Pisgah esquisses

Here are some sketches from our time off in the Pisgah National Forest plus one larger painting. In all but one case I began the scene in situ and then finished it the next day back at the cabin. This stretch up here has been closer to the pace of painting I had as a college student. I have enjoyed it a great deal. 

The first one is Max Patch looking west toward the Tennessee line. Christina and I went up there with Pearl and slowly made our way to the top. It was blustery and very cool. Lines of clouds swept past, surrounding us. For a memorable time we were alone. A young woman hiking the AT approached from one direction and then a group of about 30 teenage girls came from the opposite direction. Christina and I went down the hill and I set up to start a painting. 

I didn't go for the softer texture that the mountains usually have here. Instead I used the small paintbrush like a colored pencil and so the piece has a texture mostly of short slanted lines.  This stage has my favorite state of the distant peaks on the right. Those colors are so soft and beautiful. I laid it out in a blue drawing and spent about 3 hours filling it in and then walked down to meet up with Christina in the trailhead parking lot. 

Back home I worked on the contours of the mountain faces and tried to keep the colors on the light side. I also worked on the foreground and came up with a combination of layers that worked well. It ended up having a stubby line texture and a mixture of blues and wheat yellows that people sometimes associate with Vincent. 

On this same hike, I took a photo of Christina with Pearl lying down looking to the north. I sketched something out very rough but didn't paint it at the site. Instead I came home and worked on it sometimes using a reference picture. This is unlike how I usually work. The scene of Christina lying down before a bank of grasses has a little echo of Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World, and Christina would empathize with her namesake's affliction.  In any event, I knocked out the first version of this based on the drawing and tended to exaggerate the curves and paint in (for me) a comic book style.

In he next stage I de-emphasized and moderated the curves of the hills in the middle distance, separated Christina a little more from Pearl and eliminated the backpack. I spent a while getting the mountain in the distance to a satisfactory state.  This is kind of a sentimental scene for me but I am looking for ways to add more humans into the work. 

I like this sky and the undulation of the mountain. I also like Christina's arms and the yellow straw hat. I regret leaving the bank of tall grass so underpainted, but I didn't want to risk making things worse.

The third scene, also done on Max Patch was from a visit several days later. I was alone and found a spot looking to the east near the place where the trail intersects the AT. I took a path about 30 yards down from the trail and that was enough to keep away most passers by. 

It was a day that threatened rain. I picked the scene because of the three trees in the foreground, and the layers of mountains behind them. I had fun exploring this scene and finding ways to simplify all the details before me. I used one of those viewfinders to frame the image and help me keep the composition within the proportions of this little canvas. I went through several stages quickly in this scene mainly because the sky was threatening rain and so the shadows cast on the scene before me shifted quickly. As that warning cold wave of air came along, I quickly covered the foremost mountain in a dark blue black and then packed out.  I like very much how the distant range blends in with the cloudy sky here. Wish I had held onto that.

 Something weird took hold of me on this one when I came back to it. I spent a while trying to get the mountains into balance and to make them look more realistic. Then at some point I was stuck on the sky and I turned the piece upside down to work on it- something I do when I need to detach from representational work.  After doing this I found a piece of charcoal stick and re-established the lines of the mountains and I liked that. It was very flat however and the scene seemed to have more of a color woodblock appearance. I went ahead and finished it in that spirit and ended up with this.

The final piece (unless I squeeze one more in on my last day here) was a view of Laurel River. For the first time, we were obliged to hike more than a mile down the path to get to the public portion of the river. I set up just in time for a rain that warped the little canvas board I had so I set that aside and waited. I unwrapped a 24x30"  canvas and set about studying how water moves among the rocks in the river.  I could probably do this for a long, long time. It is so hypnotic and calming. A few years back I had a success on a small scene from the Laurel River and so I wanted to try something larger and more complex. I spent about three hours on this and had to pack out. I was working on some painterly nuances in the river flow and becoming annoyed with how mushy it had become so I picked up a big round brush and used black paint to reestablish the lines of the scene. Some of those lines were really good and gave the work a zesty edge. 

I liked this a lot but I wanted to do a better job on the water and finish the tree. I spent about 7 or 8 more hours on this over a couple of days to get the various paths of water to work together and this required very intentional (a cliché I hate) strokes of paint and a lot of close mixing of colors to get things to have volume and movement. I think this is a decent job and would love to have the chance to really master painting transparency, foam, and water movement. It is simply wonderful. 

