassed from my travels at home and abroad, to name a few. Which brings me to this current painting demonstration.

I stumbled across a watercolor sketch from La Mancha, Spain. It’s not a spectacular rendering, but it immediately recalled to memory the plaintiff villages, with their tiled roofs, the dust-colored castles, the windmills of Consuegra and Campo de la Criptana and the vast fields of flowers that stretched to the horizon. Well, my artistic juices got flowing, and I figured I’d found the kernel of something that I needed to say.  

I thought the watercolor design had possibilities, but I recall that, despite some hills, La Mancha impressed me with its expansiveness. I figured, right then, the final canvas would be a fairly large one. But first I needed to work out some of the design elements on smaller canvas. I eliminated the hill on the left and opened up a view to the horizon. I also decided to bathe the scene in a diffused light. Although this lighting sacrifices the drama of dark shadows, I know from experience that colors are enhanced on overcast days, and, since the colored flowers would drive the painting, this seemed like a prudent choice.

	Click on any step to see a larger image
Step One: I select a 36”x48” canvas. I indicate a rough drawing and strike in the sky, using a combination of Hansa Yellow Light, Cobalt Blue and some touches of Alizarin Crimson. I’ve decided to keep the general value relationships in the sketch, but push the painting toward the warmer side.
Step Two: I immediately go after the distant mountains and the general shapes of the structures. In order to keep these areas grayed down, I use combinations of the three primaries.
Step Three: I now mass in the foliage, using ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow medium, some quinacridone gold and some touches of cadmium red. This upper section now gives me a full value range to measure my values for the rest of the painting. The reddish roof, the red highlights in the trees and the faint reddish tone on the distant plain will help connect this section to the warm foreground. (Elapsed time around two hours).
Step Four: Now I lay in a gray wash that warms as it comes forward, and darkens as it goes from left to right. (Note: All surfaces in nature grade warm to cool and dark to light. That will be a whole other newsletter). When I lay my grass and flowers over this wash, some of that gray will show through and connect the foreground with the mountains and buildings in the background. This is not a technique I generally employ, but I instinctively felt it would help the final painting. I then begin to mass in the foreground foliage. This step took about forty-five minutes. This pretty much lays in the foundation for the painting. I decide to let this tack up overnight. I’ll begin the finishing work in the morning.
Step Five:   I paint the field, using warm greens and reds, being careful to keep the values tight, so that the plain isn’t fractured. I add some windows and details to the buildings.
Step Six: I begin painting the poppies, carefully stating two or three in the lower left. These two or three more delineated poppies will help sell the rest of those red blobs as additional poppies. I also fine-tune the foliage around those keynote poppies by sharpening a few edges and adding selective highlights.
Now I paint the daisies in a similar manner. The ones around the detailed poppies are more rendered. The rest of the flowers are impressionistic daubs of paint – varying in size, temperature, color and value. I bring them out into the field and I’m carefully attempting to make a believable transition. Now those red streaks in the field become masses of poppies and other flowers. I like the painting so far, but my eye seems to wander off the painting on the upper left.

I add some grazing cows and additional foliage to the upper left side of the field. These small elements seem to help contain my eye, and balance the composition. Overall, I feel pretty good about the painting. It’s got some busy areas and some areas of rest, and it seems to hang together as a whole. I’ve wanted to return to paint in La Mancha, and for a couple of days now, this painting has basically allowed me to.

Happy Painting!

 April 2008 - Who's Responsible

I often hear both young and established artists complaining about how unjust the art world seems to be. They say things like: “I have good work and I can’t get into galleries”, “Everybody sells well, and my work just sits there”, “I never get invited to the big exhibitions, yet I look at the catalogues and some of the work is amateur, at best” or “When I look at the art magazine articles, I can’t believe how bad some of the work is, and yet I’ve never had an article written about me.” The complaints are endless. We all know major art figures who are making thousands, even millions, of dollars with their mediocre paintings, prints, cups, tee-shirts and placemats. Is that fair?

 Well, quite frankly, I’m not convinced that “fairness” has anything to do with it. So is it good looks and a winning smile, pure luck, marketing skills or a good agent? I really don’t think they have anything to do with it either.

