More Tales From the Outdoors

Broken Lines, 2004. oil on canvas, 14 x 20

Okay, we have manged in the morning to damage Jack's car fairly badly. How much worse can the afternoon be? We get back to Jack's place to get my car (mind you my car is a 1984 rabbit convertible and not really a picture of reliability, but what choice do we have?) We head back out to the great outdoors, back to the scene of the crime, well not back to the exact scene, if we ever see that creek again it will be too soon, but back to the same piece of property we were on in the morning. That view was splendid and so we headed up to the top of the knoll to start our paintings. We hadn't but started, when it was time for a meeting back in town with the gallery that was sponsoring the paint-out. We were in the middle of nowhere and knew nobody would mess with our stuff. So instead of packing everything back up we just left everything set up in the middle of this huge field and headed back into town for our meeting.

Ninety Minutes later....

We unlock the gate and drive up to the top of the hill where we left our stuff. There we find a herd of cattle surrounding our easels and painting gear. Jack's stuff looks to be fine, but my stuff...well, its taken a bit of a beating. My field easels is upside down with its three legs sticking straight up into the air and my paint bag is turned upside down with tubes of paint strewn all around and my painting was laying face down in the knee high grass. The cows were just standing around looking at us as if to say, what are you guys doing in our field? Apparently cows are very curious animals, and they just wanted to see want we were doing. What is not commonly known is apparently some cows are art critics as well. (Note: they did not mess with Jack's stuff.) We shooed them off to see what the damage was done to my stuff and surprisingly it was nothing! The cows has amazingly not broken anything, the easel was fine and the painting just needed some minor repainting where the grass had messed up the paint. A couple of hours later I finished the painting.

I've painted outside hundreds of times, but none were as exciting(?) as that day.

May I just go back to my studio where it's safe?

Painting out

Barley and Early Cotton, 2003. oil on panel, 7 x 12


Painting outside (I refrain from using the romantic French term though I have nothing against the France or its beautiful language, but recently in the US, some artists have co-oped the term, so they can use it as a marketing tool, and the French term has come to denote a certain style of painting which was not its original meaning, but I digress) can be challenging. I participated in a paint out this past week at one of my galleries. We got to paint all over the Foothills of California. It's a good excuse to visit my friend Jack Cassinetto and spend the week painting with him or at least trying to paint. We are not dedicated painters of the outdoors. I don't mind it and have painted outside since I was in school twenty years ago, but Jack only tolerates it. We are both studio painters. So here we are two studio painters headed out to the great outdoors.

Day one: Rain...We work in Jack's studio...gee, that's really too bad. Note the sarcasm.

Day two: Beautiful day. We get permission to go on his nephew's ranch, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. We unlock the gate and drive in on a bumpy, dirt path (I can't really call it a road) up to the top of a knoll where there are breathtaking views in all directions. But we are artists, and both think that maybe there is something better a little farther in so we drive on to a smallish creek. We get out of the car and take a look around, and see that its all pretty closed in, nothing really to paint. We take a look at the creek and it doesn't look that deep or wide or rapid. There is even a place where cement has been pored to help other vehicles cross. We hop back into the car (have I mentioned its a mini van?) to cross the river. No problem, except as we got up on the other side we heard a rather loud clunk. We had hit a rock as we exited the creek and on closer inspection realized that water was poring out of the radiator. Enough said. We did make it out alive, and back into town. We went straight to Jack's local mechanic to see what the damage was going to be to fix his car. Late that afternoon and hundreds of dollars later Jack got his van back. We still hadn't painted anything outside. It was approaching 12 O'clock...Lunch, anyone?

believe it

Riverside Farms at Dusk, 2004. oil on canvas, 36 x 60


"Beauty will save the world."

-Dostoevshy

Trying not to crash

Fall Fields, 2006. oil on canvas, 48 x 60

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I am for the most part a good driver. Really, I am. I have only been in one accident in my life and that one was not my fault. But I do a fair amount of weaving as I drive though. I can't really help it. I'm always looking at the landscape as I drive and often the landscape distracts me. I know its not a really smart thing to do, but I get most of my ideas for my painting when I am driving. I see color relationships that are interesting, compositions that strike me that may make a good painting. I tend, like most people, to drive to the same places over and over again so I see the same things again and again. Some people may find this boring, but I love to see the same area multiple times. I get to see it at different times of day, in different seasons, and different weather conditions. I look at everything and when I see something I like I tend to look at that for longer than I should, thus weaving. I'm a classic rubbernecker, except I'm not looking at accidents; I'm looking at the landscape.

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Falls Fields was one such painting that was inspired by a drive down to Southern California. I started the painting and then it sat in my studio for a very long time, years, in fact. I didn't know how to finish it. Then driving home from a meeting from a town about an hour south of where I live I saw the solution. I went back to my studio and finished it in a couple of weeks. Just like that, I found the solution. The day before I didn't know what to do with it, then I drove on a road that I had been on hundreds of times, and I saw how to finish the painting. Two drives, four years apart to finish one painting. All because I didn't want to crash a good start on a painting. The solution must of worked since I sold the painting two hours after getting it to one of my galleries.

