Portrait of a long lost pal

Recently Christina and I were happy to reunite with a friend whom I visited in LA and NYC decades ago. She hosted me for a few days this summer in the East Bay Area and helped with a fundraiser for MCJ and book signing for a Mississippi-born federal judge in Oakland. My friend and her husband became collectors of Black Folk Art and Outsider Art starting in the early 1980s. Before learning this about her, another friend took me to one of the first major exhibitions of Black Folk Art at the Corcoran in Washington in 1983. After her husband died, we lost contact with each other for a long time but reconnected late last year.

We spent a short while in her living room talking through various things and I realized exactly how I wanted to do a portrait of her. I took a few reference photos and there things lay for about five months.

Over Christmas holidays I sketched out the image, working from a reference photo and memory. I used a sharpened charcoal pencil instead of a charcoal stick. This let me draw more accurately and do more fine detail. I tried out this tool first with part of the Siesta painting and the Painted Lady painting, but this time I didn’t use turpentine to “ink” it in.

I started the colors in this painting at lighter values than normal. I kept mostly true to this until I had covered the full canvas, but along the way it meant I was generating interesting new color choices and I had very, very little reworking of parts of the painting, except for the face. Here is an early glimpse

Several influences were at play here - the obvious one is Matisse but I also am interested in how Hockney takes Matisse’s flat brightly colored patterns into the realm of a cartoon. As I got further into it, the pale yellow ochre floors and the bare legs called to mind the indoor lighting of Alice Neel or maybe even Francis Bacon. There was a big open expanse of floor in the lower left quadrant that needed to contain something. (Bacon would have left it open). I really enjoyed how the lighter colors, particularly the reds and purples opened up new terrain for me. Here is how things looked further along.

Christina is so careful in providing reactions and advice. She genuinely respects the process - I think that’s from having been a choreographer. I got most of the way through this scene and was happy with everything except the likeness and the empty spot in the lower left. After letting it set up overnight I was able to come in with the charcoal pencil and some fine brush work and get the face closer to what I wanted. Christina made a few suggestions on each and I was able to stay on track. This is the kind of painting where I have to use the yardstick as a substitute for a mahl to steady my hand and avoid smudging wet paint. Here is how it has ended up.

One odd thing I noticed. I moved the painting in front of a little standing light and saw that when backlit it resembled a little bit the kind of stylized almost stained glass style watercolors of Walter Anderson. That was interesting to see. It made me think about adding LED’s to the back of the painting to let people switch it on for a different effect.

le carton retrouvé

Forty-two years ago in the winter of 1977-78 while studying art in Aix-en-Provence I began to use salvaged cardboard as substitute for canvas panel. Here are relics of those student days, starting with a series of interiors of Villa Jean Nelly, the home of Suzanne and Joseph Roman who hosted me. They and their adult children Jean Paul and Nelly, for whom the villa was named, were very warm and kind hosts, better as hosts than I was as a guest at times.

Here is Rubat, a well contented cat with little demand on his time. This was done in the sunroom at the entrance to the Roman home. I hear Nelly, the daughter, a painting instructor, gently chiding me not to mix away all the vibrancy of color when I look at the surface of the table.

This was an exercise in using a limited palette and I like how it worked for the clay pot and the leaves. Unfortunately, the pot and its plate are several degrees off vertical. This may have been done on the desk in my bedroom.

Here is a view of the bed. The quilt offered me the chance for a sort of pre-cubist assembly of planes of color to create volume - very much a Cezanne approach, though he used warm and cool colors to fully perfect this effect. I like the abstraction in this piece and the rectangular blocks of color and black and white. This was about the time I encountered Nicolas de Staël’s paintings. I was beginning to work with. palette knife and so his approach was very appealing.

Here is a companion piece to the bed that I greatly like. It is the table where I worked, a piece now in the hands of a fellow Millsaps art graduate, Bill Tyler. (Thanks Bill for sending it) Over the table is the poster from a Paul Klee show I saw at the Fondation Maeght a wonderful museum overlooking St. Paul de Vence. On the table are my schoolbooks and dictionaries, a lamp, and some of my outdoors gear. I regret that the surface is missing spots of paint.

This was an assignment to do a specific task. First to break a scene into three values, light, medium and dark, and underpaint these with cadmium yellow, cerulean blue, and alizarin crimson. Then to paint using pointillist technique the surface of the objects. I didn’t have the needlepoint precision of a Seurat. Instead I have this blunt edged approach. But there were places where it ended up working. This was a set of cast off clothes hanging on a clothes rack, canvases, and perhaps a backpack, next to a chest of drawers.