 It may actually have more to do with the person staring at the computer screen right now. I guess that would be you.

 I tell my students, “You win in your own universe.” It is a verity (for me, anyway) that has evolved from my own life experience. I touched on this in an earlier newsletter (see “The Intangibles”, May 2007), but now I’d like to go into it in a little more depth.

 I firmly believe that for every good painting there is a buyer out there looking to purchase it. The problem is getting them together in the same place at the same time. I have had situations where a painting sat unsold in a gallery for six to nine months, with no interest by any of their clients. So I’d swap that painting out, put it in another gallery, and, bingo, it would sell within a day or two. This has happened a couple of dozen times, at least (too often to be coincidental).

 Some would say, “What luck!” However, I’m convinced I made the right decision at the right time. Maybe you’re skeptical.

 Try this. Throughout your life you have made trillions of decisions, including crossing your legs, batting your eyes, eating a Popsicle and on and on and on. Well, all those decisions have led you to be sitting where you are right now reading this newsletter. That’s pretty hard to disprove, because that’s where you are and that’s what you’re doing. Now let’s say the ceiling above you cracks, and a piece of plaster falls, hits you on the head and puts you in the hospital with a concussion. There are those who would say, “What terrible luck!” or “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” That’s the spin our culture puts on everything, and that’s what we are all brought up to believe. But you know that all the decisions of your life led you to be sitting there when that piece of plaster smacked you on the head. We don’t want to be responsible for the bad things that happen to us. We only want responsibility for the good things.

There are basically three types of people:

A) Those that know that their actions affect their life situation. They are in control. They take complete responsibility for outcomes of their actions, be they good or bad.

B) Those that are at complete affect to life. It’s all luck, kismet, quixotic or preordained, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

C) Those that take full credit when things are going good. They strut around with their chests puffed out and their thumbs in their suspenders. And when things go wrong, they moan and complain, “How can God, nature, life, the force (whatever) do this to me”?

I’m partial to the (A) people, but I can respect the (B) people because at least they are consistent. It’s the (C) people I have a problem with. You can’t have your cake and eat it too! Either you are responsible, or you’re not.

 This pretty much shoots down the “luck” theory. When you go to that casino and put your nickel in the “one armed bandit” and win, you can take total responsibility for the fact that you chose to be there, at that moment, when it paid off. You should also take total responsibility for it sucking down your coin and returning nothing when it doesn’t pay off.

 If this is true, then the bad news is “It’s all up to you.” But the good news is “It’s all up to you.” Understanding this is both daunting and liberating. If the choices that you have made regarding your artwork and art career aren’t producing the desired results, then all you have to do is make different choices. For example, if you don’t like who’s getting articles in the magazines – DON’T PURCHASE THE MAGAZINES! (I only subscribe to American Art Review, because I like looking at all the paintings by the dead guys). Don’t buy in to other people’s stories. Your success is not dependent on what is happening out there. Affirm your success to yourself, make better choices and win in your own universe.

 Paint on! 

Narrative Painting - March 2008

When I first started my art career, I hadn’t yet learned enough to know what I didn’t know. So I had a sort of “young gunslinger” attitude. I tended to be overly critical of everyone’s art (except my own, of course), and I loved to take strong positions for, or against, virtually everything from techniques to genres. Included under this rather large umbrella were the historical, western-type paintings which were then, like now, quite popular. I felt certain that if a painter did not have a direct experience with his subject matter there wasn’t any way he could create something worthwhile.  

As time moved on, I emptied my artistic cup, added some humility to my painting repertoire and began to appreciate the works of my contemporaries. Ex-illustrators like Tom Lovell, Donald Teague, Bettina Steinke (one of my earliest mentors), James Reynolds and Howard Terpning were crafting wonderful narrative paintings with the kind of style and authority that derives from solid classical training. I, of course, began to rethink my original postulate regarding historical subject matter.