Turns out I did have one more to do. Christina and I went to Zimmerman's farm so she could pick blackberries. No one was there except a few cautious dogs and someone on a distant tractor. Christina strapped on a basket and walked down the rows marked with flags as approved for picking. She got beautiful results. I followed her with a little 9x12" canvas and did two Sharpie studies of her. 

Back home in Gulfport, I added some basic colors to this little study and will let this sit for a week or so before I finish it.

Big Lagoon on a small panel

I set up in this tower overlooking Big Lagoon. On the left you can see Christina's yellow kayak as she crosses over to the beach. This was my first experience with the pochade box. The difference in the size of canvas and work space will be a big adjustment for me compared to the French easel. I have to be much more conscious of how I work because the footprint of everything is at most half of what I usually work with and often much less than half.

So, out of sheer perversity, I decided to do kind of a big scene on a small canvas, 9X12". It's a view overlooking two pavilions on the north shore of Big Lagoon. It was very windy when I started and so the initial lines were shaky and spotty. It was laid out very crudely because of the conditions and my unfamiliarity with the set up. I used a small bright brush for most of the work and once more produced a homogenous texture of strokes that looked like a timid Van Gogh knockoff. On the upside there was some level of freshness and emotion to it all.

From this point forward I began to work things as though I was operating on a much larger canvas, and so came much of the complication. It's called a pochade box because you should sketch on it. I think the lesson here would be to carry several canvases and toss off a small pile of them to work with later. Instead I toiled over this one for the afternoon, the following day, and a little bit this morning. As windy as it was, it also was very hot on this Sunday in the Florida panhandle. The next morning I did a little work on it outside the place we stayed in Pensacola. 

Later, we went over to the National Seashore which makes up the south shore of Big Lagoon. Christina went swimming and beach combing while I worked from the passenger side of the truck, sheltered from the intense sun. 

One adaptation due to a small palette surface was to pick up colors and mix them on the canvas. At times this didn't work, so I used the lid of the portable palette to do some mixing and then wiped it off. At this point I had moved beyond sketching to correcting the sketchy drawing and painting this in a traditional way. This may have been the best version of the sky. Wish I'd have kept it. I was able to work from the truck seat pretty well, at times taking the panel into my lap for some of the detail work.  By the end of the day, here is what I had, balanced on the rear bumper of the truck. 

This has a nice fresh look. When I got home, I added some details with a sharpie, reworked the curved boardwalk and added kayaks to the shore in the lower right. This brought me to this point. I'm in conflict over the sharpie details, as I like having the graphic quality to nail down some shapes and add detail, but it does seem overall to darken the image. I tend to like the last outdoor stage a little more. 

Odogalisques

I will share a bit of history with green dogs. Here is Curvis, Cathy's dog, circled in red below. Curvis sits in the middle of the cul de sac at Bratton Circle, behind the Beacon restaurant in Oxford. He was a good dog, though I didn't appreciate him at the time. I was a highly distractible and confused law student who hadn't yet let go of the impulse to paint things. So when Curvis barked, which was often, I complained and became unruly. Neighbor Chris, always up for unruliness, joined me to hold Curvis and tint him with some green food dye color. It didn't make him bark any less. Later I did this painting. Apart from the carpet on the tin roof, and the garden stakes on the right, the interesting part is the patchwork of gravel, busted asphalt, and dirt. After putting in the shadows in an underpainting in deep blue, I did a series of quick strokes in cerulean blue, brown, and pale yellow. When it was over I "saw" in these strokes snakes  emerging from the painted gravel and the grass. In the middle of the cul de sac, I added Curvis. 

In this painting below, I didn't paint the actual dog green, just the image on the canvas. I started out painting Nash with a green forehead and torso, but couldn't make this work. Then I painted over it with the browns and maroons.  I am still trying to work out why the green and blue underpainting works with the top coats of fur.. Perhaps it is that the reddish brown complements the green and the brownish maroon is an analog to the blue. I'm sure there is a finer theoretical explanation for it buried in a book or a color wheel. For now I am just happy with the end result. 

I don't have a history with odalisques, sad to say, except for admiring those of Delacroix and Matisse. A couple of friends thought this scene owed something to Matisse, so I cooked up a pun. These dogs can't be called odalisques because these are boys, and not ladies of the seraglio. But they are lounging lazily around on cushions, they do get lots of attention, and the painting style is bright, flat, and filled with  patterns, like some Matisses. So, ok, they are dog odalisques, or odogalisques.

Several years later, my older daughter Meghan asked for a copy of this painting as a birthday present and I obliged. Not something I typically do, but I went for it. I like very much how it turned out.

