Studio Notes

Tonal

2012-03-07T09:28:00.001-08:00

Passing Hours, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

This is another Inness-inspired landscape. Along with a couple other ongoing series projects, I've been doing these tonal landscapes lately.

I don't know why I'm attracted to tonal paintings as opposed to those with a lot of color (yes, yes, I know tonal paintings are all color, too. You know what I mean.) Perhaps it's the mood. They have more of an 'old' look to them. A friend of mine once described tonal vs. colorist approaches as "timeless" vs. "a moment in time".

It kind of makes sense. I'm not all that interested in capturing fleeting effects of light on color, which is one of the main goals of a plain air painter. I'm not compelled to paint something just because the colors are unusually beautiful. For example, the fall colors of deciduous trees, or blooming flowers in the spring, while making me go Ooh ash~ , doesn't make me want to paint them. When I realized that I'm in the minority among my artist friends in that I'm not moved to paint by the colors I see, I thought, "huh, this must be a piece of my identity puzzle."

And it is. To be sure, I do sometimes paint more colorful paintings if only to keep my chops up. But I can't sustain that practice for more than a few paintings at a time. I inevitably return to my tonal "comfort zone".

When I'm in need of tonalist inspiration, I turn to Inness, Corot, NC Wyeth, Whistler, Streeton, along with many, many others. To bad they're long gone; I wish I coulda seen them work!

Cityscape Challenge! Lots Today!!

2012-03-06T09:36:00.000-08:00

Hello artists! Got a bunch of new ones for you today. Check 'em out. Be sure to visit the artists' own blogs, as there's more to read and insights and inspiration to be had.

You haven't done yours yet? Get to it!!

Thanks for the invite! It got me off the sofa and out of the doldrums. As others have said, the painting is easier said than done! For my support, I used Strathmore Multi Medium Paper, Series 400; I first applied an acrylic medium-value orange underpainting, then came over it with direct oil painting. While it was still wet, I etched-out some of the orange areas. I spent about 3 hrs on it...may still tweak with a couple touches of more pronounced value changes. Had a blast; thanks so much!

Cecilia Neustrom

What a wonderful challenge! I don’t usually paint cars or buildings…ever! So it’s really been quite a challenge for me, but I wanted to give it a go. I’ve spent a week working on this challenge, and these are the only two quick watercolour studies that have not ended up in the trash. They almost did, but I thought I would send them to you anyhow. I am working on another watercolour, but am finding all aspects challenging…. Working from a photo, perspective, shapes of vehicles, what to leave out, what to put in, lost and found edges…yikes!If my latest attempt turns out Ok I will post it to you. Thanks for running this challenge…I have added admiration and respect for your work and subject matter, and it's so interesting to see how others interpret the scene.

Maggie Latham http://maggielathamfineart.blogspot.com/

Enjoyed the exercise and really liked the road climbing the hill in the background. I love the turn toward abstraction that your work has taken in the last year. Hope you stress that in your workshop in Atlanta in Sept.
Daly Smith

I tried to keep the white of the paper in this watercolor. I struggled with large shape simplification and keeping objects in 2 values as you suggested. Your suggestions are right on when doing city scenes so I hope to do many more urban paintings. Thanks.

Donna Johnson

Fantastic idea. Thank you, thank you for setting this up! I've been reading through your various posts for several months now. I had 4 years at a high ranking art school but there is so much about painting I wasn't taught. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, progress, tips and demos on your blog. I'm eating it up.
Here are the guidelines I used to simplify the scene:1. More negative space. (lower horizon, expand space between cars)
2. Move the eye through the painting quickly. (clear path for the eye to follow the path of the road, narrow cropping)3. Emphasis on on subject. (increase the contrast between the road & rest of the painting)
4. Keep one dominant color (easy, just like the photo)

I posted my progress on my blog: http://amyhroberts.blogspot.com/ and attached is a photo of my final.
I'm looking forward to seeing your solution to the simplify challenge.Thanks,
Amy Donahue

Some tough decisions had to be made and finding the right solutions was a lot harder than expected.Thinking about composition, values, color, edge and brushwork when painting such complex subject matter is extremely challenging.This has made me appreciate cityscape paintings a lot more over night!Looking forward to see the rest of the entries (including yours). I’ve put a small step by step on my blog www.johanderycke.blogspot.com

Johan Derycke

More! ...And a quick note.

2012-03-03T22:12:00.004-08:00

Here are two more. We are not done yet! (You still have a week to do this. Come on! You can do it!!)

OK, so it has come to my attention that some of you tried to send your images to me by way of "replying" to an emailed version of this blog post. (Same thing as "subscription"? I don't know) But I am not getting those! The email updates of the posts are generated by the Blogger/Blogspot/Google automatically, and are not really coming from ME, so replying to them doesn't work. Please send your image(s) along with your comments/thoughts to me directly. The address is terry@terrymiura.com

Here is my entry for the challenge. I had a heck of a time this week, trying to get a piece worthy of sending on to you. This is the FIFTH attempt. My first medium of choice is usually pastel, but I was trying to use a new type of paper for this challenge, and was never happy with the results. This final painting is done in oils with a palette knife. I posted this on my blog and there is an additional photo showing my first pass.

Nancy
nartizt.blogspot.com (click to see the full post on her blog!)

I found the challenge really enjoyable and rewarding. I'm a relative beginner, and did this piece with my teacher in 3 hours. I learned that your street scenes look simple to do but are anything but. I struggled with mine, yet walked away with many thoughts on how I might improve upon things next time. I look forward to seeing your version, and in particular your composition, colors and highlights. Many thanks for your blog and your challenge.
Dave Licht

Cityscape Challenge - Two More~

2012-03-02T08:59:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed it very much. Here is my version of your cityscape photo. It is a pastel, done on Uart sanded paper, 400 grit using Ludwig pastels. I found this challenge to be very enlightening. You were right, I learned quite a lot! I'd never done a cityscape before because I knew I had to simplify, but had no idea where to start. Your tips were extremely helpful, they gave me an approach I could relate to.

Christine Di Mauro http://dimaurodustyeasel.blogspot.com/ (See Christine's process on her blog!)

This was a liberating experience. I'm the type who tends to spend a lot of time thinking about what to paint and not getting much done. This challenge of using a photo helped set goals that I believe should serve me well for more paintings. I think the most difficult part of this painting, for me, was finding the right 'interesting" colors to maintain 3 tones.

Doretta

See them all HERE!

Simplify! - Got One More!

2012-03-01T09:36:00.000-08:00

Here's another one. This one is from Kathryn in San Diego~

I don't usually do "challenges," but this one fit in well with lessons I'm teaching at the moment. You can read about the concepthere and see more specifics (including the source photo) here. Terry's "rules" in that first post are much like my own: editing, seeing the big shapes, simplifying the value plan, consolidating similar values. To his excellent suggestions, I'd add one more: if you really want to simplify, give yourself a time limit which will push you to make the big statements and not get caught up in details. You're making a painting, not an inventory. I gave myself 90 minutes for this simplified 12" X 12" painting, based on Terry's photo.

Kathryn Law
http://kathrynlaw.blogspot.com/

Cityscape Challenge - Another Couple More~

2012-02-29T08:43:00.001-08:00

Here's the next few~

Someone asked me, "where the hell is yours?" I'm working on it! Actually, it's nearly done and I just need to adjust a few edges. I had to put it aside to work on other projects, but I'll post it by our March 11th deadline.

It's 12x9 soft pastel. I've never done a cityscape before so this was a good exercise, thanks for hosting this. I made some compositional changes from the photo. Besides cropping it I moved some of the cars around as well as eliminating many of them. I also decided to see what it would look like with more sky and less hill.

David King

Thanks Terry Miura for coming up with this challenge. I've read every blogpost of his before I take this challenge . And my...... what a wonderful ,full of knowledge blog he has.I'm tremendously glad that I've found his blog and pick up something from there. At the moment , blog is where I learn to paint . If you have any blog you would like to recommend , do share it.

Dean Ng

http://peoplesartist-adamfonos.blogspot.com/

We Take A Little Break From Our Cityscape Challenge...

2012-02-28T09:30:00.000-08:00

Morning Whispers, 16 x 12 inches, oil on linen

We take a little break from our Cityscape Challenge and bring you this! It's another one of my favs from my series of semi abstracted nudes.

As you may have noticed, I don't specializing in one genre. I find I need varied stimuli and change of gears to keep my creative juices flowing. I am also finding that jumping from genre to genre helps me to apply what I learned in one series to another in unexpected and unpredictable ways.

I have learned much about simplification, abstraction, and paint manipulation from doing my Urban Aria series, and I'm applying all that I learned to my figure painting. Had I not done a focused study of cityscapes earlier, my figures would never have looked like this now.

And because these figures don't have the same set of requirements as painting buildings and cars in perspective, I can push abstraction even further. And in turn, I'm able to do that back in my cityscapes beyond what I was able to do in Urban Aria. It's a constant learning process, different genres feeding each other new discoveries and applications of new ideas.

Sometimes I just go way off the deep end and a painting on which I spent fifty hours just crashes and burns, and that hurts, but I know I learned a lot from it, even if I didn't end up with a good painting. The next one will show my progress.

I'm applying abstraction more in landscape painting too, but in a little different way. The more "traditional" alla prima way of painting the landscape is so ingrained in my brain and brush hand, that it's not easy to shake it off. I'm going back to studying some really tonalist works of Corot, Inness, and others. I'll share that stuff in a future post soon~

In the meantime, paint on!

Cityscape Challenge Continues~

2012-02-27T19:39:00.000-08:00

Here are today's submissions!

By the way, a couple of you asked if it would be kosher to sell your work since it was done from my photo. For this particular project, I don't have a problem with that, so go for it. Copyright is a huge issue in this industry and we all have to be diligent about ethical practices. If I use a photo reference, I usually only use my own photos. If I have to use someone else's, I make sure I get permission or otherwise make sure there are no infringement issues.

Again, for this challenge, please consider permission granted, so do whatever you want with your paintings, including selling it for a million bucks.

See all the paintings here!

I painted two, each in a single 3 hour session so I wouldn't feel compelled to overwork them with more detail. I learned that it is easier for me to keep it simple by using a lot of paint and limiting my colors. But I still struggled to keep my values intact once I started adding a little color. And then there's edges! I love the way you work your edges and would love to hear more from you on that topic! Anyway, it really is amazing to discover that less is more and that a piece will read more convincingly from across the room when the dark/light shapes are connected and simplified.

Susan Tortorici

(Streetscape after Miura. Digital. © Andy Dolphin)

The main thrust of the challenge is to simplify a photo Terry posted and produce a painting using any medium.

I chose Photoshop.
I had intended to save the image in stages - but forgot so this is all I have.
My process was to crop then convert the original image to greyscale and use that as my starting reference. I wanted to warm the scene up a little so, using a Wacom pen and tablet, I "underpainted" in a warm sepia tone. I then switched the reference photo back to colour and finished my painting from background to foreground.
I painted in the large shapes first with little concern for absolute accuracy. The rough shapes were initially tightened by working back into the negative shapes, painting the road around the cars for example, then strengthened by the addition of mid-tones and highlights. I finished with the brightest highlights, including the "pure" colours of the traffic lights and vehicle tail lights.
No tracing is involved in the process. The two images sit side-by-side with the photo kept small to avoid getting bogged down with detail. As you can see below, I took liberties with several aspects of the scene. I was more interested in capturing the feeling than producing a replica.

There's about half an hour to 45 minutes work in this. I used a standard Photoshop stipple brush (and forgot to change the angle jitter setting) for this one. I usually use a custom brush from Chris Wahl but was almost finished before realised what I'd done (I work zoomed out, so the stippling doesn't show).
My digital process almost exactly matches the way I work with oils - but I don't have to wash brushes when I'm finished - and I don't ruin another shirt or get paint on the carpet!

Andy Dolphin

Here's Another~

2012-02-27T08:52:00.000-08:00

I've indexed all the submissions thus far (if I'm missing yours for some reason, please let me know) in a separate page. Check 'em out!

This one is by Anne Marie in North Carolina~

Cityscapes are such a myriad of shapes and colors. You manage to make them so interesting, and I have admired your cityscapes for years. I also want to thank you for your blog. Those of us who are self-taught devour the knowledge of successful artists, their palettes, their brushes, their methods. Your blog has been an inspiration and a source of great information. For this challenge, I cropped the heck out of it, put in the basic shapes and put the photo away and used my imagination.

Anne Marie Propst

http://artannemariepropst.blogspot.com/

More Cityscapes!

2012-02-25T19:35:00.002-08:00

Nice work everyone! Very fascinating to glimpse into your thinking processes, too. I'm learning stuff!

Thank you for the challenge, Terry. Great idea, great guide lines. I really learned a lot from it...if I could only follow the directions.

Violetta Smith
http://violettasmithpaintings.blogspot.com/

This is 8,5'' x3'' small format for me.
I ve tried to paint in an impressiomist style the flux of the cars through the town ruled by the traffic lights I gave to the building a ghostly appearence to concentrate the eyes on the lights and cars

Robert R

Here, I painted this cityscape for Studio notes , where Terry Miura asked us to use only 2 values at least at the beginning, ignore the details, choose one dominante color, avoid too numerous sharp edges.(This point was a little obscure for me).I tried to follow this advice, chose french ultramarine as basic color. I had a black underpainting, as there was something else before.

Sylviane Le Cann
http://sylviane-lec.blogspot.com

The main thing that drew me to this challenge was the sherr IMpossibility of getting my knife around the cars/buildingscape. I think my work originally became knife-driven with heavy paint a while back out of a need to eliminate the detail. I didn't realise at the time I was setting myself a rule that was inherently simplifying. Alongside this, I also had a sort of limiting belief that photo-references gave me and my knife even more information and detail to sort through in order to find my subject and process. So until this challenge, I tended to work almost exclusively from life. I think following this exercise (and your abstract studies from life drawings) these limiting ideas might at last have been well and truly shattered. In working through this dastardly photo you kindly provided (which I'm nearly certain is no straightforward snap-shot down that street!) I've realised just how much editorial simplification and invention has actually been going on all along. Thanks a bunch!

Also wanted to say how much I've enjoyed seeing the fantastic stuff from everyone else!

Mike Lang
London

So glad Deborah Secor gave me the heads up on this challenge.