Talking about artists

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sante-Victoire, 1902-04. oil on canvas, 28 3/4 x 36 3/16

When I am with other artists we often talk among ourselves about who our favorite painters are. I also find it is a question that collectors and art lovers like to ask. It helps to understand what influences a painter. What really rows their boat, so to speak.

Sometimes collectors eyes will glaze over when I start talking about my, well, at least fifty favorite artists. (What do you mean you have never heard of Richard Diebenkorn?! He's only one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century!) So I have to watch myself. It's when I'm talking to other artists that it can get interesting. So many times, I will mention an artist that I find highly influential, and find that my artist friends haven't even heard of him or is not even interested in his work. It's strange.

I consider Paul Cezanne to be a great painter, one of the best. Yet when I mention him I usually get blank stares from fellow artists. Wasn't he the guy who started cubism and that modern art crap? I've never understood his work. No, he wasn't, and I'm sorry you never took the time to look at what he did. There is a emotional depth in his work that is lacking in a lot of work before and since his time. He was an artist who had a personal vision of the world in paint. He reinvented what he saw in paint. That's something that I think all artists should think about when they're working. What am I bringing to this painting that is my own? Of course, we are all influenced by other artists, but how can I reinvent nature in my paintings and make it personal?

Isn't that the reason to paint?

Where do you live, exactly?

Just After Dinner. oil on canvas, 22 x 32

*****

People often look at me a little sideways when I say that I think that I live in a beautiful place. They roll their eyes and say I must be not be talking about the Central Valley. I must be referring to places that are close by...like Yosemite National Park or the Coastal region around Carmel. These are all beautiful places mind you, but I don't live there. I don't know those places like I know the San Joaquin Valley. People often look at the valley as just a place to drive through. Something get across as quickly as possible, since there's nothing to see there anyway... How far is it to Tahoe from here? You should watch the weather on the San Francisco news stations (just 2 hours away, and according to their maps, the world ends somewhere just past Livermore and then picks up in the Sierra Mountains again...the Central Valley is just one long black hole of about 40 miles wide. There are no towns here according to their maps, maybe just five or six farmers. Where I live is real backwater, according to some.

*****

I live in the middle of the largest continuous valley in the world. It is a geologic wonder. It's six hundred miles long and forty miles wide and almost as flat as a pancake and surrounded by mountains on every side. It's like nowhere else in the world and thus it offers unique painting possibilities, unexplored possibilities. Its modern history is no more than a hundred and twenty years old, so there has not been much time to paint what is here. Its beauties may not be obvious at first glance, but if when you let yourself see what is here, and set aside preconceived ideas about what should be painted, paintings are everywhere, here in this valley.

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I am not the only artist to paint this grand valley, to be sure, but so many other artists who live in the area seem to think that there is nothing to paint here, and they must travel to find worthy subject matter to paint. That way of thinking is just strange to me. Do their styles of painting not suit this landscape? This valley is a modern landscape that has been transformed by man in the last century. I revel in the geometry of the fields and orchards, the patterns that these fields make when put together in paintings and drawings make a very interesting subject to work from and I believe that it relates to modern painting in a profound way. The contrast of nature and man intertwined together is endless fascinating to me.

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Just After Dinner was painted in response to spending an evening with our friends who live amidst the open fields just east of the town where I live. As we walked out to our car, I saw this sky...it was breathe-taking...I stared at it for some time...it was beautiful. The painting was not hard to make...it never is when you love what you paint.

The Commission, part III

Shortly Before (detail)

The canvas is on the easel and I have carved out enough time to lay in the composition and color of the painting. I first have to establish where the horizon line will be, that will dictate how everything else will relate in the painting...how many fields there will be and how big the sky will be in the painting are all determined by where the horizon is placed in the composition. At the same time I'm thinking about what time of day it is in the painting, this will help me decide what color I'm going to try in the painting.

Once the composition is worked out, I then start to lay in the color that I think will work in the painting, making slight adjustments as I work. I make the color choices in my paintings based on my memories when I am outside looking at the landscape. I don't work from photographs when I am in the studio. The colors I choose are based on my visual vocabulary that I have built up over the years of looking at and painting the landscape...so my color decisions are based in my personal experience, not second-hand information from another source.

This process may, on larger pieces, like this commission, take the better part of the day to get the first layer of color on the canvas. On even larger canvases it may take several days to lay in the color on the canvas. I try to work as quickly as I can so I can have something to work against when I work on the painting in the coming weeks.

When I have the color laid in, the whole process tends to slow down. I refine the relationships of the color in the painting making them work more effectively together. This process may take some time...when I first lay in the color on that first day, I usually think that the painting is almost done when I leave the studio that day, but when I come back to the painting the next day I see things that I did not see before, problems that need to be addressed and colors that do not work well as well together as I thought they did. The fine tuning of a painting can take weeks and even months. As I work on the painting the relationships in the color of the painting grow stronger, more cohesive, working together to make the piece a more effective painting. It is only when I feel that the painting is working in concert and nothing is detracting from the overall feeling of the piece that I can call the piece complete.