I actually have a painting from my very earliest days that reminds me a little of this scene. It was of a Weimaraner named Wolfgang asleep on an easy chair in my teenage bedroom. It has a much more subdued palette (plenty of green, just none on the dog) and is the work of someone who had been painting less than 2 years.. 

Analog>Digital>Analog

This painting started on Passover/Easter during a weekend break from my DC travel. The owner was kind enough to allow me to visit his place in Eden for a night and I started a canvas while I was up there.  I had an afternoon and the following morning to get something begun. Turned out the morning light was striking so I had to start over in the morning. This was my first square canvas in a very long time, and it was fairly big for me, 36" by 36".  Here is the view.

At first I was a little under the spell of Hockney's California landscapes which I had seen at the Met early this year. I was using ultra-vivid colors and flat, cartoonish drawing. It was fun to explore for a little bit but it wasn't suitable for me so I pretty much abandoned it all in later work.

A nice aspect was having a trusted old friend quietly looking over my shoulder. Unlike with strangers, I was not defensive about making mistakes or having my privacy stepped on. And boy did I make mistakes. Still, a friendly presence was a great thing. It made me realize how solitary a pursuit painting generally is.

So I packed up what I got started and went to an event in Memphis and then back on the road to DC for more work, and the weeks rolled past without me being able to do much about it for quite a while. In fact, I did the Ft. Morgan overcast scene before I returned to this.

There still is a hint of Hockney's saturated hues in this palette and the winding bank of the lake. But that's about it. I did find a little time before my last trip to DC to work on some refinements at home in the studio. I liked very much the colors on the upper right portion of the scene and it was fun to add a tractor. However the painting had a chronic problem with perspective since nothing in the foreground gives you a clear appreciation of how far down the meadow and lake are from the vantage point. 

While I was traveling, I imported the above scene into a tablet app that I use for sketching and experiments. This was the first time I did an extensive try to complete the painting digitally. I had a good time working with it and enjoyed especially the watercolor effect. I learned a good bit about color mixing that helped when I got back home and worked on the canvas. I could do some reference color checks to see what is the best way to mix some colors. 

Here is where the digital piece stood when I returned from DC. 

With this digital study in hand I had a vision of what I'd like the final state to resemble and so I set about making a series of adjustments and changes on the canvas today. It was generally pretty straightforward. It was great to have worked through all the mistakes in a digital setting where I could erase my problems and start over.   So, with a few variations from the digital version, here is where the canvas ended up. 

This piece is a little more decorative than I usually do, but I still like the overall feel. To help with the perspective I worked the foreground with larger grasses and some stones to give it a different texture. I also added the tractor, the boats, and the fellow fishing from a kayak in the shadow. I used a tool to measure the height of a person on the tractor and then scale the pier and the fisherman.

Below is a video progression of the states of this painting.

Overcast

A strong northern wind swept over Bon Secour Bay under an overcast sky when I started this piece. Christina showed me the location, a path from an abandoned subdivision cul de sac to the north shore of Fort Morgan, near the State Park area. Pelicans, blue and white herons, and a kingfisher set off as I approached. My easel was shaky with a larger canvas (24 x 48) and also unsuitable to hold my regular palette and water, so I simply applied some blue and white directly to the canvas in the center of the sky, and dispensed with the palette.  I started out with a quick Sharpie sketch of the scene and then used a large round brush to work out the lines of the painting and the basic layers.  The round gives a nice graphic quality and the large version tends to encourage a more gestural approach to lines. It also can hold enough paint to do a longer line on a big canvas. This one is 24x48.

I worked out the overall composition just in blue and white longer than I normally would. In the process the landscape became deeper and deeper blue in more locations. I began to add some greens, again applying a quantity of green, orange, and yellow ochre to the canvas, this time in the corner. Instead of pre-mixing, I simply picked up some of the colors and mixed them in place. This produced a few good effects but it also made for some gaudy colors. 

A few people came and went, and I had one blue heron who stayed and watched me for about half an hour.  I had done about all I could after 2 hours and had to deal with the remaining paint on the canvas and so I simply spread the yellow ochre in stripes.  I also had to do something with the remaining blue and white in the sky, so I scrubbed that in. I liked the sky and the windblown look of the trees a lot.

Christina had gathered some wood and shells. I packed up. A side brace on the easel which had cracked earlier broke off. I pulled my things together and started down the trail to the truck. I heard a loud buzzing and a drone came into view overhead and in front of me appeared a team of nosy people in matching t-shirts. On the ferry back across Mobile Bay we met a Quebecois couple and I dredged up my rusty French to visit with them. 