I'm trying to loosen up on my landscape painting and a challenge like this is a great exercise. I have done buildings but never a cityscape and never cars.

I actually had little problem keeping this loose and not getting too detailed. The reason being I knew it wouldn't be any good so the pressure was off. Actually, I feel it's turned out not bad at all.

This is in soft pastels about 11x9"

Ruth M

The following four images are process shots accompanied by comments, from Randy Blasquez~

Here is my attempt at painting from Terry Miura's photo. The challenge is to simplify, and because I am on this path lately to simplify and paint with the concept in mind (rather than to copy), I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I haven't had a lot of studio time lately, but I started with the under painting a few days back. I don't always start a painting the same way, and to me this one called for breaking down the value shapes into no more than "two" values - why not? I've been using a varnish medium to wash in my under paintings and decided to try it for the block in. The result is nice and transparent. My goal here, other than to simplify and stay out of the details, is to paint the "idea". I love street scenes, and have been admiring Terry's new Street Series.

In fact, I just finished a new street piece, but it had people and not cars. So I decided that I could do this in the same manner, kind of. Or I was hoping for the same type of result, where I would paint "shapes" not people, and "shapes", not cars.

Okay, for the concept. I was in Carmel last weekend where I got to get up close to some large paintings by Ken Auster. I just love the way he can take a city scene in San Francisco and guess what-- SIMPLIFY.

I bought his book and in it he talks about the way he will use warm and cool to bring life into a gray painting. So, I wanted to paint this piece with that in mind. Cool shadows, warm light. I want to do it without going crazy with color, which I have a tendency to do.

I wanted to establish the values again buy comparing the foreground to the middle ground to the background. To create distance you want to be careful to use the tools of a painter - cooler, softer, grayer, smaller, etc., as to painting recedes.

Painting is 18x18x1.5" - Linen

I had fun with this. Each car has it's own personality and shape. As much as I wanted to leave more abstract shapes, I feel that I went a little too far on the cars. This was a great learning experience for me, and I enjoyed keeping it SIMPLE. I try to do this with all my paintings by starting each shape with only two values, and going from there. It is like a building block. Or as I say to my students, start with the silver dollar, on top of that put the fifty cent piece, then the quarter, and only if it is necessary, add more detail. Detail should be only the last 5% of a painting at most.....

Randy Blasquez
http://blasquezfineart.blogspot.com/

Simplify! - Some More!

2012-02-24T07:24:00.004-08:00

OK Gang, here are the next ones that came in. Thanks so much for participating! This is a lot of fun to see what you've all come up with.

I'm starting to think that the blog isn't the best format for doing something like this, as it is becoming a little bit challenging to keep things organized across many applications, and I keep thinking I'm going to miss something or someone's submission.

I think a Facebook group page might have been a smarter solution, but too late now. We'll stick with this format until the end, or I get so overwhelmed that I start dropping balls. LOL~

In the meantime, let me just say that you guys are doing great! Just look at the variety of solutions!!

Thanks for posting such a great photo reference to get the juices flowing. I struggle to simplify, and tried my darnedest to paint this as requested, but knew I was in trouble upon noticing a quarter inch brush in my hand...ha!

Vern Schwartz
http://vernschwarz.blogspot.com/

The idea was to take a densely packed and busy photo and find ways to simplify it, perhaps by cropping, but also by resisting the temptation to paint every detail there. I love a challenge, so I was up to give it a try.

Here's my first one, my usual size, 2.5" x 3.5".I was intrigued by the density of the small shapes and colors, but attempted to keep it unified by values. Close one eye and squint and you'll see the big dark shape on the far left, the medium-dark shape in the middle, and the medium and medium-light shapes of the hills. Successful, but not quite what I was after.

Here's my second one, a HUGE departure for me and far more what I wanted to accomplish. It's literally huge, for me anyway: 8"x5" on a piece of black Pastelmat paper!

I chose to crop and distort the image, pulling it into a much elongated and stylized version that appealed to me. I loved the sense of a street going uphill in stages, and enhanced that with the light coming between the buildings. I probably 'should' have added more shadow shapes of the buildings, but I chose to limit that response in order to keep it simple. I limited my palette, and heightened the contrasting values. Cars? No chance! I just haven't the inclination for those shapes, so I suggested a couple and let it go at that. Do you think it works?

Deborah Secor

http://deborahsecor-gouache.blogspot.com/

Couldn't resist your challenge image - love that sort of thing and drooled over the street scenes in Urban Aria. In small town Iowa the building height / street width ratio doesn't allow for type of composition. I was trying to get a detailed look without really doing any...just dots and dashes.

John Preston

http://olsonlarsen.com/artists.cfm?artist_id=693&cmd=display

Ah, those pesky details. It is fascinating how few are really needed, but also how fun it is to paint too many of them... My tendency is to include too much in a painting, and although I cropped the reference hard, I could have cropped more and singled out one point of interest instead of using 3 of them. While I used my way of handling colour, I tried to think of Terry’s advice as I painted. I chose a small format, 12x9” (A4), so it wouldn’t be possible to do much detail with the pastel sticks. My aim was to take the viewer far into the painting, and to give a sense of sitting behind the wheel waiting at that traffic light. So I called it “Traffic”. Thank you Terry for an interesting project, and the visual dialogue with fine artists!

Charlotte Herczfeld
http://charlotteherczfeld.com/blog/40595/traffic-part-of-a-project-with-terry-miura

Thanks Terry for this fun, if terrifying challenge!! I live in an urban/rural area so not something I see every day and something I would usually avoid. Anyway I had a go and this is the result. 9 x 12 on Wallis with soft pastel. It took about an hour and a half and was really a lot of fun in the end. I think the guy on the right is on a suicide run and it looks more like a snow scene rather than a sunlit day. I may make it more snowy despite the green trees. Fortunately I ran out of time or I would have noodled it to death so working fast forced me to not detail. Keeping a simple pallet was hard too as I like a lot of colour. I may make a more colourful version now I have braved it. On the drive home I found myself looking at buildings, cars, roads and rhythms in a whole new way so it definitely woke up my artist eyes.Thanks for a great challenge.

Jen Humphreys

I was challenged this week by a blog that encouraged you to "Simplify"... that is, don't sweat the small stuff! As someone who thrives on details, I found that I needed to take that step. I worked quick and small, knowing that if I went bigger, it would give me room to put more details; If I kept at it, I would somehow find a way to finagle lots of details in where I thought they should be!

Working in a fairly new medium to me, I decided to let the implied colors thrive. It was fun. I am only somewhat satisfied as I cannot feel it as complete, as simplified as it is from the original. I must learn restraint! I do enjoy the learning experience that comes from this. I will work more on being "loose" and a bit more abstract.

Jessica Shippee

http://shippeecraft.blogspot.com/2012/02/working-loose-new-thing-for-me-street.html

Cityscape Challenge - The Next Batch!

2012-02-22T17:48:00.001-08:00

Here's the next batch of cityscapes from our brave participants! Very cool to see how each artist approached it differently~ Nice work everyone!

By the way, I'll if you've posted on your blog and gave me the link, I'm assuming it's OK for me to link to it and credit your work with the full name. Otherwise, I'm just using first plus last initial. If you'd like to see your name differently, please just let me know~

If you've sent me an image or a link before now (5pm PST, on Wednesday, 2/22) but I haven't posted it on this blog, I somehow didn't get it. Please try again.

Thanks! Keep 'em comin'!!

I had such fun with it and learned so much. I did two, the first being the 8x10 cityscape and the second is 7x5. I tried to be very conscious of values and as you said to simplify. I squinted as I worked which was a big help. Both paintings have a similar palette, but with second one I used a different blue, cobalt blue. The first I used cerelean because of the green it has. I also added more violet to the second painting. The second one is, of course, cropped differently using a smaller size and instead of a landscape format I used a portrait format. It does simplify the subject and I like it. Keeping your tip in mind about using one main color was also in my head as I worked. Another simplification and adds harmony to the painting.

Linda Popple

http://lindapopple.blogspot.com

I enjoyed this challenge, because the genre is not my usual, so it moved me out of my comfort zone.
Using the palette knife more than the brush was good for this as well…keeping it simple was the biggest challenge with a limited palette, complements of pthalo green and rose plus white, small, very small amounts of lemon yellow and small dollops of cad red for the lights on the cars and street. I premixed all the values needed ahead of time, laying out a value strand of three main hues. I loved every moment of creating. I look forward to more challenges in the future.

Cathyann Burgess
http://www.cathyannburgess.blogspot.com/

I learned so much from doing this since the subject matter was something I had not attempted before and it was so much fun to do. I was rushing a little so I could photograph it for my daily painting blog before it got too dark.

Fay Terry

http://paintingsbyfayterry.blogspot.com/

With some basic guidelines, the one that made me laugh was your instruction "to simplify. Not to try and render every damn detail."

In order to do that, I put my computer across the room so I couldn't see every damn detail. I still feel like I got a lot of information in here, maybe too much per the instructions, but I really enjoyed the challenge.

It will be fun to see all the different takes. Thanks!

Dana Cooper

http://danacooperfineart.blogspot.com/

First Contributions Are In!

2012-02-21T15:16:00.002-08:00

Almost as soon as I posted the reference photo, I received the first contributions. I haven't quite figured out what the best way to share these is yet. I will make a page with all the images indexed, but in the meantime I wanted to share them here on the blog too - I plan on posting them as I get them, with the artist's comments if I have them, but as I don't know how many I'll get, I don't want to commit to a format. We'll just play it by ear.

You are invited to leave comments on your fellow artists' work, but if you do, please remember to be nice. This isn't a competition and we're not here to discourage anyone from trying to improve their craft. If you're not feeling confident and are a little shy to share your efforts, remember NONE of the great masters knew how to paint in the beginning!

So here we go; the first three~

I've enclosed my try at your Simplify challenge.

I started oils last September. Your challenge is a great idea!! Thanks a bunch!

Jeff, NH

Hello, Terry:
Done! Oil on a small ragged piece of canvas I had around the studio, about 20 minutes. Here the simplification came mostly from the urge to paint -it is some sort of addiction. Maybe in the future I´ll add some detail, maybe not.
Good idea, waiting forward to see yours and the paintings of the rest of the artists. Best from the country of Velasquez and Picasso
Luis, Spain

My contribution to your great challenge. I loved it.
I don't know if to laugh or cry...The instructions are "to simplify. NOT to try and render every damn detail."
I do try.....
http://iritbourla.blogspot.com/2012/02/in-city.html
Thanks again, Irit, Santa Monica

By the way, when you email me your images, it would be great if you can also share some thoughts about your painting. It can be technical, anecdotal, or just how you felt trying this little exercise. I think other artists will enjoy hearing about it - I'll edit your commentary before posting so no personal information will be made public.

If you'd rather not see your commentary posted (or certain parts of it), just let me know and I'll fix it right away.

Thanks again for contributing to our little challenge, and I hope you find seeing others' efforts inspiring, educational, and fun!

Love your enthusiasm! and keep 'em coming~

Simplify! - A Cityscape Challenge

2012-02-18T19:05:00.000-08:00

OK! Looks like we have a bunch of takers! WooHOO~!

I'm glad so many of you want to try this. I think it'll be very interesting and instructive not only to do an exercise like this, but to see how others solve the same problems. How exciting~

OK, so the photo above is the reference we will all use to do a painting. Everyone is welcome to try - this is just for fun, remember, so don't even worry if you feel like you're too much of a beginner. Just give it a try. I guarantee you'll learn something!

I think we ought to have some basic guidelines.

Use the reference photo above. If you click on it, you'll get a larger version on your screen. Feel free to download it to your desktop to print it out or whatever you need to do to make it easier for you to paint from.
Deadline. Let's say three weeks. You have to have it done and posted by March 11th.
By "posted" I mean you can send me a jpeg via email, or if you're a blogger and you'd like to post your efforts on your own blog, just email me the link.
Any medium.
Any size.
Remember the point is to simplify. NOT to try and render every damn detail.
You may use some or all of the "rules" that I talked about in my last post. You don't have to use any of them. You can come up with your own set of rules. You don't have to have any rules at all.

Again, this is just for fun so do it in the way you feel comfortable. There are no rules as to technique or methods or sequences. I just want to see how different (or similar) our solutions are.

If you're a blogger, you might post the work-in-progress on your blogs. Might be fun, and your readers may want to try, too. If you do post your progress, please send me the link.

I think that's it for now. Good luck and have fun~

Oh. One tip; CROP! Cropping is one of the main tools of editing and simplification. Use it!

Simplify

2012-02-17T20:03:00.000-08:00

Study for "Bay Blue", 12 x 16 inches, oil on linen

Cityscapes are hard to paint not only because everything has to be drawn well, but also because there's just an overwhelming amount of information that needs to be processed. Simplification is key, but arbitrary editing of detail can easily end up with a weak painting that lack a sense of intent. With so much "stuff", it's not easy to know what to include and what to edit out, especially because you know all that detail contributes to the texture of the city clutter.

One way to approach it is to have rules for editing –and you know by now I like rules. This way, you can do it systematically (more or less) and it helps me to get the painting going in the right direction. Here are some that I use often;

Decide on a dominant color theme (in this case, blue green) and mix every color as a variation of it. (you want violet? start with blue green and bend it towards violet. Think of it as a violet-er version of the original blue green)
Paint every element (car, tree, asphalt, etc.) in just two values. Later on you can add a third value to the more important elements.
Link all similar valued adjacent shapes.
Have a large passive area. (Forces me to have an area with NO detail, juxtaposed against which the more active areas need less "stuff" in order to look detailed)
Treat super sharp edges as exclamation points. Don't shout everywhere.

These are not rules for all painting nor are they for every painter. They're just rules that guide me to do what I do, and they work well for me. With another painting, I may have a completely different set of rules. The point is, having this type of structure is helpful in keeping my mind organized and focused. It helps me avoid making arbitrary and thoughtless decisions.

I had this idea of inviting anyone who wants try this way of approaching the cityscape to give it a go, and sharing your results and thoughts on the experience. I would post a reference photo for us to use - we'd all use the same photo so that we can compare and contrast how we each respond to the same problems. Wouldn't that be interesting? Challenging, to be sure, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? I will of course post my own efforts as well. What do you think? Anyone up for it? Shall I put a deadline so we don't drag on and on? Is two weeks enough? A month?

