Tag: landscape

In the Fields

This painting was laid in on the last day of my Tuesday afternoon class which ended in July. It’s been sitting around while life moved into different areas. I finally found the time last week to finish it up. Final touch ups took place a few minutes here and there after that. Now, it is in a frame and ready to be put on display.

A summer or two ago a friend and I went to her family’s little farm plot out on the Oxnard Plain. I don’t know if this was her husband or just a worker I saw, but I thought it was such a wonderful photo it deserved becoming a painting. It shows the beautiful flat farmland found in western Ventura County, CA, and the coastal mountains which border it. I spent my teens in a then-small town nearby and always loved driving through the farm / ranch country on narrow roads surrounded by a variety of crops. I still do, too.

Oil on canvas board, 16×20.

Country Track alla Prima

I had been working on my geese (see “Honk, Honk, Honk”) for weeks on end. The last few sessions in my painting class found me bringing it in, setting it up on the whiteboard ledge, looking at it, and then dabbing a bit here or there. I expect I will dab a little bit more, but I will be submitting it the first annual student art show at the adult school campus in August.

Spending a lot of time on a painting means a lot of focused work. Breaking that focus seems important for me. Play and don’t get precious. In painting class this means slap on some paint and get going. With this painting, I did. And I finished it in two hours, all within the allotted class time. I rather like it and totally enjoyed the play time.

Oil on cotton canvas board, 11 x 14.

Desert Sunset – After the Storm

Summer is always a busy time and I really have done very little as far as artwork or painting. Other things seem to be getting in the way. This afternoon I finally had an open spot and painting in gouache seemed simple enough – simple meaning everything was at hand, the clean up is easy, and I rather liked the challenge of a sunset.

Arches HP 140#, 9×12, gouache.

Summer Fields

A lot has been happening here, and time just slips away. Additionally, my painting journey has been mostly oil painting, and that takes time. I have been pleased with my progress there. Along with my usual painting class, I have been taking a gouache class, and I have been having so much fun. Our instructor worked for decades in animation at Disney and Warner Brothers, so her background is very different than mine. As a result, it’s a lot of technique gleaned from her 40+ years of experience and exploration into gouache being used differently from my own more painterly approach.

While this painting is more in my usual style, the lessons I have been learning each week are apparent here to me. Maybe not you, but me! The class has made me see and visualize gouache painting differently as well as how to apply it. I could get into the details here, but it’s something I am not in the mood to try to explain. Let it suffice to say I had a delightful time painting this little scene of a track leading to a rape seed field – the bright yellow – and a lavender field beyond. I thought some boulders would be a fun thing to try, and I think they worked out rather well.

Artists gouache, Arches HP 140# paper, approximately 9 x 12 inches.

Landscape in Ink & Color

Traditional landscape painting in ink does not focus on realism. Instead, it works to capture the spirit of a place. Brush strokes are key as painting in black, white, and shades of grey can be challenging. Once the brush touches the paper, you leave a mark you cannot remove. So – think! Landscapes can be complex and it is very easy to make a mess. Even thinking in terms of masses of shade and shape is hard, because how do you convey the texture of a flowery field in ink without color?

The absorbent qualities of the xuen paper really make me work. It holds onto water and ink a long time before it dries. I found this out as I painted – the black kept spreading outward from my brush tip, and if I hadn’t pressed the water out of my brush before picking up more, the black became grey and the water was on the paper and in the paper forever! It seemed to spread forever. Even using a hair dryer didn’t seem to speed up the drying process. The challenge of ink painting is forethought.

Not a great landscape. Will color make it any better or interesting?

Kuretake makes traditional Japanese Gansai paints, of which I have a few colors! I decided to use these a day after the original landscape had been painted. Most of the painting I re-wet in sections to see how the colors would blur into one another. Some areas, like the rocks in the lower right hand side, I did on dry paper with a fairly dry brush but diluted paint. The Gansai colors vary in intensity, so the diluted paint seemed to be a good starting point. The bright yellow is a mistake – too intense although diluted. At this point I used a bit of scrap paper to test colors before painting.

Most of the colors were applied wet-on-wet. In the end, this painting makes me think of hand-colored photographs from the early 1900s.

Yasutomo Liquid Sumi Ink, “Jade Plate” double xuen paper.