This was on the Chemin de Beauregard east of downtown Aix in the vicinity of where my friend John lived. It was done mostly in palette knife with some brush work when necessary. I liked this a lot when I did it for reasons I still don’t understand. It has my restrained notion of a Soutine expressionism but without the bloody colors and the landscape as entrails. I guess that means it’s actually nothing like Soutine after all. It also reminds me of the nocturnal visits to meet up with friends further up this road, that involved cutting through a farmer’s meadow near the Ruisseau la Torse.

This was done in the Alps on a very short trip to Grindelwald. I still like this scene a lot. I later did a version on a single panel which my cousin Lee Green has up in Virginia. This was the only time I did a Grand Mountain View, having spent most of my time on the much more modest Mt. Ste. Victoire and surroundings. I found this cardboard outside a small grocery in town and set myself up to do this scene. I didn’t have very much time, no more than a couple of settings. Below is the reverse of this alpine scene, two panels from a Marlboro box, or what I used to joke was my Andy Warhol tribute.

Monkey Bayou - Siesta

This is the third scene from a notebook of sketches I did about 30 years ago - a trip to Chandeleur Island. I sketched it out at the same time as the sunrise scene that I am so fond of. I finally got around to working it up over the weekend. It started out in a very flat almost Hockney-esque color scheme. I immediately liked how the three big windows framed little mini paintings inside the big painting. After I took this photo, I squared up and evened out the left window frame. An advantage of taking photos and looking at them on small screens is that you can see problems that aren’t always apparent in a full size view. I also liked how the grey iron rails divide up the water and sky into rectangular blocks. I also liked how the water line stretches through all the windows and doors. The original scene appealed to me because you saw all the way through to the stern and out into the water. I left out the string of dinghies at the stern in the original scene.

I had nothing on the right foreground and the scene seemed out of balance. So I added a figure - a deckhand taking a nap. I ran into trouble over the difference between the flat pencil style of the rest of the painting and the painterly molding of the deckhand. I still think I’ll have to go back and get the anatomy done right and then simplify how the deckhand is rendered to harmonize with the treatment of the rest of the painting. But for now, I am leaving it as is. I like it generally pretty well.

I am happy with how the head and hands turned out on the figure on the left, especially the red and pink strokes in the face. I also like the striped shirt. It started out with much darker blue stripes and then I used lighter blue on top and alongside it, and it has a nice fresh effect. Simple.

The first attempt at the deckhand had issues with anatomy and overall it was too small compared to the figure on the left. I reworked it and borrowed a few bits from a sketch of Michelangelo. It made me realize how much I would enjoy doing a deeper dive into figure studies. I hope I get to do this in the future. The figure is below the painting. By “borrowed” I intend to say that I redrew the head and shoulders area to give the deckhand a longer neck, raise the shoulder up, and draw the connection of the shoulder to the back.. Also I reworked how the arms folded underneath the head. And I added a little detail to the torso and will add more but I couldn’t go full Michelangelo with a twisting torso. The sleeping pose doesn’t permit it.

Still at work on this. I did additional work on the torso on the right and got it closer to what I wanted. For the overall scene to work, I couldn’t leave that big empty space in the middle foreground -it seemed deliberately incomplete. So I added a third figure working from a mental sketch of another member of the trip. I sketched it, then put the figure on in pencil, then used a brush with turpentine to dissolve and solidify the lines, and add some gray tones. (Thanks Ruff) Then I painted it in. When I got the other two done, I had to take a hard look at the first one; The head and hands were too big and the basic style was out of sync with the others, so I reworked it to harmonize it with the other two. So I got it to this stage, but I still need to adjust the perspective. The new addition seems to be on a slope instead of a flatter surface. I added some pencil lines as seams to suggest the slope, but the figure needs to be more foreshortened. There also is an adjustment to the left rail to do. That’s the next stage.

I did some more work on it over the past week (early January 2020) and here is where it now stands. I really like the head on the left and I also made some headway on the foreshortening of the figures.

Brisk and Rough

Last week C and I went over to Ft. Morgan and Gulf Shores. I took the opportunity to revisit a view that had hung over our TV for a year or so and drawn my endlessly critical eye. So I set up to paint it in oils and solve the problems I had piled up in my head about the first one. This was the episode with brisk weather.

There’s not a lot to say about this small panel painting except that I really like it a lot. I did it nearly all in one 3 hour sitting on site. The next day after it had mostly dried I gave it a French polish - taking out a smudge here and a weak stroke there. For some reason I like the distant treeline - it sits just right on top of the water and it suggests a lot more detail than actually is there. There isn’t a lot of fussiness in the color mixing. I got what I wanted down on the canvas pretty close to the first time out. I also like the shallow waves and sweeps of water onto the shore.

