Daily Painting

This was at  Land's End, San Francisco, yesterday - very breezy and cold. Quite uncomfortable....I have a new appreciation for plein air snowscapes and general plein air in cold weather. I was trying to paint from one dark value to the next, connecting areas of similar value a la Charles Reid [my new obsession] .... apparent in how I started [rocks in the first painting] but then reverted to old ways. Bigger brush for the second painting - quick, loose - how I want to paint  a l w a y s.

I attended a full day figure painting workshop [with Robert Dvorak] at Pacific Art League, Palo Alto.  Each pose was 20 minutes, and the deadline was intense: to draw [7-8 mins] and paint [12-13 minutes] to complete! These are posted in the order in which I did them....not sure if there is progress!  I wish I had left more whites on the paper... This was my first time doing figures, AND working on a half sheet. I am usually a miniature watercolorist.

Ralph, the director of the Audubon Society, walked over to see the first painting, and offered me space in his office to sell it! How lovely, and the best compliment. I am still reveling in it. I like the second painting better than the first - the colors are more transparent [the red ranch building is too opaque - I need a more transparent red], and also, the purples make the Blacksmith Shop painting more cohesive. The red ranch painting has too many separate parts. I do like, in both paintings, the foreground of the textures from all the plants - something I noticed right away when I walked on to the property. The buildings were being softened by the grasses in front of them, and made for very pretty views. In the Blacksmith painting, I let the colors of the plants that were obliterating my view of the building decide the overall [purple] tone of the painting.

This was painted right outside Vintage on Santana Row, San Jose. The scope is pretty large, and I completed this in about 1.5 hours. Something is missing - maybe overall, the colors are too pastel-y, without a punch anywhere. Maybe small areas of the painting are more successful than the overall painting - perhaps, here, the individual parts are better than the whole.