My style?

I tried another town-with-red-roofs-on-hills painting tonight. And I have to face the fact that I will never paint like the people whose paintings I cited in yesterday's post...but I think I did manage to make this one a better painting than the one of Santorini from the night before.

I'm too literal, and I just don't have the knack of spontaneity; I don't work fast, I have no idea how to make tile roofs actually look like tile, and getting greens to look like shrubbery, well, hmm...but I guess I will keep trying.

Some people say they like "my style." Do I have a style? Most of the time I feel I do not, I just paint what I see.

Paul Jackson, Daniel Smith, and M. Graham paints on Fluid 140-lb. watercolor paper. Pencil underdrawing. From a reference photo whose origin I have forgotten.

A certain style

My friend Bix reminded me that before I admired Marc Taro Holmes's painting (in my last post), I had been exposed to those of Keiko Tanabe and Eugen Chisnicean (both of whom I discovered through Bix). They, too, have the facility of looking at a village on a hill—usually one of those picturesque ones in France, Italy, or maybe Moldova (Eugen)—and squinting their eyes to include all the essentials and none of the pesky details. I don't know how they do it, and just studying their artwork doesn't put me much further ahead; perhaps watching them paint about a dozen of them apiece would do it? Or perhaps painting about 100 of them myself?

Keiko is an interesting case: She worked in intercultural communication, first for a law firm and then for a Japanese government trade organization, for many years, but always wanted to paint. In 2003, she made the commitment to become an artist and, after taking basic drawing and watercolor classes at a community college, embarked on a mostly self-taught regime of painting. She began exhibiting two years later, in 2005. She is one of the most intensely serious painters I have ever encountered; she tells stories about herself such as "I realized I was afraid to paint water, so I painted a picture with water in it every day for a year." She primarily paints en plein air, fast and fresh. She teaches workshops and paints for about 50 weeks a year, and in her "spare" time juries art shows and gives demonstrations. Here is one of hers that is evocative of what I admired about Marc's:

Eugen is, as far as I am concerned, a baby genius. He's 36 years old and, although he has studied art since the age of 11, he didn't really take up watercolor until 2007. He paints, teaches, and exhibits all over the world. He, like Keiko, is primarily a plein air painter.

Perhaps, if I dedicated 10 hours a day, 350 days a year, then I, too, would be painting this way.... When I took a workshop from Keiko and she said the Jeep I had painted looked more like a Yugo, I joked with her that I would have to spend all my lunch hours at the library sitting in the parking lot drawing the staff cars until I could differentiate. She said, very seriously, "Yes, that's a good idea, if you do that for about six months you will have it down."

My cars still look like Yugos.

Not what I was going for

Last month, I participated for part of the month in the "30 x 30 Direct Watercolor Challenge," which is to make a daily painting where you use paint and brush only, with no underdrawing whatsoever. I have had variable success and failure with this challenge in past years, but it's always a good exercise, as it focuses you on looking more carefully at your subject material.

Today I decided to try something based on a painting made by one of our two our mentors in this challenge, Marc Taro Holmes. I loved the way he took this village and just painted in the pertinent details without getting precise about anything, and how it still looked like a village on hills.

Example by Marc Taro Holmes

I had a reference photo lying around of a view of Santorini, in Greece, and thought perhaps I could pull off the same effect, since a majority of the buildings on that island are also white, with only windows and shadows to delineate.

It didn't quite come out as I had hoped. First of all, I did draw in some of the buildings, just to locate them properly in the scene, but once I had done that, I was faced with how I was filling up the interim spaces, and everything got too tight. Then, I quickly realized that there were actually a lot of colors in the buildings in this particular shot, so the absence of color thing didn't really work. There are little sections with which I am happy, and others that turned into a big mess, and I had trouble consistently with the direction of the light. So...a mostly wasted 90 minutes on an experiment I will try again when feeling more flexible!