Back home, I had to correct a compositional error. The waterline on the lake to the right was higher than the horizon on the right. I realigned the lakeside waterline by lowering where the fringe marsh entered the water. I also stressed the sharp vertical line on the left side of the lake and reworked the small bit of marsh grass jutting out in the right foreground. 

I used a mixing white thinned out with gel and a small amount of ultramarine blue to create a water surface. After several passes at this, I began to get something that worked. I turned to the bushes, marsh grass,  and trees. I was trying to avoid the gaudy effect of the permanent green that was causing me trouble in another painting I had started. I made a mistake I had made before, which is to do endless variations of green without making them work structurally or have internal logic. This was a particular problem with the fringe marsh grasses. Here is where things stood partway through the day. Still some glam green and a lot of chaos. This is the lesson for me:  nature is far less chaotic than we may perceive. Start with one place and work from point to point, and it becomes clearer.

Later I switched to a set of smaller bright brushes.  I consolidated the fringe grass green into a generally uniform dark green, instead of the permanent green light over ultramarine blue. I also reworked the reflections of trees in the water and the ochre fringe along the far side of the lake. I added in reddish brown trunks and branches to the trees and some earth tone debris along the foreground. Toward the end I lowered the horizon on the right side to open up the trees and emphasize the roughness of the woods. I did very little to change the far horizon or the sky.

This is another scene that stays in the mainstream of what I have done most of my life. I could fault myself for not reaching further, or I could notice that I got this done in 2 days and I was grabbed almost instantly when I saw it. There were few initial decisions to make.  I really enjoyed working with the paint on the canvas as a palette. I don't know how often I'll continue to do it, but it was very convenient.

Painting a Pluton

For close to 20 years, I have tried to capture a really good view from Whiteside Mountain near Cashiers. It's a great location for painting, because the perch is so uniquely situated. it's off the main trail, down between two large boulders and out over a rock face hundreds of feet in the air. 

Some time ago on a little site called Cowbird I described the geology and the experience of painting at this location.  Here is the link (you have to use the navigation arrow to move right and see the text). And here is the image. I like its fresh and loose feel and the sfumato edges of the distant mountains.. But I wish it were a landscape format. It also is tilting off to the right a little too hard, made worse by the off kilter photo.

Here is the view looking out to the east.

Here is an early stage and a final on an earlier version, now lost to the storm. These have nice soft treatments of the tree cover and interesting exposed rock faces, in the distance. But the horizon line was way too high in the scene and the nearby rock faces resembled waterfalls, as my curmudgeonly neighbor back home reminded me. 

More recently,  I began a scene out there and brought it home to finish. Instead of doing so, I set it aside for a considerable time and finally picked it up about a week ago. I'll skip the step by step and just say I tried to find a balance between the two prior paintings, freshness and perspective effects. Here is what I ended up with.

Put In

Again to Fort Morgan and again perched on the back of our pickup truck. I looked out over Bon Secour bay from a location where kayakers and fishermen put in and saw a clear well-lit peaceful scene. I did a sparse underdrawing in gray after putting in some vertical and horizontal thirds. When I started I thought the appeal was going to be the water and sky. 

 I painted paler and thinner colors in the water and middle distance and had darker and more opaque color in the nearest point to shore. Most of this was done with small to medium angle brushes.  For the sky and some of the water I used rounds and brights. This shot's poor quality is because it was taken in the back of the truck bed on the ferry heading home.

Back home the next day, I corrected the horizon and set to work on enlivening the water and sky. I was taken by the darker patches of water where the wind stirred up the surface into an interesting texture. I also wanted to have a vivid sky and so I did some loose brushwork with some unmixed colors. I did a fair amount of work on the nearest point of land, reworking it over and over. I also darkened the patch of shrubbery in the lower right but that turned out to be too much.. 

I deepened the cerulean blue in the sky and did some palette knife work to give the clouds some weight. I also spent a lot of time trying to get the foliage right on each of the strips of land. There is a risk in using the same brush to describe ever further away areas of the painting. The eye doesn't read these as being further away if they are the same basic width and length. I liked the water effect in this stage pretty well.  For scale, I added Christina putting in from shore, but it was immediately clear she and the boat were too small for the surroundings.

To bring this to an end, I had to replace the existing figure with Christina in the kayak coming to shore, eliminate the small sand bar on the left and the shrubbery in the lower right, and do a series of refinements on the sky, water, and greenery fringing the water.  With these changes I got to this point. 

This is another piece that was completed in the studio with less and less dependence upon a reference photograph.

Lately I have been checking the dynamics of the composition by flipping the scene horizontally. A number of times, I find myself more attracted to the flipped version. I am curious if others notice a preference like this as well.