New and old versions

Several days later Christina went beachcombing despite threats of rain. I brought up a larger canvas and decided to start a 2’ x 4’ scene of the Gulf Shores pier in acrylics. To get a couple of lines right, I used a gimmick of some masking tape. This got me a straight line on the horizon and a gray band in which to paint the pier. This was a real time saver. I was on the balcony from a late afternoon to a first half of the morning as the weather cycled between partly cloudy sunset to misty morning to rough conditions with driving rain and gusts to post rain dramatics. I shifted the painting to follow the conditions several times. The rain drops gave the sky and water an interesting effect- the paint drooped and began to slide down the canvas in places and the rain drops left tiny grooves on the surface. You can see a few places where this still shows up. I took it inside and put it in the shower to let it drain off. Then we had to take it home. I finished it using a reference photo taken in the last hours of the alla prima work. Early on and at the end I used a pointy brush tip art marker.

Here is a little clip of the evolution of the painting.

Laurel River

This was a long hike down the Laurel River with the Julien easel and oils, perhaps my first large on site canvas in oils in a long time. I was struggling with a bad leg and using a walking stick to get down the road. It was toward the end of the vacation in NC. Here is the scene I was working from. Over the course of the day the river rose and the lighting changed a lot. You could tell it had rained by all the little rivulets down the rock faces and out of the foliage that seeped across the trail into the river.

There was a steady trickle of onlookers and their dogs. I sketched out the scene leaving out all the trees and focusing on the river. There came a point where I couldn’t go further with it. I had overdrawn a few places and couldn’t back things up to blank. So I began to add in the color.

I had prepared for a longer stay and rain. The previous days’ rains had muddied the river into the jade and ochre shades I was working with. People with their families and dogs came by from both directions, but the rain kept down the traffic and the well-meaning interruptions. I had done a study earlier in the week that had a Matisse-like quality at the top of the scene. When that happens in a painting, something that charms me, I often go blind to the rest of the painting, so in this case it felt like two different people painted the upper and lower portions.

But I was looking for two things in this bigger piece - colors that were truer to nature and some expression of the flow of the river around the rocks and over the little ledge. So began a long and uneven journey over the next month interrupted by extensive travel. Down at the bottom of this entry is a clip that shows all the different angles I tried. When I shared states with a friend, he offered to try some Photoshop ideas out. It was interesting but I ended up largely sticking to my original plan. The few things that survived almost from the beginning were the foreground in violet red with blue/green leaves and the river boulder done in charcoal and lime green. Everything else went through a train of different treatments.

I finally did hit upon a color solution for the portion of the river towards the near bank. It was yellow ochre, thalo blue, zinc yellow and zinc white. Once I had the right color I was ready to consolidate this complex field of attempts at water and make it be simpler. Another place that was exciting was when I realized it was time to put in the tree trunks. I loaded up a brush and laid them down over the downstream section of the painting - a few big bold brush strokes that felt almost calligraphic and immediately improved the composition. Later I added the foliage putting down blocks of color in the general areas and letting them dry. I came back later and used white and yellow to cut in and shape the leaves. On the far bank I added some detail on leaves and a black/red descending line to suggest a pathway.

Update one year later. I delivered this as a gift to a friend who turned 100 last year. Last week, after looking at this for that interval, I returned to borrow the painting to adjust a few things. I wanted to change the color of the upstream water nearest the viewer to a more greenish hue to better suggest a shadow, and also because I thought the all ochre river didn’t work at all. It seemed to be color blind. Once I worked on that I also reworked the greenery on the far shore and then used a turpentine soaked paper towel to give the colors a softer look and to remove some of the colors. The easel I have made this easy because it converts to a horizontal plane.

Finally, I added a tree trunk and some branches on the right side of the painting, something I had resisted for a long time. But it felt right the minute I did it, like adding that necessary note to complete a chord.

Here’s the clip with the various detours before I reached the end. I like bits and pieces of many of these but I couldn’t collage them all together because they were all part of a state that got left behind. If there is another state that I still like, it’s the one shown in the still shot that begins the clip.

Shenandoah River

Near the end of a month-long stretch of work travel I was invited out to a cabin on the Shenandoah River near Bentonville outside of Front Royal, VA. The weather forecast was unfriendly with only a short window of decent weather. I had acrylics in the pochade box and two 12x18” panels in my hanging bag. I settled on this site because it had a bend in the river and some whitewater. The land-side elements were pretty static and the foreground trees blocked the far side of the river bank, so I wasn’t expecting a lot from the composition. But the river movement and reflections were interesting. And, for the first session, the weather was really nice.

I reduced the cluster of trees in the middle foreground from 7 to 5. This occurred because I omitted space in between the two panels. I started the left one with a green made of yellow and Payne’s gray and a lavender of lightened ultramarine blue and produced an underpainting that reminded me of a Bonnard or early Matisse. In the right panel, I used a green made of thalo blue and yellow and I had one tree drawn right at the left edge, on the seam between the two panels.