Speaking of flexibility, the reason there have been no paintings on this blog for almost two weeks is that I threw out my back and have been suffering with it until I could get to the chiropractor for treatment. I have now been a couple of times, and about 75 percent of the pain is alleviated. I have more appointments this week, so I should be back in better shape soon.

Jackson watercolors on Fluid 140lb. paper.

Selfie

For a combination of reasons, most of them resulting from brangling with arrogant, overly sensitive, and poorly informed people online about my new business, I had another wasted day. Finally, I decided I'd try to save it with some therapeutic painting, so I assayed a selfie.

I was actually thinking it would be exploding with either red for anger or blue tones for, well, feeling blue, but the photo I managed to take to serve as a reference looked fairly cheerful, so that's how the painting ended up too. Somehow, despite the appearance of more and more gray hair, the angle at which I caught myself looked younger and happier than my current state would suggest! So I went with it. (Plus, the eyes came out a little bigger and the lips a little fuller, and the head tilt lost an extra chin...) Sometimes you need to idealize things, even if they are self-portraits. Or especially if they are self-portraits?

Here I am, with clean, pinned-back hair and a slight, pursey smile...

Uniball pen

M. Graham, Daniel Smith, and Paul Jackson watercolors

in Bee Sketchbook

Masked crusaders

Once again, six days passed without any painting. I don't know if I'm in a fugue state from being isolated for so many months, or am just having that periodic dip in energy that people with some physical issues have from time to time, but lethargy has triumphed lately, and all I seem to manage to do is read, eat, and sleep.

Today, however, I got into a somewhat unwise online exchange with someone who was espousing the conspiracy theory that Covid 19 is a "plandemic," rather than a pandemic, and I decided I would make this painting I've been wanting to take on for some time now.

These two beauties were all masked up for the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic because, despite their downtown ladies-who-lunch (or march-for-votes?) attire, they knew it was important to protect themselves and each other by covering up their respiration.

I found a great article online called "Four Lessons from the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic," and I'll feature a quote from that:

"The Spanish flu tells us that social distancing works. And it works best if we act early, act fast, and stick together—and base our decisions not on social or economic concerns, but on science and data and facts."

 If you would like a further lesson from history, which is eerily similar to our own in some respects, please read the article, which is here.

This was a black-and-white photo, so all color decisions were my own. I couldn't find a source to credit for the photo.

Uniball pen, Paul Jackson watercolors, Bee sketchbook. 

Relatives

I came across this photo somewhere, and the caption read "There's only one race—the human race." I loved how seriously the little boys were regarding the camera, and the way the one was holding the other so sweetly.

I didn't quite do either of them justice—the boy on the left looks older because I made his face too square when it had more baby fat (I'm used to taking OUT the fat on my adult models, to make them happy!), and his ears are too small. The boy on the right turned out smaller and a little more serious-looking than he was in the photo. Also, I started the faces too high on the page, so the tops of their heads ran into the spiral binding. But...making the attempt made me happy.

Uniball pen, Paul Jackson and Daniel Smith paints, in Bee sketchbook.

Time lapse

I honestly don't know how I went from June 16 to June 21 without a painting, but somehow the days passed and I didn't feel inspired, or ran out of time, or didn't even think of it while doing other things (although what they were I mostly couldn't tell you). But this painting is one I've had in mind for a while now (every time I look to the right out of my patio), and today was the day to put it on paper.

It doesn't, of course, capture everything I was hoping to reproduce. The chair is sitting up against the wall in the shadow of my giant jacaranda tree, the only evidence of that in this picture being the cast light and shade. The chair is a little smaller and therefore less imposing than I intended, and the bright greens on the climber rose were hard to catch in their contrast between bright light and dark shadow. I overworked the background foliage, but I did enjoy capturing the variable canopy (from untrimmed palm trees to giant ash to orange trees) in the vista beyond the wall.

Paul Jackson and M. Graham paints in Bee sketchbook.