Into the Wild

" Into the Wild” 21.5 x21.5

Studio Watercolor 

Yellowstone, Lower Falls in LPAPA "Salute our National Parks" Exhibit, July 3 to 31st.

Yellowstone, Lower Falls 16 x 21 Studio Watercolor
This painting has been juried into the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association " Salute Our National Parks" exhibit, July 3 to July 31, 2017 at the Forest and Ocean Gallery 480 Ocean Ave, Laguna Beach CA.
I need to thank my parents for being intrepid travelers and my Dad who has an artist's eye for the source material. I don't recall ever painting a waterfall and it was a great one to paint.

Above Sonoma, 20 x 16 Studio version of plein air painting

Above Sonoma 20 x 16.

And here's the original piece:

Sonoma Valley Vertigo 17 x 14

Which do you prefer? I am still deciding.

Point Lobos Series

 Point Lobos Walk 14 x 14

 Pacific Passage 14 x 14( view from the path by China Cove)

Point Lobos Arche 14 x 18

Living in California, not as close to the coast as I would like, I've wanted to paint the Pacific Ocean for a while. The challenge of painting a new, moving subject  from life has proved to be too much. So I have been painting in my studio from photographs and memory..

The hardest thing for me in painting from photographs is to avoid rendering and to try to remember what the colors actually looked like, since the camera distorts them in ways I wouldn't.
The subject that works for me is to use wintertime scenes when there is so much foam in the water that the light value creates a contrast with the darker colors of the land.
They are posted in the order they were painted. ( And look a little dark on my computer)

New Paintings from the Studio

The Ridge After Sunrise 14 x 21

Ridgeline Rhythmns 16 x 12


In winter, I tend to finish paintings in the studio. These are the two most recent. In the studio , I can use my outdoor starts as compositions where I play with color harmonies and really concentrate on what the painting needs.
In Ridgeline Rhythms, I pushed myself to abstract the ridge. I love the diagonals of the mountains.
In the Ridge After Sunrise, I explored the darks from early morning.
There was a piece in the New Yorker Magazine a while ago that described these hills as a lovely rumpled landscape, a phrase I love and plan on using as a painting title one of these days. The Ridge after Sunrise is more about the low light and colrs but has some of that rumpled feeling.

A Tangled Place Watercolor

A Tangled Place 14 x14

This is a studio painting done from a plein air piece from earlier in the year. I took my tendency to tighten up in the studio and turned it into something like embroidery. I try to have your eye meander up the paths of color and tightly control the values to make the meadow shimmer and lead you to the three trees at the top. Even though it is not a mountain or hill painting, you'll notice I've kept to my favorite high horizon format.