While I am painting people stop by to watch and have a chat all the time. I really enjoy talking to them. One time a man stopped by and asked to photograph me with the view in the background. He said he has been photographing artists in museums copying master works and it's very interesting to see what the artist is doing compared to what was done by the old masters. He thought it would be a fun extension of that project to photograph landscape artists at work in the landscape showing both the picture they were working on as well as the view of the landscape they were seeing. I decided to give it a try and include a photograph from the area as well as my rendering of the locale.
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The picture on the left is the original landscape. The one on the right is my rendering. I've been having a devil of a time getting the colors to match California color. The trick is not only which particular colors to use but also the tone of the paper. This one is done with green paper and the whole thing went very blue. I redid it today with a magenta ground, but it still went too blue. I'll have to do more analysis of the greens in my palette.
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I've also been painting relationships between trees. The painting on the left is the first one I did this spring. I went out on the spring equinox and these two trees were just popping their buds. I love the blush of color that covers a tree's branches at the moment of spring when the leaves first pop; lemon yellow, palest of peach, lime green. With the painting on the right I was intrigued with the juxtaposition of a tree in flower and one that was still lost in its winter sleep. A passerby looked at the bare branches I had painted and said it looked like "hair". I must confess there is a reason for that. I have read quite a few of Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo in which he talks about his painting process. One of the things that struck me in those letters was his discussion of painting trees. He mentioned that a row of poplars looked like a line of women with caps on their heads. Since reading that I look at trees as animate figures frozen in time like snapshots of people in movement. I haven't seen any that look women with caps on their heads, but I do see movement in the branches and in this painting I was trying to get across an idea of dancing. I was engaged in getting the swirling movement when I made the marks. They do look a bit like hair too. But you can see what you like or feel. No one is correct about it. It's all in the eye of the beholder.
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The picture on the left is a phot of the location. You can see the top of my easel in the center. This is a different angle than the first painting. In this one, the petal covered branches of the tree in flower seem almost to be reaching over to touch the one that is not yet awake. I've been experimenting with different colors of ground. When I was in Colorado I used very pale pastel shades of pink or beige. Here in California the light is much warmer than in Colorado. Because of that, the ground paper has to be brighter and darker or the colors just wash out and get lost. Further south, like in New Mexico, I've seen pastel work on Fucia grounds. The light down there is very warm and colors are really bright. I changed background paper in the painting on the right using cool grey instead of magenta. The result is a rendering more in the cooler shades of colors than the first piece.
Next are two views from the Japanese Tea Garden. The exterior and what you see immediately upon entering. The man who talked about photographing artists and their subjects while working took a picture of me and the tea garden while I was working on the piece on the left, below.
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That's all the photos I have for now. The wind was gusting up to 45 mph today. It blew my easle over and knocked all my colors everywhich where on the ground. That may well be it for the cherry blossoms. But I will go out a couple more times this week and see how many managed to hold on to the trees. It's been blowing pretty hard, though, and it looked like snow in the park, but, it was cherry blossoms blowing on the wind. Very pretty.
Since the sun is always moving, outdoors, the light is always changing The highlights and shadows change. As I am working on a piece I can see the light change and it's a race to capture a particular quality of the light before it changes. I do not usually finish a piece in one sitting. I will do the underlying sketch and ground work on one day and then return again on another day at the same time to finish the piece. I have a couple of photo examples of chaniging light. The first shows the light difference between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. The second, located in my large "brochure site" shows the changing light of the seasons. The same location has been photographed on the Equinox and Summer and Winter Solstices. The changes in light there are dramatic. These two pages are referenced from the Site Map under changing light links.