Daily Painting

Many times we have trouble accepting a compliment or offer, anything we feel the other person is being troubled for, even though they themselves are offering. Yuko Nagayama says in her book that often when we are given a compliment on our painting, we dismiss it, and instead want to know what weak areas we can improve. In such cases, it is important to accept the good that’s being given to us, and try to understand more deeply what it was we did that was good, and how we can become even stronger at it. Another reason to accept the compliment is that it doesn't dismiss the giver. We are undermining the opinion of the giver when we refute what they’re saying, even in modesty. Similarly, when someone offers a favor, it is obvious that they have thought it through before offering. They are not being troubled for it, or they are willingly accepting the trouble they may go through for it. So if it helps us, accept it, and honor the giver. This is a small study of Mexicali Grill. The co...

This was today, at the Duc Vien Buddhist Temple in San Jose with the Thursday watercolor group. I get so excited just anticipating a place like this - architecture, curves, ornate details, and of course the unpaintable atmosphere of peace and silence and incense which you cannot capture on paper but which somehow pervades your painting. I am so drawn to Buddhism.  When I was sketching the first dragon detail, I was so aware, my sense of where I was. and what the ideology is, was so heightened that when a small bug crawled across my paper, unbounded by my pencil lines, I blew him away gently. Another one came, and I blew her away gently. The Buddhists believe that all sentient beings- visible and invisible, from earth, water, or from air - should have no suffering and live lives of ease. I am amazed by the invisible - all the beings that we cannot see that are there in the air around us. My second most exciting part, after the revelation of what the site has to offer, is lunchtime...

There are so many techniques for different effects in watercolor. I know many in theory, but I am not natural or instinctive enough - yet - to know when to use what, or even to remember to use them. I played with wateriness a few weeks ago, yet I still forget that I should use it. This painting looks pretty granulated and opaque - maybe the Burnt Sienna I had was too opaque or more semi-transparent than transparent. That is another thing I need to do - learn about the characteristics of the colors in my palette. After the success of the process behind Hidden Villa Hostel, I am taking my value study more seriously and spending more time in the planning, before the painting. Also I learned that doing a painted value study in layer form - using Payne's Gray and covering everything but white, and then adding the darks - is counterintuitive to understanding the play of shapes. In coloring the value study, it is easier if I do it in pencil, and get to the value I want right away - the ...

Another parallel between meditation and watercolor: in meditation, they say to close your eyes lightly, gently. Or the other option is to keep them slightly open - just enough to let in light, but not wide enough for the brain to discern meaning in what you are seeing. That SAME light, with slightly-open eyes, is what helps you see values. Just shapes, not enough to discern meaning, but just enough to see the interplay of large shapes, and values. No detail. Isn't that remarkable? This appears to be a series of its own. This is Milpitas Materials - the big rig thingy that breaks down rocks into smaller aggregate - I think that is its function. I think there are too many hues and not enough neutrals.

I've known in theory that a successful composition is based on a play of light, medium, and dark shapes, and that what you see in your subject is only a starting point - you can rearrange those shapes, attribute whatever values you want to them for the best composition, and it does not necessarily end up matching what you saw. Today, I FINALLY understood that, and applied it. I am so excited - I can trace back the journey I took and see how it all worked. This was done plein air at Hidden Villa, Los Altos, today. Here is the building that caught my eye. Why? Look at the stunning horizontals - these stripes, this pattern of lines running across - from stairs, to railing, to vents in the gable roof - so intricately designed. But, it is all so dark. Only the eye can discern the shapes and shadows. I looked for the light, and caught two dots of it on the metal corrugation of the roof on the right. I had no idea where I was going but I started to sketch the shapes to make a ...

Honesty is very important to me. Honesty in architecture and honesty in art. In the house that I designed, the beams, joists, and rafters that make up the ceiling of the large open interior space ARE the roof structure. There is no facade of one thing covering another. What you see is what you get. That is true of my own personality as well. Similarly, truth and honesty in watercolor are that it needs to look like a watercolor - it shouldn’t become something else. The attributes of that honesty are transparency, drippiness, and watermarks. What better illustration for this blog entry than this wood framing construction site - here are the honest bones of this house under construction. I've called it " Careful Up There! "

I look back at the 2 1/2 years that I have been doing watercolor - from the very beginning, when I was scared, afraid of failure, and didn’t even want to start. Today, I can see that I have made progress. In that moment, when I was painting, I was struggling, and the struggles seemed never to end. The result was never as good as in my imagination. But I look back at my paintings, remembering the earliest ones, and I can see that there are jumps and improvements between clusters of paintings. I can measure my progress, but in hindsight. This reminded me of a quote: Life must be lived forwards, yet understood backwards.           Søren  Kierkegaard  These are Sharon's orchids yet again, with more playful hues.