Let me know via comment box if anyone is interested. I'll go ahead and post a ref. photo if there's enough interest.

Happy Valentines Day!

2012-02-14T09:02:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day everyone~

This is a picture of little painted hearts made by my daughter Skye (4) for her kindergarten classmates. She got some help cutting the hearts, but the painting is all her work. Very adept with watercolors and gouache, and as you can see, she is in her Jim Dine phase. Good job Skye!

Channelling Inness

2012-02-13T13:31:00.000-08:00

Winter Evening, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen

I did this demo for my in-studio landscape class a few weeks ago. I call it the "George Inness-inspired moody tonalist landscape thing". The image above is the result of the one hour demo plus two more hours of struggling with the feathery bare winter tree.

The view is entirely made up, but it looks very much like what you'd find walking along the American River trail just a few minutes from my home.

I don't usually paint bare winter trees not because they're hard (and they are!) but because the mood they create in one of my paintings usually is bleak and lonely, and I don't want to be made to feel that way. It must trigger some childhood emotional memory or something, I dunno.

I've seen many bare tree paintings by other artists which don't have that effect on me, so it must be just me. Funny how closely art and emotion are connected.

However! when asked by a student to do a demo on this motif, I couldn't resist the technical challenge. I'm willing to crash and burn for this class who always asks me to do something outside of my comfort zone, so I thought it'd be fun to try. I was looking at some Inness paintings recently, and I was inspired to do something similar.

I don't know how Inness painted. When I look at his paintings in person, it looks like there's a lot process going on; a lot of scraping, wiping and painting over. I can't paint like that, so the demo wasn't "how to paint like Inness", but a more general "Inness-like" moody landscape.

Structurally, it's the same as the nocturn I did the week before. The sky is lighter and it's yellow of course, but the organization is the same. Silhouette driven, mostly monochromatic, a little bit of local colors in the foreground, soft edges, etc.

The tricky part is, obviously, the bare tree. I treated it like painting gauze, a translucent fabric tattered in the shape of a tree. The paint application isn't transparent, I just mixed a color that's in-between dark warm gray of the solid trunk, and that of the sky. The trunks and bigger branches hold the fuzzy stuff together.

The way I did it isn't a linear process. That is to say, I didn't *just* paint the background first, paint the tree in the in-between color I just described, and added the solid parts. As with my fully foliaged trees, it takes a good deal of going back and forth between foreground and background, and with plenty of scraping unsatisfactory attempts. Whether the sky gets painted first or the tree is kind of irrelevant because I go over every part of it so many times in order to get the shapes I want.

I do try to finish off with more conspicuously calligraphic strokes so that it doesn't look so belabored even if it is.

Sketch It Out!

2012-02-10T14:46:00.000-08:00

Chillin', 16 x 12 inches, oil on linen

From last week's figure session. If I'm painting from a model, I usually do a couple of sketches in my sketchbook first. Though I'm not picky about materials when it comes to sketchbook stuff, I find I use a regular ol' ball point pen a lot.

When I start the painting, I need to have a concept, otherwise I end up with a painting with no impact. So the pen sketch helps me to be clear about my intent, find a direction and a specific idea that I want to focus on.

Sometimes I don't have a clear idea when I just look at the model. But when I start drawing, the ideas start forming. It has something to do with the fact that I'm doing these sketches quickly, which forces me to just visually jot down the essentials and edit away the unnecessary detail stuff.

Once I know which direction to take it, I can start the painting with a certain amount of confidence and intent. And you know, confidence, whether warranted or not, shows in the brushwork. And brushwork communicates intent. And communicating my intent, is the bottom line.

Melting Light

2012-02-08T22:01:00.000-08:00

Opposing Instincts, 16 x 12 inches, oil on linen

This one was done a few months ago - I just realized I hadn't posted it here. I really like how her legs just disappear.

The paint handling is still a little restrained compared to the newer pieces, and my colors are more descriptive in that I'm still thinking about the color of the light source, that of skin, complementary shifts as we move into shadow, increase in saturation just before the core - all based on rules of representational painting. I haven't given these up entirely, but I'm not as hung up about them as when I did this painting. They work pretty effectively here, I think, so I'm not going to change anything on this painting.

Most of these figure paintings are 16 x 12, but I'm about ready to try larger. I have started a 24 x 20 version of an earlier piece. That one was one of my very favorite of the series and of course that would be the one to sell first. I missed having it around but I didn't want to just do another of the same painting - where's the fun in that? So I decided this was a chance to do something larger. So far I'm just slinging paint at the canvas but boy, am I having a good time! Eventually, I'd like to get to 30 x 40 or thereabouts with these figures. I don't want to rush into it, though. I have plenty of ideas to try out before I commit to a large canvas.

Sitting Pretty

2012-02-08T09:29:00.000-08:00

Sitting Pretty, 16 x 12 inches, oil on linen

I am slipping deeper and deeper into abstraction. I can't remember the last time my work changed this much this fast. Something is definitely changing fundamentally, and it's a wild ride. I feel like I should be worried but I'm not. At all. I'm actively fueling the fire!

Don't get me wrong– I'm not finding this easy. It's not getting any easier, either. But I'm getting better at breaking rules. I mean, that's what abstraction is all about, to me; breaking the rules of representational painting.

Being an extremely analytical type, I often have to trick myself into breaking the rules in which I was trained and practiced for years and years. I do this by making new rules for myself; rules that defy, nullify, or otherwise cancel out the long established habits.

For example, regarding small detail, I made up a new rule which says "don't paint it if I can't do it in two values and a beat up no.2 brush." This rule effectively eliminates my need to decide how much detail is too much. The rule dictates, at least at the scale of this painting I'm posting today, that I cannot paint facial features or fingers or toes because I can't paint them in just two values and with a beat up No.2 brush.

Another rule might be, "similar values next to each other? link them. Never mind if they're different materials. And not just the darks, either."

Want another? How about, "treat skin like marble. (or metal. or plaster. or marshmallow. or whatever) This one frees you up from rules of painting flesh tones. I would also put in this same category, "only paint from quick drawings done from life. Not from photos."

Here's a good one. "Title the painting before you begin, but make it a concept that you want to communicate." For example, instead of "Female Nude", you might title it "Gravity" or "Seductive" or "Lost in Thought". You can always change the title afterwards, but having it beforehand puts your mind in that concept state and help you not to paint "things". When you're trying to paint an abstract, intangible concepts like "seductive" , you're more likely to treat the literal elements more abstractly.

I don't follow all these rules on every painting. Each new painting is a fresh adventure and I assign different rules to it. After a while the painting takes on a life of its own and I just do what it tells me to.

With Sitting Pretty, I had a couple of small breakthroughs and I was so happy with the result (especially because I had abandoned it once because it wasn't happening'. The whole thing took about 20 hours) that I signed my name really big on the bottom! I've never done that before - it was a spontaneous expression of joy. Sounds cheesey, but it's true. I couldn't help it!

A Little Nocturn

2012-02-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

California Nocturn, 20 x 10 inches, oil on linen

This is a demo I did for my class a few weeks back. I don't usually paint nocturns –in fact I've probably done may be a dozen in my whole life. And half of them were illustration assignments.

But my students asked for a nocturn demo, and as I aim only to please, I gave it a go. If you talk to any of them who were actually in the class, they'll tell you the demo degenerated into a miserable piece of kitch and we had a good laugh.

I gave it another two hours the next day without an audience and brought it back to life, because after all, it had good potential it seemed a shame to let it die.

In terms of structure, a nocturne like this isn't all that different from painting fog. It's much lower keyed, of course, but the fact that it's silhouette driven, with soft edges, and tonally organized color makes it almost like painting a heavily atmosphered daytime view, only darker.

We don't see much of anything in the shadows because there isn't much of ambient or reflected light to illuminate them. If they're not illuminated, they're very dark, right? Exceptions might be if there are artificial light sources present, or if the moonlight is bright enough that there is sufficient bounced light, or presence of atmospheric conditions that scatter the moonlight. But in this particular painting, it's just a basic weak moonlight with (almost) nothing visible in the shadows.

In many a nocturn painting, we see the distant objects (hills, trees, etc.) just as dark as the foreground trees, because the atmospheric "stuff" (dirt, dust, smog, fog...) isn't there or just isn't illuminated. In my painting, I did make the background trees lighter for pictorial purposes. I think, in reality, the background trees would be much darker, or the moon much brighter (to illuminate the atmosphere between the fore and backgrounds)

A couple more characteristics to note; harsh cast shadows are absent. And since it's very tonal, there's very little, if at all, temperature shifts between light and shadow. Also, almost all colors are variations of a subjectively decided "color theme" of the painting - in this case a pale muted blue - and local colors (greens of the foliage, etc.) become more or less irrelevant. Except in the extreme foreground, but in this painting my foreground is all dark so you barely see it at all.

The characteristics I've described here fall within a fairly narrow context, though. If you Google "nocturn painting", you'll instantly see that there are many, many ways of approaching the problem of depicting night scenes and everything I've just said can be easily argued against. So as usual, a grain of salt goes a long way~

Focusing on Gesture

2012-02-01T20:58:00.000-08:00

I've been having a blast painting the figure! I keep slipping deeper into abstraction, and I love it more and more.

One of the challenges of painting the figure from life is, of course the fact that the model has to hold the pose for a length of time. During painting sessions, I usually have the model sit for 20 or 25 minutes at a time, then take a short break, and resume posing. Some poses are easier to do and they can hold it longer than that. But the really interesting and dynamic poses are often very difficult or impossible to hold for more than a few minutes at a time.

I can take photo references and work from those, but I don't really like to do that because the experience just isn't the same. The visual, psychological and emotional interaction isn't there when working with a photo and it's just not as fun. The intensity is missing.

To get around the problem of difficult poses, I have been painting from rapid charcoal sketches, rather than painting directly from the model. The model can handle much more interesting poses if they only need to be held for two or five minutes, see.

The charcoal sketch on the left is a 2 minute drawing. Most of these sketches are 2 or 5 minute poses. Some of the longer ones are 10 minutes.

And essentially, I am only looking for information on gesture, form, and light / shadow patterns. I sometimes make notes on value variations if I thought that was important in a given pose. But as far as colors go, I decided I don't need that information because I never copy colors anyway, even if I did have a model in front of me the whole time. I make my color decisions subjectively, which is a part of my strategy for abstraction.

Gesture though, is paramount. I can't make that stuff up, so I have to work from life, and with very short poses I can get 1) more dynamic poses, 2) more poses per session, 3) a more intense experience, and 4) get to the point (recording only what I need and leave out distracting information).

When I'm focused on drawing the gesture, there is analysis and interpretation of the gesture and I find ways of emphasizing the movement, whether it be exaggerating a bend or stretching a limb, or may be making an angular area a little more fluid. I find it hard to do these things if I have a lot of time and am therefore tempted to shift my focus on other factors like color, or even capturing the likeness of the model.

So I've accumulated thousands of these little sketches - some are good, many do nothing for me - and I go through them and when I find something that catches my eye, I use it as reference to make a painting. The drawn figure, with all its interpretations of the original gesture, (as opposed to a faithfully copied figure) translates very well to painting.

At this point in the game, I'm finding that this method works really well for me. I can essentially have the short, gestural poses that I like, and still have the benefits of working from life.

To be able to render reasonably convincing colors, I do practice painting the figure from observation too. But these I consider studies and I just put them away.

An Alluring Balance

2012-01-29T12:59:00.000-08:00

Purple Haze, 40 x 30 inches, oil on linen

Got a nice mention in FASO's Informed Collector. Whoever wrote it - thank you very much!!

Smoldering atmospheric conditions, a myriad of shapes, and a cool color palate with just the right touch of warmth, combine to form an alluring balance amidst the busyness of the urban landscape.

"Smoldering". I love that adjective.

Archangel Michael

2012-01-25T22:48:00.000-08:00

Arcangelo, 24 x 20, oil on linen

This is a painting that I did recently of Archangel Michael. The original sculpture was created by Flemish sculptor and architect Peter von Verschaffelt in the 18th century, and it stands outside Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome.

Peter did the hard part. I just painted it.

Edges

2012-01-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

Sierra Rocks, 9 x 12 oil on linen

This is my first demo of the year, which I did for my landscape concepts class last week. I used a photo that I took last summer during my trip to the Eastern Sierras with a bunch of unruly ~~hooligans~~ artists.

Among other things, I wanted to emphasize using edges effectively. The basic idea is this; we have at our disposal a couple of options when it comes to edges –sharp, soft, and lost – and we need to use them deliberately, intentionally, and strategically. There are reasons why we use one type of edge over another, and it should never be done arbitrarily or thoughtlessly.

So when do we use sharp edges? In general;

The thing you're painting has a hard surface - rocks, glass, metal are much harder than grass, foliage and fabric.
Focal point. Sharp edges draw the eye.
Cast shadow edges are generally sharper than form shadow edges. (There are a lot of exceptions to this)

And soft edges;

The thing you're painting is soft.
Away from the center of interest, so you want to play down its presence.
Form shadow edges are generally softer than cast shadow edges.

Lost edges;

Simplifying a cluttered area by connecting shapes
You want to deemphasize an area even more than the soft edged areas.
Separation of adjacent "things" isn't part of the story so it's unnecessary. (If you lose an edge and it still makes visual sense, you probably didn't need that edge to begin with)

I'm sure there are other reasons to use hard/soft/lost edges, but these are the biggies.

and of course, there are exceptions to all rules and it boils down to whether a particular decision makes good compositional and conceptual sense, in the context of your picture.

