Sand Dunes in Death Valley

Death Valley is up and off Hwy 395 along the Eastern Sierra Mountains in California. It’s a strange and eerily beautiful place with a lot of surprises and history. It is preserved as Death Valley National Park. The website is filled with great information and it is one of the best places to visit – in the right season, and in the right weather. People die in the desert because they do not understand it, so if you go, be careful!

Sand dunes always amaze me. I am still stuck in my child’s view of the world that sand dunes exist only in the Sahara, and can only be found by riding a camel. Silly, yes!

There are sand dunes everywhere – beaches and deserts mostly, but sometimes in places you least expect. Their shifting shape in the wind and blowing away foot prints or burying ancient cities all lead to a fascination as they make everything seem so temporal.

Anyway . . . . this is an oil painting using a limited palette. Some of the goals in doing this painting included smooth, smooth brushwork for the dunes. I tried to catch the gradual gradations and color changes I saw. In the distance is the flat valley before the towering mountains. For each I used directional brushwork and a deliberate vagueness to create a surreal effect. The mountains, when I look at them afresh, can also be visualized as swirling clouds. Interpretation I will leave to your eye.

Oil on canvas panel; 16 x 20 inches.

Persimmon-O-Lution

A lot of people I follow in the contemporary oil painting world are of the school of “paint it and forget it”. That is easily done if you have a lot of experience perhaps. For me, since I don’t plot out compositions too much nor do preliminary studies, this doesn’t work too well. I am of the wing-and-a-prayer school, using what I do know, and proceeding to let things evolve. Somehow I find that more satisfying.

Below is the final (for now) rendition of some persimmons. These are fresh fuyu persimmons which appear in the grocery stores for a few weeks and then vanish. They can be dried and are quite delicious. Hachi persimmons make great bread – a fruit and nut bread. There are even persimmons native to North America and may be found in the southeastern areas of the United States.

It seems pretty well settled as a painting except for the background to the upper right of the persimmons. It is a bit too yellow for my taste, but as I am considering whether or not to leave the overall back and foregrounds on the lightish side, this is something to be addressed once that decision is made.

Prior to this painting, I made an underpainting to set up colors and values and composition. This one I was pondering about – the lower left hand corner needed something, so I put in a persimmon leaf. Then, the painting was banished for about a week, to dry as well as to be able to look at it with fresh eyes.

I didn’t like the leaf. In general, though, I did like the painting. I decided to remove the leaf using the generative background PhotoShop element to remove it. You can see the results below.

Much better!! And so I painted the leaf out with fairly thick paint and made the adjustments you see in the first painting of this post.

Like I said, painting is an evolutionary process in many ways. With watercolors you are sort of stuck with what you put down, so plotting and planning – to a point – is necessary. Being able to anticipate is a big part of watercolor. All other media can be fixed and corrected. Mistakes can be hidden and reworked. I prefer oil to acrylic and gouache as that the paint is very malleable – you can moosh it around, wipe it off, and so on. Acrylics dry too fast for this, even with retardants. Gouache paint can lift (with artist gouache, not acrylic gouache) up and reveal the layers beneath if applied too thickly. Alkyds added to oil paints speed up the drying process and odorless mineral spirits help make oil painting a less stinky medium.

I will continue to paint in oils for the most part. Acrylic paint may provide an underpainting at times. Evolution can be a bit of fun, and these persimmons have been a real delight so far.

Oil paint, 10×10 cotton canvas on board.

Below, click through the paintings to see the progress of with leaf, without leaf, and semi-finalized painting.

Seasonal Leftovers

I am winding down the spring and summer container garden, weeding out dead plants, dumping pots of dirt, and deciding what to carry over for the spring season. There are still plants to enjoy, some permanent, others transitory. Trees stay around all the time, and as the season changes, so do they. Other plants, like succulents, flower but continue to stay fat and succulent into the coming colder months. Others straggle along, like the milkweed, and just seem to grow no matter what you do to them! Let’s take a look.

One of my favorite bits of the yard – the Brown Turkey fig tree. It needs to be pruned, but I had to wait for the gardener to work his magic and fill my clippings bin. I also need to sort out first year / second year growth to get a good crop next year, and begin at the top – it is way too tall for me to reach up!

Another favorite tree is the Crepe Myrtle. It is a deciduous tree – something of a rarity around here. At present, its leaves are deep red and dropping. Against the late afternoon sun their brilliance is beautiful, especially against a blue sky. Once bare the delicate branches are lovely and graceful. Spring sees swelling leaf buds and soon clusters of deep red-pink flowers. And then the cycle continues after the flowers drop, and then the leaves.

Succulents annoy and fascinate me. They don’t need much work and they are really hard to kill – perfect for people with purple thumbs. This one is in a pot with a number of others just like it, and as I wandered around to find something to photograph, the light on the – leaves? – branches? – was quite lovely.

Milkweed for the Monarchs! This year my flowers were few and I did not set out to raise a bunch of milkweed, but despite that, the plant is stubborn and continues to show up in some of the strangest places. I have a number to be found in my container garden – mixed in with lilies, peppers, tomatoes, lavender, oregano, mint, succulents, and who knows what else!! I like the yellow ones the best, but have also had them in reds and oranges. Even if I forget to water things – or just don’t because of hot winds and cold weather – these plants just chug along.

The last few sunflowers of the summer are hanging on – but these are not big and tall, but short and runty. Nonetheless, their brilliant colors cannot but add to your day!

It’s windy this afternoon, but this little spider’s web caught my eye. It is strung up between a couple of small branches of the orange tree, dancing in the breeze. As a photo, it was hard to capture, but the twinkle of the light on the strands, however imperfect a photo, reminds us of the fragility and strength all around us in the natural world.

And now, indoors it is! Cold wind, 60F, and the cleaners are here and it is time to watch some Hamish McBeth and kick back a bit.

In the Devil’s Garden

The American Southwest is amazing. Austere, rugged, rich colors of red barren stone showing sedimentary rock layers in many different colors. Plant life is tough and diverse and needs to be able to withstand extreme heat and cold, as well as arid conditions. Portraying these colors is really a challenge and a lot of fun as well! Here is the Devil’s Garden Trail area in Arches National Park. I thought doing it in pen and color might be the easiest route . . .

Strathmore Vision paper, 9×12, ink, watercolor.

Across the Pond

This has been a terrible week out here. Where I grew up was burnt to the ground in a lot of areas with family and friends losing houses. Election week was a roller coaster. It is always surprising to me how such things can just cause my sense of world order and sanity to just blow away, as well as realizing the world is not as I see it – perceive it – want it to be. But connections with people and hobbies and doing things – normal, everyday things – does help settle the discomfort and chaos a bit. Not sure what the next several years will bring, so we will wait and see – what else can we do?

I guess we can paint!

Watercolors almost always soothe my troubled soul! Painting and drawing does in general. The act of doing is an act of being, an affirmation of life, and the validity of existence. Me, I am always searching for explanations, but there are times when the only explanation is to do something, like paint, watch a movie, read a book, go for a walk, watch the cloud pictures in the sky.

Nature. Water, trees, sky, grasses. Peace.

Watercolor, Kilimanjaro 300# CP paper, 11×14.