In July of 1995, I had an exhibition at the Americana Museum in El Paso, Texas. The show was comprised of 50 of my travel watercolors and 26 oils of various subjects. I sold 33 watercolors and 13 oils. I don’t generally have such a clear recollection of twelve-year old events, but this exhibition, besides being financially successful, would herald a turning point in the orientation of my artistic subject matter.

One fellow who attended the show bought several pieces and commissioned me to paint a large Indian dance. Since I lived in Santa Fe at the time, and had been going to the Indian dances for years, I had plenty of material to draw upon. After I had successfully completed the commission, he asked if I could do a 3-foot by 5 foot historical painting of famous Fort Bowie at Apache Pass, Arizona. I blurted out “Sure!” An hour later, I was scratching my head, wondering how I was going to pull this off. I had never before ventured into the realm of historical painting.

I found some literature and old photos of Fort Bowie in the archives of the Santa Fe Public Library, started traveling to ranches in the area, learning how to draw horses, located photos of period uniforms, saddles and guns etc., borrowed some western movie stills and began to craft my romantic interpretation of Fort Bowie.

My collector loved it, and that painting led to another dozen and a half large, historical pieces, including twelve large works for the coffee table book “400 Years in El Paso”, and three four-foot by six-foot paintings on the Battle of the Little Big Horn. I had a lot of fun researching the themes, going to ghost towns, renting costumes, and dressing up my friends as gunslingers, Indians, conquistadors, dead people and ladies of the night. I also learned a lot about selecting a moment in time, and then designing and crafting a visual image to impart the maximum impact, or narrate a tale in which the viewer becomes a participant. Although these narrative pieces comprise a very small percentage of my output, they have provided a pleasurable diversion from my general subject matter, and have contributed immeasurably to my growth as an artist.

The following is a demonstration of a scene from the Mexican Revolution. It is my fourth painting in the series. All of them were painted because I’ve done extensive traveling through the hinterlands of Mexico, and I find that period of Mexican history fascinating.

 In the early part of November 1913, Pancho Villa made a failed attempt to capture the city of Chihuahua. His casualties were heavy. He would, however, in the next four weeks, capture the cities of Juarez, Tierra Blanca and Ojinaga. He returned to the city of Chihuahua in early December and using surprise, and a ferocious attack by his famous cavalry “Los Dorados” (the “Golden Ones”), who rampaged through the narrow streets, he was able to capture the city on December 3, 1913. This battle effectively gave Villa control of the State of Chihuahua, and the northern railroads, and allowed him to prepare for his ultimate march towards Mexico City.

March Demonstration:

Using old photos, film stills and pictures from my travels in Mexico, I move people, objects and horses around until I settle on an arrangement that suits my needs. Using thin paint, I roughly draw in the elements, occasionally wiping out some a replacing them with others, until I feel comfortable with the design. I choose a monochromatic color scheme (transparent  oxide red dominance) to lend an air of antiquity to the painting. As you will see, I judiciously place some cool grays throughout the piece to give it some color vibration and to enhance the aerial perspective. The horses, the riders, the figures in the foreground, as well as the rooflines form an arrow, and give the painting a strong left to right thrust. I stop the thrust with the figure on the bottom right, and use the smoke and fire to lead the eye up to the Federales on the rooftop (the fires on the right and the muzzle fire on the rooftop are more evident in the actual painting). The whole painting grades from dark to light, and warm to cool as you move from left to right. It’s subtle, but it helps create movement and distance. I’ve never been a stickler for detail in my work. One doesn’t have to put the whiskers on the kitty to say “kitty”. Nonetheless, I borrowed a Winchester ’94, and a Colt Bisley (pistol) from two gun collector friends of mine, so that I would at least be in the ballpark on authenticity. If you feel the rider on the left looks North American, you’d be right. Villa’s army was rife with American mercenaries (including Tom Mix, who would later become an American cowboy movie icon).

	Click on any stage of the painting to see it larger
Step One
Step Two
Step Three
Step Four
Step Five
Final Work "Chihuahua - 3 Diciembre, 1913" 28 X 48 oil

2008

Painting Out of Your Head

The Golden Age of Illustration- part one and two

2007

Contours and Shapes 3 part series

January through April May through August

2006

September through December