In the context of my picture above, I might point out a few things to illustrate what I mean;

The rocks in the front and the rocks in the back are both hard surfaces, but the front rocks have a much sharper edge because they're the focal areas. The rocks in the back are "supporting cast".
Trees near the middle have sharper edges (though not enough take away from the rocks) than the trees away from the center of interest. Trees in the back have hardly any defined shapes or edges.
The edge between water and the rocks are lost. The separation of the two were unnecessary because the picture makes sense without that separation. It also simplifies that area into one shape, not two.
The reflection of the rock is softer than the rock itself.
Edges of the rocks where the form is turning away from us, is softer than the edges in the front. The sharp edge helps to bring it forward.
Trees all connect at some point or another - lost edges to combine multiple shapes into one. Simplify.
The water's edge against the lit part of the land mass is pretty sharp because there's quite a bit of value contrast there. As opposed to the shadowy areas. If I made all the edges along the water soft, it would look fuzzy and lose that glassy quality (even with the reflections present).
The front edge on the rocks where it turns from light to shadow is actually a form shadow edge, but it's supa sharp because the turning radius is so sharp. That's one of the exceptions to the rule.
Sharp edges contribute to the general crispness of the picture, which, in turn gives it a more colorful feel than it actually is. Subtle color differences lose their identities when the strokes are mushy.
The contrast between sharp and soft edges enhance each other's characteristic. Sharp edges are more meaningfully sharp when surrounded by (or played next to) soft edges, and vice versa. Arbitrary placements of sharp edges don't have the same sense of purpose and intent. (Well, duh!)

It may be helpful to think of sharp edges as exclamation points. When you're verbally expressing yourself, if you were to shout every word, no word is more important than the rest. Similarly, if you speak softly from start to finish, nothing in particular is emphasized. In order to communicate effectively, you'll want to know when to speak softly and when to punctuate with a !.

Metamorphosis

2012-01-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

No, not Kafka. I'm talking about making big changes to a painting and giving it a new lease on life.

This painting is not finished but I've spent quite a lot of time on it. I've been thinking about my decision making processes on this particular painting. There's so much going on (which was, now that I look at it, the main problem with the picture) that many conflicting ideas had be resolved. I got confused at every turn, but in rare moments of clarity I told myself "this is important. I need to write this down before I forget and become confused again".

And so here are some of my thoughts as the painting went through drastic changes.

This is where the change started. It was finished, hung in a show two or three years ago, and came back to me. It wasn't a bad painting, but my painting style has changed and it no longer looked like it should have my name on it. Too tight, too literal, too Hopper, too narrative, too cute.

At first I thought the tightness was what was bothering me the most, so I went over every surface, doing a looser version of it on top. If you've ever tried to loosen up an already finished tight painting, you know it's not easy to do. Much, much easier to tighten a loose painting than to go the other way. (there's a lesson in there somewhere)

But I knew it had to be done, and it could be done - I just had to keep going till the entire painting was loosened up because only then will I have a "loose context". A little bit of looseness in an otherwise tight context only looks like a mistake.

And then I decided that this painting relied too much on the narrative. The story there, like a scene from a novel. Nothing wrong with that, except I didn't want a narrative-driven painting. So I took out the car and the figures, the main players of the story.

Now I'm left with the set, without the actors. The visual elements such as the fire escape shadows and the striped awning became more important, and I noticed that there were actually a bunch of strong elements competing for attention. Is it about the fire escape, the cast shadows, the awning, the sign... Too many good things crammed into one picture. Too many statements.

As much as I hated to do it, I had to get rid of the awning. That was a tough decision (I really liked the awning!) but I think it was the right thing to do. It felt right immediately afterwards.

Once that was cleaned up, I noticed another BIG problem. Actually, I had noticed it long ago but was in denial, hoping that drastic editing of the elements would somehow solve my problem or may be help me fake it. No such luck.

What's the problem, you ask. It's the color vs. tone structure. Look at the cast shadows of the fire escape in the earlier versions. They have a lot of blue in them, and feel much lighter and airier. Toward the bottom of the painting, the shadowy areas are much more tonal, dark, and moody. This is a conflict of light conditions that doesn't make very good sense, even accounting for artistic license.

Do I want tonal and moody, or light and airy? Can't have it both ways. The tonal approach will give me a grittier, more somber, and perhaps a more timeless feel. On the other hand, the lighter, bluer shadows imply that I have a blue sky above the buildings, contrasting with the orange afternoon light. It implies a particular time of day, a particular kind of light, and that my intent would have to be to suggest that that's important. Is it about the color temperature shifts, or the patterns and shapes of the shadows?

I concluded that it was the latter. With considerable doubt, I took out most of the blue in the cast shadows. And I really liked the result. It's still got that warm afternoon light, but without making a big statement about color. The painting wasn't about pretty colors, after all.

Now I could see the overall mood coming forth, that of the afternoon sun, a mundane urban street, the familiar, comfortable yet slightly anxious feeling of living in the not-so-slick part of the city.

Yes, this is what I want. But the emptiness of the street seemed to be making too much of a statement. Why is it empty? Is it a ghost town? Did the plague wipe out the population? Am I making a statement about death and abandonment?

Hardly. But you see how my mind makes one association after another. Anyway, I put a pedestrian back into the picture, taking care not to overplay his presence. No bright colors or contrast on him. Let him lose some edges and be integrated into the scene rather than be the center of another narrative. Give us a sense of life but don't let the painting be about this particular person.

So this is where I am right now. I'm still working on it, but all the main issues are resolved, so I'm just tweaking edges and refining shapes and strokes. I like it very much.

Shape Driven

2012-01-06T09:53:00.000-08:00

Take A Seat, 16 x 12 inches, oil on linen

In designing a painting, I often look for and rely on strong shapes to carry the composition. Aside from the fact that the shapes are interesting to look at –that's a given. I mean who wants to look at something boring?– strong shapes are extremely helpful in simplifying a picture.

Consider this; In order for the viewer to understand what it is he is looking at, the thing must have visual information which communicate its identity. One can do this without color obviously, which is simpler than rendering something in full color. (You can look at a black and white photo of an orange and know that it's an orange) You can show the form of something by using a few values and manipulating light and shadow patterns. Using two or three values to do this would be simpler than say, using ten.

But if you have a strong recognizable shape, then it doesn't need anything else for the thing to be recognizable. A silhouette will do the job without the help of color or even value modulations.

I'm not saying that one should paint everything in cut-out shapes and ignore values and colors. I'm saying that if you have a strong shape, you don't have to be dependent on rendering color or value to make something recognizable. Light and shadow patterns and color are important in conveying your concept, but since you're not depending on them to play the role of defining your subject, they become tools for expression. In other words, rather than using color and value modulation to merely construct a sentence, use them to say something meaningful (because the silhouette already has done the job of constructing the sentence).

You might say, but one can do that and have them define the subject. Yes, absolutely that is true, and I'm not going to argue with that. I only make my point in the context of my pursuit for simplicity. If I can say what I need to say with less, why should I complicate the matter?

Anyway, that's my thinking for always looking for strong silhouettes. Failing that, my second choice would be to look for a strong light/shadow or light/dark pattern to define the subject. If I can't do that, I might just as well start looking for entirely new compositions because it ain't gonna work for me.

A 2-Day Workshop in September, South Bay

2012-01-04T07:58:00.000-08:00

Hey art enthusiast in the Bay Area! I just scheduled a two-day workshop in September. Yes, it's almost ten months away, but I thought I'd throw it out there for those of you who wish to plan ahead. (I give you fair warning; this workshop will be filled long before September!)

This is a plein air painting workshop hosted by the good folks at the Society of Western Artists in Redwood City, California (25 min. South of San Francisco). Open to all levels but some outdoor painting experience is highly recommended. (If you have none, hey, you got ten months to get out there with your easel!)

September 29 -30, 2012 (Saturday & Sunday) 9am - 4pm
$300 SWA members, $350 non-members

For more information and to register, please go to the SWA website.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T09:42:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! May this one be filled with art and inspiration. And peace. and love. and some really good wine.

I'm happy to kick off the new year with momentum; Urban Aria is featured currently featured in the online magazine, A Hopeful Sign. Check it out~

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-23T10:16:00.000-08:00

City Dwellers, 24 x 36 inches, oil on linen

I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season and managing to hang on to your sanity. I think I'm doing better than usual this year, but it ain't over yet.

Artistically, 2011 was a great year for me. In the course of developing the Urban Aria series, I made some big breakthroughs in the way I see, and think about, painting. Consequently my work became more abstract and expressive, and I'm very very happy about that. I'm finally finding my voice! So it's taken me 20+ years and literally thousands of paintings and tens of thousands of drawings to get here, and it just feels like a tip of the proverbial iceberg, but at least I've found the iceberg.

Now that I've found it though, it's time to push myself out there. Therefore, 2012 will be the year for exposure. I dare say you'll start seeing me in more publications and juried shows. It's not 2012 yet, but I'm off to a pretty good start. the Painting above, City Dwellers, is already committed to California Art Club's 101st annual Gold Medal show. Though I've been a member off and on for years, I haven't really participated in many of their shows till now because, as I've said above, I didn't have a voice to push.

Also in the current issue of Plein Air Magazine, I have small mentions in pgs. 83, 94, 95, and 96.

Keep an eye on the February issue of American Art Collector, too. It'll be a cityscape issue, a good place for my work to be seen.

We're visiting family for the holidays so there won't be much painting - if at all - for the next few weeks, but if I get a chance, I'll try and post. I hope you have a safe and enjoyable Holidays too~

Stripped

2011-12-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

Stripped...of color, that is.

I'm a great believer in simple value structures. The fewer values you use to make your statement, the more impact you'll have.

These paintings are, obviously, done in black and white. Without color you're left with only values. I find it much easier because quite simply, there's less information to deal with. It also means that you can't rely on color changes to distinguish one area from another, so you really have to be sensitive to value modulations. Beginning painters sometimes find this very challenging, but it's as basic as understanding sentence structures. A noun and a verb will make a sentence. Addition of adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, conjugations, etc. will make a more complex sentence, but it can get very confusing, right?

Anyway, just a couple of values and no color to worry about. You can really (and you have to) pay attention to edges, brushwork, drawing and design. It might open your eyes to where you are weak. (And you thought color was the problem!)

Color is difficult to master, to be sure, but without solid understanding of the bones underneath it all, you're only faking it. So get your value groove on, Do some black and white studies (of any subject - doesn't have to be figures) and see how comfortable you are with the limited parameters.

You know what else is so great about just painting with black and white? It's cheap!

Process - A Recent Figure Painting

2011-12-13T09:15:00.000-08:00

As it is very difficult to convey what I mean by thinking abstractly , I thought I'd share process shots of one of my recent figure paintings. I think, even if I can't articulate all that's happening in my head and on the canvas, these shots will help to illustrate some of what I'm talking about better than showing you just the finished image.

This painting is fairly typical of the direction my figure paintings have taken in the past several months. My brushwork had been (slowly) moving towards becoming freer and more expressive for years, but this year it sort of made the jump from "describing body parts" to just plain "expressing".

Here's how I started the painting;

On the left is a charcoal drawing I did a few years ago. Probably a five minute drawing from the looks of it. I taped a piece of linen (Claessens #66) on board and loosely drew the figure with a pencil. The original drawing had a nice gestural quality, which I wanted to push further. I thought leaning her body a little bit more would add grace, so that's what I focused on.

Using black and Liquin, I drew over the pencil lines and mapped out the shadows. My aim here is to separate light and shadow clearly. Organizing the figure into two values simplifies the problem. (Hair mass represents a third value here, but that's not a function of light and shadow)

Now that I have my values organized, I'm ready to go in with opaque colors. (up to now I've just used black and painted transparently with the help of Liquin) I blocked in the shadows with a single color, for simplicity's sake. I didn't get into local color shifts at this point, because that would be moving towards literal description. Besides, I'm working from a charcoal drawing so any local color shifts would have to be made up.

I did the same with the light side of the figure. Single color, very simply blocked in.

I wanted to see what it looked like with a dark background, so I quickly filled it in, paying close attention to shaping the figure from the outside.

This is what my palette looked like at this point. You can see the four colors I've used so far; a dark color for the back ground, the black w/ Liquin for the underpainting, the light side of the figure, and the shadow side of the figure. Nothing really tricky so far.

The colors that I actually have around the edges of the palette are, clockwise from the bottom left;

Ultramarine
Cerulean (this is where I put a greenish blue. Sometimes Cerulean, sometimes Prussian, Sometimes Phthalo)
Ivory Black
Titanium White
Cadmium Lemon,
Warm Yellow (a mixture of Cad Lem and Transparent Earth Red)
Yellow Ochre
Permanent Red
Alizarin
Transparent Earth Red

I have filled in the rest of the background, and now sneaking in color variations into the figure. I have no references other than the charcoal drawing, so everything other than the construct of the figure is invented. This includes all colors, suggestions of environments. This contributes greatly to making abstract decisions.

Working variations into all areas of the painting, losing edges and finding them, pushing and pulling the paint. It's starting to look like a painting.

Finished. If I were working with a live model or a photograph, I'd be influenced a lot more by what I saw. The colors would probably conform more to actual colors, and shapes would likely be based on existing things around the figure.

As it is, the temperature shifts on the figure are sort of generic - at least, they start out that way and slowly become less literal as I respond to subjective color decisions I'd made outside of the figure.

I'll post more figures like this soon~

Go Figure

2011-12-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

Breanna in Red, 16 x 12, inches, oil on linen

So may be you noticed my preoccupation with abstraction of late? Well, I've been doing some figure work, hoping to apply what I learned about abstraction in the Urban Aria series to a different kind of subject matter.

Figure painting like this is a very different experience from painting cityscapes, and in some ways, easier to push abstraction because I'm not dealing with certain rules of representational painting like extensive perspective drawing and atmosphere.

What difference do those things make in terms of abstraction? I've found that they matter a lot, abstraction requires abstract thinking, and not just distorting shapes / colors/ brushstrokes here and there. In a cityscape (or landscape) painting, if I were to create a convincing sense of space, things like perspective and atmosphere must follow a set of rules which basically, go against this abstract thinking. It's really difficult to reconcile the instinct to follow the rules and that to break the rules. You can't do both. A perspective line is either correct, or incorrect. It can't be both.

How one artist works around that paradox differs from the next artist, which makes each artist's style unique. In effect, we're talking about how an artist analyzes and interprets the visual world; his identity.

But I digress - let's not get into the heavy stuff today! - As I was saying, with the figure isolated from the environment–that is to say, I'm not painting the surrounding environment – I'm not worried about things like perspective and atmosphere (OK, there's a little bit of that, but not much) and I can just focus on the drawing of the gesture, brushwork, surface work, color, and two dimensional design. And my colors aren't tricky. I just use few colors and paint them tonally. I've pretty much taken out the complex temperature shifts out of the equation, too.