In the next phase, I kept the simplified shapes but brought the colors more in line with what I saw. I liked the overall look, especially the values in the water reflections in the left panel and the irregular reflection of the treeline in the right panel. Losing the wild colors made me want to do an alternative version of this painting with a limited yellow and violet palette. I did like the richness of the greens on the far bank.

The second sitting was overcast and threatened to rain. It was time to give shape to individual trees on the riverbank and details to the whitewater. I experimented a little with the colors for the whitewater and liked the results - offwhites, blues, and greens. To make the foreground riverbank stand out from the water, I used a bright green. After putting that in place, I loaded a drawing brush with lots of yellow and blocked in the clusters of leaves on the foreground trees. (I also added graphic elements with a Sharpie.) I liked some of the looseness of the foliage but as a whole it didn’t set off from the background, so this was a problem to fix. Also, it made the color scheme hard to take.

I got a little time to work on this after work during the following week. I cut in with darkened blue black and other greens to shrink and give shape to the foliage. I also used the Sharpie to add branches and edges to the leaf clusters. I added graphic detail to the banks of trees in the middle and far distance. And I did additional work on the river surface reflections and the cluster of bushes on the far right.

To transfer it to oils, I sketched out the field study onto a 12x36” canvas. I worked to keep the colors light and flat. Just as with the study, the hard part would be the foliage and so I held off putting it in until the last.

What I didn’t realize is that the river reflections would be as hard or harder than the foliage. I started out in a very flat and crude way.Someday I’d like to try another version of this all in sets of straight lines like that sketch I did back in Oxford years ago.

To move forward, I used reference photos and the painting, picking elements from each and dropping out things along the way. I liked having clean colors, not covering over too much for errors in mixing or drawing. After awhile, I needed to draw lines on the canvas, but the oils were too wet for a Sharpie. I turned to a small long thin brush and loaded it with Payne’s gray, and after several tries, got to a point where I could do a longer more flowing line.

There’s a point where the color is mixed right and the paint is the right consistency on the brush where you feel free to step in and do new things, depart from nature, the plan, or whatever is your reference point. I felt secure enough to try something out on a nearly-done piece this time when it came to the water reflections, and I decided to cut into the tree reflections with the lavender blue. (Maybe this doesn’t seem like such a big deal - it’s not, really. Except that in this case I am reproducing a painting that had reached an equilibrium without this element.) This changed the painting’s basic focus to the flow of the river, which is what originally attracted me to the scene. So, the oil painting done back in my studio finally got me where I wanted to be despite being far removed from the original scene. This seems like progress.

Chandeleur Sunrise

In the late 80s or early 90s I went out to Chandeleur Island with a group of friends and did a number of sketches. One of my favorites was a sunrise over Chandeleur Island from the stern of CAVU. Nearly 30 years later I turned that sketch into a painting. Here is the sketch. 7 by 16”.

To move quickly, as I only had a weekend, I used a projector to put the barebones drawing onto a 24/48” canvas. I worked outside in the back yard while Christina and Alexandra gardened. It was a mild and beautiful day. I had the sketch book propped open and I started in on the scene with blues and yellows.

As I added more colors the color scheme intensified and moved into a Fauvist vein. Even though the sketch originally was pretty bold, thanks to the prisma color pencils, it was the richness of the oil colors that pushed me to go further. I had an interesting purple, green, yellow combination going on for awhile. And then I had to figure out the transition beyond the green in the sky, and that’s where the pale blue began to come in. I actually pulled out some of the art monographs I have to see how Derain and Van Gogh managed that kind of transition. I don’t have one on Derain, so I will have to look for that.

I always liked the composition. The boats and skiffs take the eye into opposite directions like the four points of a compass. That huge cloud with the red eye of the sun peeking beneath was an interesting shape and it seemed to hold everything else in place. Expressing the expanse of water and its changing colors was a big attraction. This very sketchy state is where I ended yesterday morning.

Today I decided to strengthen the olive greens in the water and go in strong with the yellow on the water on either side of the clouds. I realize that I haven’t ever used that much yellow in a scene before and it gave me a thrill. I also had to go in with yellow, orange and red in the sky around the cloud and work more on the sky transition from yellow to green to blue.

I filled in the cloud with a slightly greyed and zinc-ed down ultramarine blue and painted the shape flat with no strong brushwork. The shape of the cloud alone was enough.

As is usual, when I look back I see things I wish I’d kept. I do like the overall color harmony in this last state, but I wanted to go further with several ideas. These included getting the water reflections to better mirror the sky. and simplifying some of the areas that had become thickets of individual lines. I also worked on the interior of the foreground skiff and the shapes of the other two vessels on the horizon. This was a pretty quick piece of work, just as was true of the Captain Bob piece. Both took about 8-10 hours all told.

Here is where I ended up with the sunrise scene.

This is the second consecutive painting from the notebook of that trip. Here they are together.