Last week I took this commissioned oil painting up to Mount Vernon and hung it in Dave’s beautiful house overlooking the Skagit Valley. The frame I made fit right in with the decor and the painting looked like it was made for the place……. well it was!
I haven’t been painting with oils much in the last couple years. The watercolors took me on a journey. Many months after my show in Mount Vernon, Dave Oneill gave me a call about doing a painting for his dinning room. He had seen the show and had some ideas for a commission. After going back and forth a bit with his vision I came up with a few ideas in rough sketch form.
Dave wanted it pretty large, 5 x 3 ft painting, so instead of a watercolor I recommended an oil on canvas.
I transferred my sketch and did a thin “imprematura” underpainting. This seals the gesso ground so the oils don’t suck in as bad and it provides some color coming through the layers that will be added on top.
Next comes the block-in, to get the darks, mids and lights all established and really start to understand how I’m going to paint this scene. At this stage I start to make the planes or shapes, sit in front or back of each other.
The painting starts to come together at this point as I listen to a CD of the high school kids from Maui.
After a couple weeks of painting it was almost done. I really had fun painting those crazy, electric splashes around the salmon. I’ll let this dry thoroughly for a few days, oil it out with a very thin rub of Galkyd thinned with Galkin to even out a few sunken in areas. After that is completely dry, I’ll put on a final varnish, mount it in a frame I made and take it to it’s new home.
I’ve been teaching a Saturday afternoon oil painting class at GalleryOne in Ellensburg, WA. We started with a small still life of a lemon…. not so easy, but everybody did great. The second Saturday we got a good start on a landscape, learning to simplify and look for values. Next week we’ll dive into a portrait. It’s an interesting process to figure out where people are at and what they need. I hope I’m doing a good job.
When I’m a bit lost I remind myself to get back to the basics. Composition is the foundation for all that sits on top of it. Value is where form is described and color is like the flavors that make up a good meal. Out of many tiny thumbnails a few will stand out and call for more exploration and refinement. It’s design at this stage, pushing the shapes around and easy to adjust anything at a small size, no more than a few inches. Then after many small idea sketches a few will stand out and hopefully one will be interesting enough to take into a painting. This is just one process of many, but a good one to remember.
In my little watercolor notebook I start working this out. I want the brightest glow from the sky to just hit a bit on the right wall and around the figure. Perhaps the left wall is still too light. And I have to do a couple real vanishing points so the walls read correctly. And then the water reflection shapes need to be worked out as I don’t have a real photo of this, just a snap from a TV image.
I’ve been putting some final glazes on these flowers and foliage and really enjoying it. Some manners of painting don’t use glazes at all, going after that modern matte flatness, the truth of paint on a surface. In this type of painting I want the illusion of depth. I want the viewer to look right through the picture plane, with forward parts almost popping in front of the painting itself. It’s a dimensional composition leading your eye in, around and back out again. And when you are up close there is no doubt it’s just paint on a board. We always have to simplify, leaving out as apposed to leaving in. I’m leaving a lot in at this point, it’s consciously full. Now I want it even brighter… maybe the next one.
I’m trying to spend enough time this summer to get a few garden paintings done. They don’t come easy. I have a tendency to put in way too much and not simplify enough. It’s one of the issues with working “Plein Air”. Nature has more than a simple painting can handle. Every place you look is beauty beyond belief. I’ll just keep trying and appreciate every moment spent outside observing. This painting is coming along, started while sitting in these flowers, then worked on for a while in my studio and now back outside. It’s changed so much in a few days that I don’t know it this will help.
My show is up on the walls at the gallery. A years work, thirty one pieces in total. Come and celebrate with us on February 7th from 5 to 9 at GalleryOne on Pearl Street in Ellensburg, Washington.
I’ve been working out this idea for a while and finally got the under painting pretty close. Then it started peeling off between the gesso and primer. I had to just take the whole thing off.
Redid the whole thing in about 2-3 days. Now to let it dry and start the next layers.
Karen, at Gard Vintners called me up the other day and said I could set up anytime. We hadn’t talked for 6 months at least and had never set a date for a show at their nice wine and music place in Ellensburg. I had two days to pull it together and hang a show of about 25 pieces. Looking through my older work, some enamel paintings and oil pastel drawings from the 1980s seemed to fit with some of the newer acrylics. They all had to be taken apart, cleaned up and reassembled. The glass and surfaces were really dirty, but with some cleaning the colors popped and I could see what I was going after almost 40 years ago. There is a continuity to these two eras, something that ties my work together that is only knowable after this many years.
I’ve been working on fine tuning my technique for figures and portraits. In this painting of my friend Chelsea, I used something similar to the Venetian Technique with a complete tonal underpainting in an earth red. In this case Terre Rosa and Venetian Red but with no white,
just the white ground showing through the scumbled drawing. In this way I had the time to really work on the drawing without the complexity of the color. After that was completed and dry I could work over it keeping the shirt a looser more painterly style with solid strokes of opaque paint while tightening up on the face. This technique seems to suit my temperament right now, it can be as tight or loose as I want to go while getting the placement and tonal structure correct first to create the illusion that I’m after.