The bottom line is, fewer rules of representational painting, more freedom to abstract. Drawing the figure is a rigorous discipline, to be sure, and has its own stringent limitations but figure drawing is something I enjoy immensely and besides, even in cityscapes and landscapes, drawing is one rule that I consciously try to adhere to. I don't break that rule.

And in Atlanta...

2011-12-06T09:17:00.000-08:00

I'm in another small works show – this one is at Anne Irwin Gallery in Atlanta. I have three pieces in this one, all 9 x 12 inches.

The paintings are a continuation of the direction that I started with Urban Aria. I'm pushing abstraction still further, by consciously using brushstrokes which do not necessarily conform to the form that it's describing. My brain is so conditioned to painting representationally that I automatically use strokes to help describe form. I'm trying to break that habit, and that means thinking about what I'm doing every time my brush touches the canvas and asking myself, now is this predictable?

That's not to say describing form is bad. Rather, I'm exploring what contributes to something looking like what it is. There's the local color, shape, form, value modulation, drawing, context... It's not necessary to use all these tools all the time, but if some are ignored, the thing suddenly doesn't look like what it should. What are the rules that govern which tools need to be used in what situation? What logic dictates which tools can be ignored, and when?

Is there really logic to this? Sometimes I think there is (not that I know what it is). Other times, I'm totally lost. So I continue to investigate.

You've seen this painting in an earlier post. All these are float mounted in 1/4 inch blond hardwood box, and are available from Anne Irwin Fine Art. If you're interested in adding any of these to your collection, please contact the gallery.

Small Works Shows

2011-12-03T15:06:00.000-08:00

Well I'm behind in blog posts! I should have posted these sooner, but Holiday craziness gets in the way of things, yaknowwhatimean?

These are 6 x 6 paintings float mounted in a wide 5 inch frame, and both of these are in the 6x6 show down at the Randy Higbee Gallery in Costa Mesa, Ca. As the title indicates, all the paintings in the show are 6 x 6 inches, and there are some sweet pieces in this show - if you're looking to collect but your favorite artists' prices are a little out of reach, these small works are sometimes the best way to get your hands on them. Smaller paintings, smaller price tags (generally).

The opening for this show is actually tonight (Saturday, 12 / 3... I told you I shoulda posted them earlier...) but there are many paintings in this show and the they'll be hanging for the holiday season, so you might want to check 'em out. Who knows? you just might find a small gem with a big name on it.

6x6 Show
Randy Higbee Gallery
102 Kalmus, Costa Mesa, CA
(714) 546-2156

Before & After

2011-12-02T19:04:00.001-08:00

For my in-studio landscape painting class, I usually spend about 45 minutes to an hour doing a demo on a different subject each week. Obviously, that's not a lot of time and I don't expect to do fully resolved paintings on the spot. I'm usually talking about some specific aspect or another, and I'll paint and talk until I make my point.

If I think my unresolved painting has potential, I'll work on it later in my studio and bring to to a satisfactory finish. This may take an additional hour or five, for a 9 x 12 painting (my usual demo size).

When I did this particular demo (above), my topic was simplifying complex things like cars, using atmosphere. I didn't spend too much time on composition or drawing, as you can plainly see. But I thought there was potential and I didn't want to let it go so I started reworking it later, when I was alone in my studio and away from any pressure to perform.

This is what I ended up with. It's changed quite a bit. I love the medium's capacity and tolerance for making big changes!

The placement of the figure is unconventional, and I kept moving it around but couldn't resist playing with fire. In the original demo, it's placed more predictably, and while it's sloppily safe, it was boring to me. I kept edging it to the left a little at a time (as if she was walking) and in the end, I decided to stick it right near the edge, but by manipulating the edges and directions of the strokes, I hoped it would work; or at least look intentional.

Anyway, a fun demo and a rewarding reworking experience.

Urban Aria Exhibition Catalogue

2011-11-27T13:19:00.000-08:00

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and didn't suffer too much from overeating like I did!

Now, it's time to get back to art before another onset of feasting and craziness.

I'm excited to announce that the Urban Aria exhibition has so far been received very positively. I continue to receive great feedback from people who visit the gallery. So here's a big Thank You to everybody who has taken the time to see the show, both in person and online! Your continued support and enthusiasm really helps me motivated.

So in connection with the show, I'm announcing that the exhibition catalogue for Urban Aria is now available directly from Blurb.com. Every painting in the show is included, plus a few "earlier versions" that may give you a glimpse into my process. I'm very happy with how the images printed, too; the colors look pretty damn close to what they should be, which, if you know anything about print publishing, is no easy task.

Anyway, here's a preview of the first 15 pages -

URBAN ARIA by TERRY MIURA | Make Your Own Book

The exhibition will be up through December, so if you haven't seen it and you find yourself in San Francisco, please check it out~

Thomas Reynolds Gallery
2291 Pine Street @ Fillmore
San Francisco, CA
(415)441-4093

Away From the City

2011-11-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

Old California Trail, 16 x 38 inches, oil on linen

This is a new painting. I haven't abandoned the city - just needed a little break. Painting the hustle and bustle of the city is exciting but after long periods of doing nothing but that... well, I can't think anymore and I need a mental vacation. So I go to this quiet spot, slow waaaay down, paint something that calms me down.

Tall eucalypti, muted "old" colors, solitude. Ahh, that's the ticket. Not a car in sight! No pedestrians! I hear no honking and no diesel engine noises.

This painting looks a little tight compared to my recent city things, but that's only because of its scale. It's actually painted pretty loosely. "Loosely" doesn't mean it's painted quickly. As I said above, I slowed waaay down. Thinking about each stroke as I put it down, trying to make it look nonchalant, but in the right place, with the right shape, and integrated into its neighboring stroke. Consequently, shaping these trees took a long time. I want them to look like they just fell out of my brush, but that spontaneity is an illusion.

I've seen other artists do it quickly and in single passes, but how they're able to do that is beyond me. May be I just need more practice or may be my brain doesn't work that way. I don't know. I'd like to be able to do that, but going slowly is kinda nice. Meditative. Quiet. That's what I was looking for in this piece to begin with, after all.

Happy Thanksgiving! Slow down a little, eh?

Painting What's Not There; An Interview

2011-11-13T08:54:00.000-08:00

The following is an interview about Urban Aria which appeared in Art Matters. I hope you find it interesting.

URBAN ARIA

Painting What’s Not There; A Conversation with Terry Miura

The title of your upcoming exhibition is Urban Aria. What is the significance of the title, and how did you arrive at it?

The word aria has a couple of definitions, one of which is Italian for air. As this series of paintings has heavy emphasis on atmosphere and its effects, I thought it was an appropriate title. The other reference for the word is musical – an aria is a melody, often a complex song in an opera. I often have musical references for titles of my paintings and shows (an earlier exhibition at Thomas Reynolds Gallery was entitled Andante) because I feel there’s a strong relationship between imagery and music, and I often think of my painting in terms of musical concepts. Harmony and rhythms are two of the more obvious examples.

Is this a new direction for you?

The genre isn’t new to me. I started out painting cityscapes a long time ago. There was a period of several years during which time I focused on learning the craft of landscape painting en plein air, but the city never left me. What is new this time, is that my work has become more abstract, both in terms of how I paint and what I paint.

What do you mean by that, and how did that come about?

Well, the brushwork is looser and freer than it has ever been. I don’t paint a lot of detail, so the shapes are simpler and less descriptive. Objects are merely suggested, not defined. I’ve been struggling to paint more abstractly for years and years, but being an extremely analytical person, I’ve always needed rigid structure. Rules of representational painting gave me that structure and I had a hard time leaving it. Consequently, abstraction eluded me for years. I mean, an abstract stroke made no sense to me, and I needed everything to make logical sense. Perhaps that’s why abstraction has always fascinated me; it was mysterious and out of reach.

It wasn’t until earlier this year that things began to change. I was painting on a street corner during the Sonoma Plein Air Festival. My subjects were cars and pedestrians, more or less familiar motifs. What was different for me this time, was the fact that I was looking into the sun. The backlit cars and figures...in fact everything in view became very simplified because you really can’t see any detail when you’re staring into the sun. I was forced to simplify, working with minimal amount of description. I have painted hundreds of backlit views before, but I believe this was the first time I tried it with moving targets. The simplicity forced upon my view by the back lighting, and the figures and cars in motion made it impossible for me to render anything. The only way for me to paint the scene was if I just tried to capture the impressions of things, and not the things themselves. Many an artist talk about this idea, and in fact I tell my students to do that too, but I hadn’t really grasped the full meaning of this way of seeing the world until I realized I was painting motion, not pedestrians.

Back in the studio, I pondered on this concept of painting the intangible, and I started a bunch of new canvases. I wanted to see if I could come up with other concepts which were intangible, abstract notions and paint them. Concepts such as airiness, noise, anonymity, and mood. When I focused on these ideas and not cars and buildings, the cars and buildings looked more like cars and buildings. And to my delight, the painting became more and more abstract.

Atmosphere plays a part in this, right?

A huge part. I’ve always loved atmospheric perspective and its ability to create mood. My landscapes are typically very atmospheric. In back lighting, because the sunlight has to travel through all that stuff in the air– smog, dust, etc. – the atmospheric effects are very much accentuated. And it bathes everything in a single unifying color theme, which, again, is a great simplifier. The fact that you can tell a backlit car is a car, tells me that you don’t need any detail. A silhouette will do. Adding detail doesn’t make my statement any more eloquent, so what would be the point in making that car more defined? Less really is more.

You mentioned musical concepts. Can you elaborate?

Right. In many ways ideas in music are very similar to thos in picturemaking. Even the words are the same; composition, rhythm, harmony, key. Those are formal concepts. It’s easy to see color harmonies as being similar to chords on a piano, and pleasing placements of visual elements translating to tempo and cadence. I’ve always been a big fan of jazz, particularly Miles Davis’ music from the late fifties. Not only that the tunes are very moody and atmospheric, but I love that he says so much with so little. It’s pure poetry. I identify with jazz, I think, because of its improvisational nature. The music has to have structure, like representational painting, but with jazz, you’re allowed to abstract and express, sometimes sticking close to the score, and sometimes going way off. Coltrane sometimes played entire songs without ever hitting the note as written, and yet, the tunes are identifiable. That to me is exactly what I try to do with my painting. I realize I have a long, long ways to go, but I feel I’m making progress. When I get stuck on a painting, I often ask, what would Miles do? And I answer myself with a famous Miles quote, “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”

Can you talk about your process? Do you use photo references or paint on site?

About half of this series of paintings are done using photo references. The other half are imaginary, composed from scratch. None are done on location. To me, plein air sketches are more like studies. I often bring them to a satisfactory finish, but my intent is usually to study and explore something specific; light’s effects, or the construct of a car or a building or a tree, for example. In the studio, I often just start with random washes on a small canvas, looking for shapes to spark a composition. I think of these as doodles, almost. I then tighten up the design and introduce some sort of structure, correct perspective and believable spatial relationships, all the while moving things around to try different placements. A great thing about painting cars is that I can move them around anywhere to suit the composition, as long as the perspective is consistent with the context. Once I have a design to sink my teeth into, I paint thicker and more decisively. I do many of these small paintings and have them all around my studio to give me more ideas. Not all of them are good but many will have a potential to be made into larger, more thought-through paintings. I may combine elements from two or more smaller paintings, recompose, and edit. In terms of actual application of paint on the larger canvases, it’s pretty much the same as small ones. The difference being with the larger one, I know where I’m going whereas with the smaller paintings, I don’t. It is hit or miss–and I have a lot of misses– but I like the spontenaity and improvisational nature of starting with doodley washes.

Is that the same thing as painting from memory?

I don’t have photographic memory, so it’s not as if I can paint exactly what I visualize in my head. But I tap into my memory for general feeling of being in a certain environment. I can remember whether it was busy or empty, tall buildings or a big open sky, many trees or few. That sort of thing. The rest is constructing the image on canvas with some attention to perspective. I always thought this was a good way to work because I can only actualize what I can remember, and I can only remember what I noticed, the composition is pre-edited to an extent. By definition, what I remember must have been worth remembering. I don’t remember colors too well beyond simple hues, so perhaps that contributes my palette being muted.

You’re known as a tonalist. Why do you paint tonally?

You know, I don’t even know what that means, really. I have nothing against bright colors, if the painting is executed well. I’m just drawn to a more quiet, muted palettte. I think it’s an effective way to create mood, and besides it’s a lot simpler. Colors of things are information, as with any other detail. If I can communicate what that thing is without local color information, why do I need it? It makes it more colorful, sure, but that has nothing to do with what I’m trying to express. Bringing a tuba into a sring quartet would make it more colorful, but it doesn’t make it better, does it? That’s not to say that I paint monochromatically. I do actually use a range of hues, just not very saturated. A strong single-color theme unifies the painting and if I throw in a few color accents in the foreground, I find that’s enough color for me. Any more would start to fragment the image.

A few of these paintings depict recognizeable buildings, but many are just ordinary, everyday type of views. Is that intentional?

Absolutely. It goes back to painting the intangiable. A recognizeable building would have to be painted...recognizeably. That is to say, the visual information not only has to be there, but also more or less accurate. The painting becomes more about the building than about, say city rhythms. I don’t really want to paint a portrait of a building or a car. I want to convey a mood. The more information I paint, the more specific the subject becomes. Keeping my views more ambiguous allows more room for the viewer to interpret, to complete the picture in their own mind, in the context of their own experiences and memories, and I think that is a far more powerful interaction than a realistic depiction of a recognizeable street corner can offer.

Since your subject matter is ordinary streetscapes, do you find that you see potential paintings everywhere you go?

Sometimes, when my brain is in that mode. Like right after a painting session. But most of the time it takes conscious effort for me to mentally translate what I see into a possible painting. It’s a lot of work, and since I have a habit of doing that while driving in the city, it can be dangerous! I prefer it if someone else were driving, but then I get car sick so that’s not good either.

Your figures too, are non-specific.

I’m painting motion, not pedestrians, remember? But seriously, I try to keep my figures less defined for the same reason. I want to identify with the figures in my paintings, and if they’re specific individuals, it’s not so easy to find resonance. I wouldn’t necessarily care about that person, because I don’t know him. But I can relate to Everyman, and keeping him anonymous by painting him abstractly, I can see myself being him. Not every viewer will identify with him the same way I do, but If I painted him with more detail and definition, I’m sure even fewer will be able to relate to him.