After the moment of application, no other medium besides watercolor keeps working in the next moment without your looking or controlling. You might start with a runny blue and charge a purple into it, then because it is wet, you leave it alone and move on to a drier part of the painting, mentally noting that you’ll come back in a couple of minutes to work on that area some more. Magic happens in those couple of minutes, and you’re not even paying attention! The painting paints itself. In other mediums, you don’t have this happening - when you stop painting/coloring/pastel-ing/graphite-ing/charcoaling, the work stops with you. Watercolor is magical. When you look again, something beyond your control has happened. It’s beautiful. You only control a part of the moment; water and pigment complete the moment for you. These are sweet peas given to me by a friend on my birthday. The stems were the striking part - slim, parallel, green reeds. 

I've been so prolific lately. I didn't expect that to be an outcome of my daily painting - my intention was to get better and get in more hours of painting - though in hindsight, it is obvious that I would produce something. It is a great feeling - the flow of one painting after another. Many days, I practice small studies or techniques, and many times, those studies are good enough to frame. I love it when that happens. It is when I am practicing that I do my best work. These irises were done en plein air last Thursday at Nola's Iris Garden in San Jose - in the order that I painted the three. I almost didn't go, knowing that it would be all florals, but I am so glad I did - I have never seen that many colors or color combinations in a single species. I have been doing florals lately just to get out of the box, and I thought they would be easy - they are organically shaped, mistakes can be hidden in flowers. But just because I can paint the flower doesn't mean I ma...

What is a mistake? It is a matter of intention that makes something a mistake. If I deliberately put a drop of water into wet paint, I make a cauliflower or a bloom. If I accidentally drop the drop of water into the paint, I get the same cauliflower or bloom. One thing I intended, the other I did not. One thing is a mistake, the other is not. So who’s to say what is a mistake? What if I did drop the water accidentally, but realized it looked beautiful? I can celebrate that "mistake". I can accept it and flow with it and not let it affect my painting in a negative way. It’s all about mindset and how open I want to be. My friend Sharon brought me these lovely orchids during my first SVOS weekend last Sunday. As exhausted as I was this past Saturday, I needed to paint, so set up a chair in the sunlight in my backyard, and painted these stunning flowers. I had the right frame and mat for them too, so framed them, and took them with me to my last SVOS day yesterday.

I've been having a lot of thoughts lately, as I'm driving, as I'm painting - and when I explore them, question them, jostle them, I find new treasures, new values, and what's important to me. Watercolor teaches me about life, and life teaches me about watercolor. I was doing a floral and put down some watery yellow, and while it was wet, charged in a new color - Daniel Smith's Anthraquinoid Scarlet, a red-orange - and it did something quite unexpected. It brutally pushed the yellow out of the way, instead of mingling with it gently, and I watched it happen - a matter of seconds - the violence of it still shocks me. I know I'm just talking about colors.  :-) But then I thought - we get so annoyed when friends and people do unexpected things, and we carry a grudge, and want things to change - instead of just accepting it, just learning that that is their property, like this AQ Scarlet had this bully-ish property - what can you do about that? Talk to it and tel...

This is called "Urban Sky" and is a patch of sky perimetered by the tops of skyscrapers. The value study was much stronger than the final which lacks darks. I am getting ready for SVOS Weekend 2 in Sunnyvale - I am surprisingly - not surprisingly - non-chalant. I have this down. I made a list of everything I took with me to the other one, including loads of panic and stress, and things I forgot and wished I had with me. The husband is eager to help again - I could use that and minimize our time doing grunge work on Friday night so we can get to dinner. r.

All the panic of the week leading up to this past weekend, and the accumulated stress, culminated in a fairly calm first day in Belmont, my first city as part of Silicon Valley Open Studios. I asked the husband for help on Friday night, and he came willingly and followed my planned layout to put up my watercolors on the 7 white panels under a large white canopy. It looked very white and light, and the colors of the paintings really popped. A good decision as the framing and matting were all white too. I got in my Daily Painting too at the end of the day, as exhausted as I was, but only a value study and a first layer with color. Physical fatigue is one thing but I was mentally so wired, so hugely over-stimulated that I just couldn’t quiet my mind and relax my brain. It was a bizarre feeling. The first day is special - I realized this when I was driving to my open studio that first Saturday morning along with my stress and panic riding right there beside me - and I knew I wouldn...

No, not what first comes to mind! I am putting together all the paintings I will be exhibiting at this year's Silicon Valley Open Studios - I am participating for the first time. I was going over the list of numbered paintings from last year's Red Berry display and then the Los Altos Library solo show, and realized I am using very few of the work I did last year. A lot of my paintings that will be in SVOS are from this year. At least the Daily is paying off, and it helps to be regular to the Thursday paintsites because new and unusual locations come out of that. Hence I have a new body of work. Almost entirely a new body with the old flushed out. I flinch at some of the old ones - but embrace them all as they are a stepping stone to getting here, where I am today, at this moment. I had to do those early 100 to get from 101 to 200. Despite all that needs to be done for SVOS, I joined the Thursday paintsite group and enjoyed the planned Hike & Paint day ON my birthday. I...