So this has been a particularly important series of paintings for you?

Working on this series was a completely eye-opening journey for me, unlike any other stage in my development as an artist, because I feel I discovered something very important. I feel like I finally understand how to break the rules of representational painting without violating my analytical self, and it’s absolutely liberating. I love how abstract my paintings have become in such a short time, and I love that I feel right at home after all these years of struggling to find my voice. I’m not there yet, but I believe I’ve found a piece of the puzzle. A corner piece, even.

Urban Aria is on view through December at Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco. Check it out!

Urban Aria Opening Was A Blast!

2011-11-07T09:55:00.000-08:00

The opening for my show was this past Saturday, and it was a lot of fun! Very well attended despite the gloomy weather. Thank you so much to those of you who made it to the opening - your presence there made the show!!

above: Me about to knock out the paparazzo. In the back is my good friend and artist Cindy Lemmon.

Fellow artists Sergio Lopez, Philippe Gandiol and Jimmie G. Jimmie, are you reading this? Let me know your website/blog address.

Richard Lindenberg discusses something with Michael Reardon (Might be something about art. or the bear market. I dunno)

Sergio and Philippe contemplate (somethin). James and Nancy in the back.

Me and James. We're kinda tonal.

My buddy from the sixth grade, Brad, flew up for the opening. He snatches the title piece from the show, too. Thanks Brad!!

Casual snapshot captures Michael Reardon, Sergio Lopez and Paul Kratter. Paul and I wore the same shoes. I thought you'd want to know.

This is my littlest fan, artist Skye Miura.

Erik Tiemmens and I went to art school together back in the late eighties. Always inspiring.

Ernesto Nemesio and Erik talk shop.

Christin Coy and Richard Lindenberg; always fun to hang out with.

Bill Cone, Paul Kratter and Philippe Gandiol. I didn't get to thank you for the beer afterwards Bill - so thanks!

Here's Sergio again. He's been tearing up the plein air circuit lately.

The show will be up through December so if you couldn't make the opening, there's plenty of time to see the paintings. If you get around to SF, please stop by the gallery and check 'em out.

Thanks again for all your support!

Now, on to the next project!

Without Atmosphere...

2011-11-04T09:29:00.000-07:00

Purple Haze, 40 x 30 inches, oil on linen

"Without atmosphere, a painting is nothing."

-Rembrandt van Rijn

That's one of my favorite quotes. Not surprising, eh?

The painting above is entirely invented. The atmosphere is the real subject matter, and the cars are er...vehicles... to express the atmosphere. In order to keep it that way, I made a concerted effort to keep the cars, pedestrians, and other "things" in this painting as simple as possible.

Dark values, highest contrast, visual activity are all concentrated in the foreground. As we move back into space everything becomes simpler, until light and shadow become so close in value that everything gets obscured. Buildings don't have any detail on them, and for the most part I rely on strong, recognizable silhouettes for visual clutter such as pedestrians and street light posts.

The idea there is this; it is much simpler to paint an object with two values than, say, ten. It is even simpler to do it with one value. But can I paint something with just one value and still make it recognizable? Yes, if it has a strong silhouette. When does a mere silhouette make sense? In heavy atmospheric conditions, and also when the object is back lit. Think of cinematic effects when silhouettes are used effectively. The first thing that comes to my mind is when Darth Vader emerges from the depth of a smoke filled corridor. What does that say about me? LOL But kidding aside, the next time you watch a movie, pay close attention to how a scene is designed. You'll find lots of beautifully executed scenes which are surprisingly simple, and heavily reliant on atmosphere and silhouettes.

Urban Aria opens tomorrow (Saturday, Nov 5. Reception; 5 - 7 pm) ! If you come to the opening, be sure to say hello~ I'd love to meet you!

Urban Aria Opens This Saturday!!

2011-11-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

Urban Aria, my solo exhibition at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery opens this Saturday!

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, I hope you can come to the opening. The reception is from 5 to 7 pm. Everyone is welcome - if you do come, don't forget to say hello!!

Urban Aria

Recent Paintings by

Terry Miura

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 5th, 5 to 7pm

Thomas Reynolds Gallery

2291 Pine Street at Fillmore

San Francisco, CA 94115

Something Wicked This Way Comes...

2011-10-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween! And that means... yes, carving pumpkins! I've always enjoyed this part of the tradition, but I've never really done anything complicated. My Jack-O-lanterns have always been pretty much traditional.

This year, I decided to do something a little different. I don't know why - may be because I had just delivered all my paintings for the show and was feeling relieved and relaxed. May be because this year my daughter is old enough to really be excited about Halloween and that enthusiasm is contagious.

And probably too, because I had been talking with a friend about illustration, the occupation I am no longer in and miss a little bit every time I read a beautifully illustrated children's book at my daughter's bedtime.

Anyway, I decided to try the - I don't know what the proper term is - woodblock type of carving where you don't penetrate the wall all the way. Making use of the variation in the depth of the carving to achieve a light / dark value pattern but not cutting holes, it's a lot easier to do more complex images than the traditional method.

I had a cheap set of woodblock / lino cutting tools which worked just fine. I tried my Dremel, but it didn't have a pumpkin bit so it was just like using a clunky electric drill. Way too clumsy. Next year, I think I'll buy a Dremel specifically made for carving pumpkins and give that a try. But I have a soft spot for old fashioned tools, so I'll probably end up using the knives more.

The cat is Mooner, my trusty sidekick who had been with me for 18 years, during my entire illustration career and left us when I completed the transition to painting full time. This part of the Jack O Lantern is in honor of his memory. 'Hope you're having a good time Mooner, wherever you are!

Skye drew me a thumbnail - I'll post it later if I can locate it - of a spider that she wanted me to carve.

I didn't have a design to start with. This is all just ad lib, stream of consciousness. Not very different from my doodles that I do while mindlessly talking on the phone.

When I was a freelance illustrator, I had two distinctly different styles. One of them was gritty, newsy, digital collage with which I worked for clients such as SI, Rollingstone and Washington Post, and the other was like this pumpkin; whimsical and fun. The two styles balanced one another in terms of my need to be both serious and goofy.

Gotta have a witch! Elphaba lives! I love Gregory Maguire's work.

Another one of my daughter's requests; "Daddy, you need to put in a bunny!"

Skye's head on the spider; it's a "Skyeder"! Get it?

And here's the best part. This is Skye's pumpkin. She drew the face, and got a little help carving from ol' dad. Looks pretty awesome!

Ch-ch-ch-Changes~

2011-10-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

A.M., 12 x 16 inches, oil on linen

One of the beautiful things about thick paint oil painting is that it is almost infinitely editable. I say almost because if it gets too thick, surface texture becomes more and more a problem. Or an issue, anyway.

But my paint application usually stay within a manageable range in terms of paint buildup and texture, so I can make changes whether it's still wet or after it's dry.

The painting above is one that will be in my upcoming show Urban Aria at Thomas Reynolds Gallery (Opening reception; Nov 5th, 5 - 7pm). It says it's 12 x 16 inches, and it is, but it started out a little bit bigger.

Above is the same painting, at an earlier stage. It was 12 x 21 inches and while it had a nice back lit thing going, I felt it was a little too simple (less was not more in this case) and unresolved. So I went back in and worked on the main figure, which led to repainting everything around it because I needed all edges of shapes to be integrated. In turn, I had to repaint everything else too, for the same reason.

In essence, I repainted the whole thing over, which seems like a lot of work but it's pretty typical of the process when making changes on top of a dry surface. I brush on a thin coat of Liquin before I make changes on a dried surface and it sort of makes it feel like I'm painting wet into wet, but not really since there's no interaction between the dried strokes and the wet ones on top. However the coat of Liquin brings back the richness of the darks and brilliance of the colors, which helps me to judge colors and values accurately. This is pretty much what retouch varnish does. I use Liquin instead of retouch varnish because the varnish fumes make me sick.

Here's the detail of the pedestrian. The edges and brushwork are absolutely critical, and there's no way I can get the new layer to look integrated into the dried surface of the painting, so I have to repaint everything. When I point this out to my students when they want to make changes to their already-dry paintings, often I get a groan because they feel its a lot of unnecessary work and they don't want to cover up everything they've already done. Why should they repaint what's already working? But here again, is the notion of feeling too precious with the painting getting in the way of taking risks.

The plain fact is that if you want the look of wet-into-wet edges, the only way to paint them is wet into wet. And if that means painting the whole thing over, that's what you do. It's just a process. Nothing to groan about.

Oh and while I was reworking this painting, it became clear to me that the left side of the painting wasn't contributing anything to my statement so I took the panel to the table saw and BBZZZZzzzzzz!! Voila! problem solved!

Painting on Paper

2011-10-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been doing my figure studies on paper rather than canvas or linen. Typically, I use thick vellum which is smooth (with a little bit of tooth), translucent and a lot cheaper than linen.

I used to paint on this surface a lot when I was in art school since I couldn't afford more expensive materials for mere studies and exercises. I just recently rediscovered it, and am delighted at the fact that it works beautifully with my thick paint application of late.

It doesn't take washes well at all –not in the way I like, anyway– but I find I can build the surface toward thick paint without getting muddy. Paint responds to the brush in a more fluid way. It sort of forces me to be more aware of each stroke since I don't have the canvas texture to help me fake it.

These are all 11 x 14 and done in about an hour. In our three hour figure sessions, I do three of them. I just tape the corners of a sheet of paper to a board, and am ready to go. The paper itself is archival, if you were wondering, but I'm not worried about that - these are just exercises and studies and I do a lot of them. I'd go broke if I painted on linen all the time!

One thing that slows down a student's advancement is when he feels too precious about every little painting. Yes, it's important to try your best every time, but not every painting is going to end up worthy of a gallery wall or even a frame. In my case, for every one painting that ends up in a gallery, there's probably five or ten that do not. And if I start a painting knowing this one isn't gallery bound, I'm more likely to take risks. A lot of them fail and end up in the garbage, but so what? Can you imagine a musician recording every scale exercise for posterity?

Because the material is cheap, I don't feel bad about doing a ton of them. Set a time limit, focus on one issue, do it, and move on to the next one. As long as you are focused on a particular issue and you're not just going through the motions, you are getting better. And much, much faster than if you were trying to solve all problems in a painting every time you face the easel.

By the way, I'm Tweeting. Not sure if this is a worthwhile pursuit, but I thought I'd give it a try~ Follow me if you feel like it!

Recent Class Demos

2011-10-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

Here are more recent demos from my Thursday landscape class. I sometimes think ahead and prepare my demos to make sure I don't crash and burn. Other times, I take requests –often students have questions about specific issues that their trying to figure out in their own projects– and try to do my best on the spot. Riskier, but that makes it interesting too. Sort of like improv comedy. Except it isn't funny.

The pic at the top is my latest demo, done just last night. Among other things, I wanted to emphasize two things. The importance of paying attention to brushwork, and keeping temperature shifts between light and shadow subtle and under control. I used a pen sketch out of my sketchbook as my reference, so the colors are invented. Which was not a big deal in this case - both the tree trunk and the ground are kind of gray so there's no critical local color to worry about.

China Camp, I think? Gail was working from a photo and asked me if I could do a demo with it. My first reaction was, "hell no, that looks like a recipe for a crash and burn demo!" I didn't say that, but I thought it. Then upon closer inspection, I decided to give it a go. The clutter in the middle really was the only tricky part, and that was all in the drawing. Once I resolved that, the peripheral stuff was just back drop for the main dish. I believe that "strategy" of defining a few recognizable elements in a grouped clutter and leaving everything else loose, is what I focused on in the demo.

Here's one from a few weeks ago. I decided to do a street scape out of my head. The main theme here was how to simplify complex stuff like cars. I demonstrated how atmosphere and edge control can be used to accomplish this. It isn't about how to paint cars. It's about how to edit. Or more precisely, how to think in order to edit effectively. As you know, there's a whole lotta thinking required when you're painting but most of it has good logical reasoning to back it up.

Fog demo from two weeks ago. It's all about atmosphere, baby~ Organizing your values logically, I dare say fog isn't hard to paint (compared to some other climate conditions, that is). What's difficult is shaping the trees so that they're both interesting and convincing. Mine is just hastily done (these class demos are done in 30min to an hour usually) so it doesn't quite work, but another couple of hours would do the trick.

It's true that sometimes, reading or hearing about the hows and the whys of painting doesn't translate to problem at hand, even if the information makes perfect sense to us. But seeing it done right in front of our eyes is a whole different experience and we hear lots of "Ohhhh that's what you meant!" After all, painting is a process. A picture really is worth a thousand words!

URBAN ARIA Preview

2011-10-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

An American Gothic, 36 x 48, oil on linen

The opening of the exhibition URBAN ARIA is just a few weeks away! If you're in the SF Bay area, I hope you can stop by and check out the work and say hi!

I've uploaded the entire collection for your viewing pleasure! If you've been thinking of starting a collection or adding to your collection, here's a rare opportunity to purchase a painting before the show opens. All the paintings are available now (as of this posting). If you see something you just have to have, please contact the gallery directly.

Go to the online preview of URBAN ARIA

'Hope to see you at the opening!!

Getting Thicker

2011-10-15T22:34:00.000-07:00

Blues Jam, 24 x 18 inches, oil on linen

I'm nearly done with all the paintings for Urban Aria, which opens on November 5th. I started painting for this show about a year ago, and in that time I saw my style change a bit. Consequently, I had to reject some of the earlier pieces in this series because they no longer seemed to work with the group. They're good paintings and I still like them a lot, but I have this preoccupation with creating a show that's cohesive as a whole, and not a collection of different sides of me.

The very last of the bunch are painted thicker and loser than the earlier ones. It just gradually became that way over the course of doing three dozen pieces (of which 25 - 28 will be shown) I really am enjoying painting thicker. It sort of helps me look at paint as paint, rather than material with which to create a visual reality. Abstraction being one of the main concerns, anything that helps me think in those terms is worth investigating. Thick paint, it turns out forces me to think about the physical quality of the material, and less so about the physical quality of the thing that is being painted. I'm not sure if the distinction is important but it does seem to liberate me from being too literal.

I can't see myself going completely non-representational, because I'm not willing to let go of the structure provided by the recognizable. I need some rules, in other words. If all rules were thrown out, how do I know if anything is good or bad? Right or wrong? I'd have a hard time with that.

For now, thick paint and abstraction work well together, and I'm going to keep pushing it further.

Another Limited Palette Strategy

2011-10-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

Crossing Lines, 20 x 32 inches, oil on linen

This painting is one of the larger ones I did for the upcoming show, Urban Aria. And, it's one of my favorite ones of the bunch.

There's a lot going on this picture, so composing it was quite a challenge. One way I sought unity was to limit my palette (as usual) so that the overall color theme was very muted to begin with. In fact, in this particular painting I used a severely limited primaries palette of Ivory Black, Yellow Ochre, Permanent Red, and White. The black acts as my blue, in this case. It's surprising how much color - blue - you can tease out of black. It's all a matter of context, see. If you don't have a lot of saturated colors, Black + White look very blue, especially juxtaposed against warmer tones.

Yellow Ochre is my yellow, and like the black, is muted from the get-go.

My red is the only saturated color of the primaries, but I used it very sparingly. There is some red mixed into my "blue" to get that violet tone that's laced throughout the painting.

After the painting was about eighty percent done, I introduced a little bit of more saturated colors to mix my accent colors (pedestrian's clothing, mostly), but even those don't scream.

You may have noticed that this is actually the Zorn palette, used often in portraiture and interior figures. You can get very naturalistic results when painting warmer tones including and especially flesh tones. My painting uses the same palette, but pushed toward the cool end of the spectrum, and obviously, I'm not after naturalistic colors in this one.

One thing I like to do, to keep a very limited - almost monochromatic - palette painting from looking drab is to make sure I use a full range of values, and give it some snap by making good use of value contrast and sharp edges juxtaposed against soft.

I'm very pleased with the way this one came out.

Come see it in person - Urban Aria opens November 5th, at Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco. Opening Reception starts at 5pm. 'Hope to see ya there!

Figure Drawing Class

2011-10-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

My weekly figure painting class at The School of Light and Color will, starting this week, turn into figure DRAWING class!!

I love short pose figure drawing. (2 - 20minutes) I've always wanted to add a drawing class to my schedule, but I already have two weekly classes and I thought I wouldn't be able to add another class; I don't have enough time to devote to my own work as it is.

I thought may be someone else could teach it (and I could sit in once in a while) or we could start a weekly un-instructed session (like the painting sessions we do on friday mornings at SLC) but for various reasons, it hasn't happened.

Then I had an idea! How about I do figure painting class AND drawing class in three month rotations? I would teach painting three months, then switch to drawing three months, and so on. That way, I get to do both without adding a new class, and it will help to periodically refresh my students' chops, and keep things interesting.

We will be doing mostly 2 - 20 min. poses, emphasis is on gesture and shorthand form indication. (no jokes about "short hands" please LOL)

It's what I love to do, and I firmly believe that gesture drawing skills like these are absolutely essential to becoming a better painter. The discipline really forces you to learn how to say more with less. Line economy translates directly to expressive and meaningful brushwork. Shorthand form indication will be critical in painting with more decisiveness and confidence. No noodling the hell out forms here!

How important is gesture? It's the MOST important thing, as far as I'm concerned. Because it's the concept behind the drawing. You're communicating what the figure is doing, not what it looks like. It's the communication of an idea, in other words. Not mindlessly copying what you see.

The sanguine and white drawing on toned paper is what we'll be doing for 20 minute poses. Demos? you bet. Lots of em.

I'm really excited to begin this class! If you're interested in signing up, please contact the School of Light and Color;

The School of Light and Color
10030 Fair Oaks Blvd, Fair Oaks, CA 95628
(916) 966-7517

sarback@lightandcolor.com

More MSU; Making Stuff Up

2011-10-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

As the title of this post suggests, this painting is "made up". It's constructed from scratch, with no references. As far as invented cityscapes and architectural motifs go, a facade like this might be on the easier end of the scale. You can pretty much work up a composition in an elevation view, with no perspective to worry about.

Well, it's not exactly no perspective - there's a little bit of it like the underside of the fire-escape landing, and there's a hint of it in the sidewalk. The trickiest part of perspective in this picture is plotting the cast shadows. I know it's not completely accurate, but it's believable, and that satisfies my requirement. To tweak the actual shadows to suit my composition is more of a priority than them being precisely plotted.

To be sure, I have painted every element of this picture in some form or another in many other paintings (both from direct observation and using references) , so I'm fairly familiar with how they should look. And I did a couple of pencil roughs to nail down the design.

The most difficult thing about city paintings, for me anyway, is achieving unity. With all the separate little shapes and colors which may be very saturated, and not necessarily related to one another, it's up to the artist to unify them on canvas, and that's very, very tricky. Keeping the whole thing tonal and muted helps - A little bit of color goes a long way in this set up. Notice the green in the fire-escape and how close it is to the pale yellow of the wall - It's just a little darker, greener version of the same color. It could have been much more saturated and another artist might have taken that path, but for me, unity was more important so I modulated the colors accordingly.

Having just one bright color - orange in this case (and it's not even fully saturated, at that) in a sea of muted, close colors works well - it's a strategy that I employ often. I don't want to present it as a formula, though. It does get old quick if you don't have other ways to maintain interest!

On Making Stuff Up

2011-09-29T09:51:00.000-07:00

Many of my paintings are done from memory. Or more precisely, invented. Making stuff up, is what it is. I like to work this way because it frees me up from being tied down to what I'm seeing before me. It's much easier to edit, and move elements around to suit my composition. If I went looking for (and ended up using) a photo that looked like it could make a good painting, what really is the point there? Am I expressing something of ME? or is it just a painted version of a nice photo? And if the composition is already there in the photo. I wouldn't really be composing, either. I'd be just copying. I really have to think hard about what's the point of painting the picture in the first place. What is the concept?

Making stuff up is simply a fun and challenging thing to do. I enjoy it. It's my favorite pastime.(HAha~) The memory part of the equation has two parts. One is the overall sense of the place or scene, including and especially, the mood of the time and place. Being conscious about what sort of emotional response I had, drives my intent. I want to re-feel that same emotion by looking at the finished painting.

The second aspect of memory painting has to do with remembering just what something looks like. How wide should a sidewalk be, in relation to a pedestrian? How high is the walk/don't walk signal off the ground? Should the post supporting it be hexagonal, or octagonal, or square? cylindrical? If you painted these elements over and over and you make a note of typical proportions and shapes, pretty soon you'll remember them. It's called building your visual vocabulary, and it doesn't take any skill or much effort. You just have to make a mental note of things you paint, when you do have something to look at, whether from photos or on location. Obviously, if you're just copying what you see, you're not likely to build this visual vocabulary very much, and consequently you can't edit and make stuff up very effectively.

Carlson talks about the importance of painting from memory in his book - it's worth a read. In fact, if you're a representational landscape painter, this book should be on your nightstand or in your bathroom!

Urban Aria - Opening Date Change!

2011-09-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

There has been a change in plans - My solo exhibition, Urban Aria will open a couple of weeks later than previously planned. It will now open on Saturday, November 5th, 5 to 7 pm. Please make a note of it. If you are in the area (San Francisco) I hope to see you at the opening!!!

Urban Aria

New Paintings by Terry Miura

November 5th through December, 2011

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 5th, 5 to 7 pm

Thomas Reynolds Gallery

2291 Pine Street @ Fillmore, San Francisco

(415)441-4093

Cityscape Tips

2011-09-21T10:17:00.000-07:00

Coastin', 18 x 36 inches, oil on linen

This is one of the larger pieces for my upcoming show, Urban Aria.

If you've tried painting cityscapes, you know it's not an easy thing. (As if landscapes and figures were, right?) Obviously, there are many ways to approach it and no one way is the correct way. Sometimes I do a fairly tight drawing and use a grid system to blow it up onto a larger format. Other times, I just go in with a brush without a carefully laid out drawing on a blank canvas.

I prefer the free-hand way, because it just meshes with my personality better. The tight initial drawing is just so tedious! But sometimes I want a level of accuracy that I can only get from a carefully measured under drawing, like when I'm doing a recognizable landmark architecture.

This isn't one of those paintings, so I started it free-hand. Even so, I do end up using the straight edge to get long straight lines correct, like the perspective lines on the buildings on the right. There's no way I can eye ball those at this scale. (The painting is 36 inches wide) My hand is not that steady, see.

After the loose block-in of the main elements, I just lay my straight edge right on top of the wet paint and draw lines by scratching into it with a sharp tool (a pencil, or the back end of a brush). Does that mess up the layers underneath? Yes, but mine is a push-and-pull-back-and-forth type process painting, so it doesn't really matter. I rather like the mess the straight edge makes. It helps to integrate shapes and add visual activity.

Here are some of the points that I consider helpful in painting the kind of cityscapes that I've been doing;

Know which lines are critical. I don't have to draw every line. Perspective lines are obviously more important than those that describe little things like window trim and street signs.
Simplify the color scheme. Overall color theme (harmony) is more important than local color. Consequently, many of my cityscapes have a tonal structure that's almost monochromatic. Local colors are expressed as slight variations of this tonal color theme.
Most of the local color happens in the foreground.
In the distance, the color of the atmosphere (the color theme for the painting) dominates, and the local colors of things (trees, cars, buildings) become irrelevant.
When the painting is structured tonally like this, the jump between warm and cool temperatures need to be very subtle. If you want a big temperature shift, be subtle with value shifts between light and shadow lest you end up with completely unconvincing visual "reality". (If you're going for expressionist color, this stuff doesn't apply, of course)
Simplify by asking what is the minimum amount of detail I need for this object (car, tree, building) to be recognizable as such?
Integrate every shape into the painting. No shape or object should look like they're pasted on.
Lose an edge on every shape, if you can.
Have a strong focal point.
Never be afraid to scrape a perfectly good passage. If you can do it once, you can do it again.
Take out that detail on that building you just painted!
Take out that other detail too.
Take out a little more detail while you're at it.
Now put it back in to see if it's better with it or without it. Ask if the detail makes for a stronger statement, or distract from the overall impact.
Cars - pretend it's all the same surface - no glass in the windows, but it's solid painted metal surface. If the car doesn't read correctly by differentiating values of the planes, making glass look like glass will only look stupid.
Cars - pay close attention to ratios and draw them carefully; height:width, length:height, etc. Just how high is the trunk compared to the top of the car? You might be surprised to find out just how small a space the rear window occupies in the silhouette.

I'd better stop before this turns into a book! Anyway, these are some of the things I think about.

Music While You Paint

2011-09-10T20:57:00.000-07:00

Some artists, when painting on location, listen to music through their earbuds or headphones using an iPod or similar devices. Me, I usually bring my ten-piece harp ensemble with me when I paint en plein air. Something about the angelic background music triggers Divine inspiration.

....which doesn't necessarily translate to a better painting unfortunately, but I find it soothing nonetheless. Except when you're painting here in the Fair Oaks Village, periodic interruption by roosters crowing at the top of their lungs sort of ruins the effect.

Back in the Studio

2011-09-08T09:44:00.000-07:00

Summer Passing, 15 x 30 inches, oil on linen

Well! I guess my summer is over. The kids are in school, and I have no more expeditions on the calendar. It's back to the grind, folks. Back to work. (I consider my trip to the mountains work, but some may disagree.)

For the next month or so, I will be focusing (hopefully) on finishing up the suite of cityscape paintings for my solo show coming up. I will post more on that very soon, but first, I had to finish a few larger landscape paintings for Anne Irwin Gallery's group show that's opening next weekend.

The image above is that of a painting I just finished and sent out yesterday. I also have sent them a few city themed paintings, one of which is a variation of my earlier motif;

I was going to include this in my cityscape show, but as the series evolved and became more abstract and urban-themed, I began to think may be this didn't fit in so well. I still love this painting, but I have in mind to create a show that's more cohesive than my previous efforts, I decided to send this one off to Atlanta, where it'll be with my other paintings with which this guys feels more comfortable.

Anne Irwin Fine Art

"Best in Show" Anne Irwin Fine Art Anniversary Show

Opening Reception September 16, 6:30pm -8:30pm

If you're in the Atlanta area, be sure to check it out!

Sierra Pack Trip - Day 6

2011-09-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

After breakfast, we struck camp and got ready to hike down. Mules came up, lead by a couple of wranglers on horses. You can see in this photo, our junk being assembled in the back while the beasts wait patiently. There were a dozen or so mules, which seems like a lot but at least a third of them were for the kitchen stuff. A week's worth of food were carried in in metal bear-proof boxes. (and we ain't talkin' 'bout no freeze-dried astronaut food, either) And though we ate all that, the boxes still needed to be packed out.

One last view at our meadow. Look at those beautiful clouds. Thundershowers were predicted later in the day, so we hurried out.

Paul stopped on the way to do a last bit of painting. That's one advantage of an Open Box M set up. It's very compact so you can carry all of it with you, allowing you to stop and set up along the trail. My set up was much bulkier and heavier, (Soltek + French Companion fitted w/ glass) so I let the mules bring it back. All I had in my back pack were ten paintings on 1/8 panels, stashed in two Raymar plastic panel carriers. And lunch, and a bottle of water. We had plenty of time to do a painting on the way down, but I wasn't going to lug all that gear (35 lbs) for three and a half miles.

Not stopping on the way down means extra time at the bottom of the hill for.... pie and beer! I had a slice of cheddar pear and it was amazing! Perhaps it was the altitude, or maybe after a week of camping and miles of hiking, any pie tastes good, but seriously, the pies they make here are some of the best I've ever tasted. It might just be the best kept not-so-secret secret this side of the Sierra. If you're ever travelling on Hwy 395, take a short little detour to enjoy a slice of pie here. You won't regret it. But get there early! They often sell out before noon.

And the ice cold beer after a hike? Better than a hot shower.

And thus concludes my painting adventure in the Sierras this year. Breathtaking views, (there's a pun in there somewhere) great food, and wine, and lots and lots of painting with people who speak my language. What could be better!?

Sierra Pack Trip - Day 5

2011-09-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

By Friday, the general fatigue was catching up to me. I just couldn't get up early enough to do a pre-breakfast painting. Though I did get up in time for breakfast.

The pic above is Paul and Timon, eating their breakfast. It got pretty chilly in the night time, and before the sun reached our little camp area, we had to be dressed pretty warmly. As soon as the sun hit, though, it got very warm.

Here's Daniel painting in the camp area. I think he was painting the "kitchen".

My crib.

Daniel, Jim, and Bob, relaxing after a hard days work.

Well I did four paintings on Tuesday, three on Wendsday, two on Thursday. I am trending down, I realized, and I resolved to do three on this day. Here's my first. I realized that I didn't have any paintings of "big views" yet, even though we were surrounded by them. I guess my interests were elsewhere. But since we are here, I just had to do one.

This painting also features a bit of blue. It is a running joke among my friends that I never use any blue, so here ya go, Paul. Granted it's only a tiny bit of the canvas but it's still blue, eh?

This is the little thumb. Nothing fancy.

Well the perfect Edgar Payne clouds started to get bigger and darker, and I smelled rain. I packed my things and hiked down to base camp, and shortly thereafter, we were hit with a downpour. So much for my goal of doing three paintings!

Rain came in fits so every time it let up, we became hopeful and set up. but then it would start dumping water on us so I quit. A few of us braved it, using umbrellas and what not to keep their work dry. I can't be bothered with such apparatus so I just sat under the tarp and drew Jim painting.

If it's not a thumbnail for a painting, my drawings in the sketchbook does get a little more involved.

Bill and Timon spent the rainy afternoon under the tarp playing chess. Is it happy hour yet?

Sierra Pack Trip - Day 4

2011-09-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

Day 4. Thursday. Another glorious morning to get us started. Actually, I slept in and missed the pre-breakfast painting session. Shame on me. In fact, I almost missed breakfast! I blame it on not being able to sleep well at night due to bear activity.

But that's a lie. We had no bears. Only chipmunks and ground squirrels, but they don't make good camp stories, do they? It was probably just the wind that kept me up.

Anyway when I got up most everyone was already done with breakfast and was assembling their lunches. That was the m.o. - Gene lays out all the lunch meats and snacks, and we build our sandwiches and stuff 'em into brown bags to take with us on our daily painting excursions so that we don't have to hike up and down just to eat.

Bill is still eating his breakfast, and everyone else is making their lunch. I've yet to eat my eggs and sausages.

Left to right; Paul Kratter, Sharon Calahan, Daniel Aldana, and Ernesto Nemesio.

A late start but thanks to the vertical-ness of my subject matter, the shadow patterns remained interesting for a long while. This is up at Gem lakes. I did a painting from the same spot last year, but I can't seem to find a shot of it right now. I'll post if I find it. I did put more color in it this time. (which in my case, doesn't mean a whole lot. LOL)

Here's the thumb for my painting. I've been doing these quick two to three value organizations lately. Very helpful in simplifying the structure.

Here's Bill Cone, with his pastel set up. Notice the stance mimics the tripod.

For my second painting, I decided to do a value study. I was tired after the first one, and thought it would be easier to limit my colors. Turns out, it was harder, not easier! I used Ultramarine, Transparent Oxide Red, and White. No yellows. It really took a lot of effort to wrap my mind around the fact that I have no green to paint those trees. It was a challenging and rewarding exercise. I think I'll do more of these in the future.

Thumb.

Daniel squinting to see the values.

Here's Jim. Doesn't he look like an ad for plein air painting gear?

We ended the day with nice juicy steaks with red wine - mushroom sauce. Doesn't get much better than this!

We Interrupt This Program To Bring You...

2011-09-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

We interrupt this program to bring you news of a plein air painting workshop happening next weekend! (Friday, September 9 - 11)

I still have spots open for this workshop, which will take place locally here in Fair Oaks. We'll be painting in and around the quaint Fair Oaks Village, plus an additional location for a more landscape-y subject matter. There'll be demos and plenty of one-on-one at the easels.

Many students have expressed interest in painting city scenes - Fair Oaks Village is not exactly urban, but it has some neat old storefronts and street charm, as well as a nice park with big trees so there is good variety to paint, both man-made structures and more organic, natural motifs.

One nice thing about doing a workshop locally is that should the weather get too hot (a distinct possibility in this part of the world) we just go indoors into the SLC's classroom and work from studies and photos. And my studio is right there next door too, you can check out in person all that you've seen on this blog recently and I'll be glad to talk about studio processes (working from photos, the role of the computer, scaling up a study, making panels and stretching canvases, etc. etc.) should any student be interested.

And yes, the elusive book En Plein Air, 80 pp of full color, fully illutrated painting secrets (OK, there are no secrets. Just stuff I learned from experience) is included in the workshop!

This book is only available as a part of my workshop. To many of you who has written me inquiring about purchasing the book, I'm sorry - I only print enough for each workshop so there are no extras and I don't have plans to make it available for purchase at this point. May be at some point in the future, but no immediate plans.

The workshop will start on Friday afternoon, to give students time to get here. We'll do a 3 hr demo first thing, and should you want to stick around and paint, there's plenty of light left yet. Alternatively, we can go back to my studio (just a block away) and examine some ~~wine~~ paintings. Either way, we'll have a good time.

On Saturday, we'll paint all day outside, unless it gets too hot in the afternoon - then we can work indoors. At the end of the day we'll do a crit, and have some more ~~wine~~ art discussions.

On Sunday, we'll drive out to a different location - 10 minutes away - for a change of scenery. I'm thinking...water and reflections...

Anyway, that's the plan. If you want to join me for this workshop, please contact the School of Light and Color.

Plein Air Painting Workshop with Terry Miura
September 9, 10, 11 (Friday afternoon, all day Saturday and Sunday)
$325

The School of Light and Color
10030 Fair Oaks Blvd Fair Oaks, Ca 95628

(916) 966-7517 email:sarback@lightandcolor.com

Sierra Pack Trip - Day 3

2011-08-31T22:27:00.000-07:00

Ahhh... coffee... It's not Peet's, but any coffee tastes so good at 10,000 ft at sunrise. Bits of coffee grounds in my mouth don't even bother me.

I woke up early again - but not as early as some who are more disciplined than I - and set up to do this painting;

You'll have imagine this painting without the light on the trees, for that's how it was. The inclined wall behind the trees went up another coupla thousand feet, and the sun was coming over that. I was anticipating the "first light" on the trees and I painted them accordingly. Although I was ready, the sun wasn't coming as quickly as I expected and I was called for breakfast. I wasn't going to miss a hot breakfast so I painted a made-up light and went to eat.

It was way past the "first light" when I returned to the scene of crime and I saw immediately that I got it wrong. I should have painted the trees top lit, with a little bit of rim light. Instead I got the light coming from the wrong direction! Ah well, live and learn. I didn't bother to fix it. Instead, I packed it up and hiked up to Gem Lakes to do my next painting.

I didn't have to hike too far to find this granite slab basking in the morning sun, and in a very quiet corner of the Gem Lakes area. I felt so isolated that I kept looking over my shoulder expecting to see a bear or something. The water's simultaneous reflection and transparency was what intrigued me. I've seen other artists do it with considerable skill and I wanted to try it too. It turned out to be a fun challenge.

Satisfied, I went looking for my friends who I knew were painting somewhere in the vicinity. I found them on the far side of the Gem Lakes area, doing some fab pieces. Very inspiring. I don't have photos of their work but hopefully, by the time I wrap up my report of the trip, some of them will have posted on their own websites / blogs, and I can post a link to each. It should be an interesting comparison.

My afternoon painting (above) was a bit of a struggle. I didn't plan well, and didn't anticipate the shadow patterns changing on me so dramatically. I should have known better than to paint a near vertical cliff at mid day! When I started, the cliff's face was in the sun, but an hour later it was totally in shadow. As I hadn't quite reached the point of defining the light and shadow patterns sufficiently (in order to go on without relying on the view) I was forced to scrape most of it and start over.

I like the painting I ended up with, although it's not what I wanted to communicate in the first place. Such is the way the cookie crumbles sometimes when painting en plein air.

Afterwards, I packed up, hiked down to base camp, took a shower out of a bag and washed my hair and shaved. Felt good to get the grime off but boy, dousing my face with Deet immediately after shaving was a painful experience! It was either that, or be eaten alive by mosquitos, which were aplenty this year.

Sipping wine and eating dinner that Gene prepared for us, we talked shop as we watched the light slowly change on the faces of the mountains. There was no moon, and the night was clear, so the stars filled the sky like something exploded. The milky way clearly looked like someone spilled milk across the sky. Awe inspiring.

Sierra Pack Trip - Day 2

2011-08-31T09:20:00.000-07:00

So Tuesday was the first day of painting for me. I got up at sunrise, as did everyone else, had two or three cups of cowboy coffee (already brewing on the camp stove by the time I crawled out of my tent - nice!) and got started on my first painting. I knew that I wanted to do the same view as my last year's first sketch. Not exactly the same, obviously, because it was a different time of the day, and I don't think I set up at the same exact spot either. No matter, I just thought it would be kinda neat to compare the two and see what changed in the way I see and paint.

Here's my thumbnail for the painting. Rather rough and loose. The idea for the composition wasn't complicated so it didn't require too much investigation before I stared.

And below is last year's painting of the same scene.

Now that I look at it, it doesn't even look like the same spot. The angle was obviously different since I can see trees in the background - and this was more of a closer study of the boulders than this year's sketch, which looked at more of the peninsula.

With one painting done, it was time for breakfast. I don't usually eat breakfast at home but boy was I hungry. Eggs and bacon really hit the spot~

After breakfast I set up my easel just down the hill from my tent and tried this view;

By now the sun was up and hitting the tree masses from the far side, giving me a nice rim lit tree mass against a still-dark background. The violet in the background is a subjective choice here. It wasn't really that color - I was playing with the idea of structuring my painting around orange, green and purple - orange in front, green in mid distance, and purple in back. The purple is a little strong but otherwise I'm happy with this experiment.

da tumnail.

Here's the view. More or less.

Michele deBragança doing her morning painting not too far away from my set up.

Next, I turned my easel 90 degrees and painted this view. The shadow pattern on the hill caught my eye. The challenge was balancing abstraction with organization. I expected this to be more abstract since it's all bushy and organic - A few shrubs at the bottom and the trail going up the hill provide some structure, but I struggled with the opposing urges of making my trees solid and simple (more like the previous painting) versus making them completely abstract. The result looks to me like I couldn't make up my mind. Haha~

Indecision screams.

Here's my thumbnail. What I see from this is that I deviated from my original plan, which is to treat the darkness of the trees and the shadows on the hill as one unit (more or less). In other words, I got a little too literal in places, (seduced by the thingness of things) and that's where I went wrong.

Here's Timon, doing his pastel thang, not too far away from me.

After lunch, it was time to slow down and recharge. I tried to take a nap but was too excited. Still, I can't sustain the level of focus painting requires for long, so I forced myself to rest for a few hours. Gene, our cook, made a little afternoon snack / pre-dinner appetizer. Look at that apple swan thing! And camenbert? Fancy eats at 10,500ft, folks~ this is roughin' it. :-)

The sun is going down to the Western mountains, and the shadows are lengthening. We are in the valley surrounded by high peaks so on the valley floor the sunlight is gone fairly early. The surrounding mountain tops continue to be illuminated in glorious light for hours afterwards) I was more interested in painting my immediate surroundings than big views, so I needed to take advantage of the light before it disappeared. This is Bob's and Paul's tent.

...and the thumb.

For dinner Gene cooked chicken, but gave us a choice between white wine and tarragon sauce, or ginger orange sauce. Talk about gourmet camp food! Gene's about as rough looking as any cowboy / pirate as any character NC Wyeth painted, and has the voice and the demeanor to go with it. Can you imagine the phrase "you have a choice between white tarragon sauce, or ginger orange sauce" coming out of such a character? The disconnect was pretty funny. And we all enjoyed the meal very much.

Sierra Pack Trip - Day 1

2011-08-29T22:06:00.000-07:00

So we got up early and caravanned to Rock Creek Pack Station. We dumped all our stuff onto the loading dock and then enjoyed our coffee and breakfast provided by the pack station.

Because we have to haul up our art supplies as well as camping gear, we can't really do it all on our own two feet. Fortunately, mules can do the job for us! That doesn't mean we hike up empty handed, no. Mules cost money so we were somewhat careful about how much stuff we brought, and anything over the weight limit, we had to carry on our backs. I opted to carry my palette (among other things) with me because it's fitted with glass, and I didn't want to trust it to the rough handling of the cowboys and their beasts.

Our base camp is at Chickenfoot Lake, which is a relatively easy 3.5 mile hike with only a 500ft in elevation gain. (SO much easier than getting to Ediza!) The trails are well worn, and the scenery is spectacular from the first step. We got there in no time. In fact, it was only 10:30am when we arrived at the base camp location. The mules weren't going to be there for another few hours, so we decided to eat our lunches and hike up to Gem Lakes, a collection of beautiful small lakes just 15 or 20 minutes higher up the mountain. (11, 194ft)

This is Long Lake, one of the three (?) lakes along the hike up to our base camp.

Up at Gem. There's more snow than last year, thanks to a long, wet season.

Since we didn't have all our gear with us, and we wouldn't have them until the mules arrived, a few of us decided to hike further up the mountain. Treasure Lakes were just a few hundred feet higher. I don't know how but we clearly did not follow the easiest path. We ended up scrambling up boulders and had a bit of a time getting up there. But the view from above was well worth the exertion.

That's Ernesto on the rock and Bill to the left. At this elevation, even a little bit of climb is a workout. And we were all challenged by even the easier climbs, not to mention trail-less boulder hopping that we had to do at times. Except Ernesto, who seem not to notice the thin air or the tricky footing. He went up and down any terrain like a mountain goat and left the rest of us in the dust every time. Ah, to be young...

You don't have to be Edgar Payne to want to paint this stuff. Just amazing views everywhere we looked.

By the time we returned to the base camp, I was thoroughly exhausted and didn't feel like painting anymore. Besides, there were chores to be done, like assembling my tent and filling bottles of water and the sun-shower thing. What extra time I had, I just drew in my sketchbook.

This here drawing is Paul and Bob, sitting around waiting for chow time.

They kept moving around, so I turned around and sketched some stuff that didn't move so much.

So on this day (Monday) I did not paint. Too wiped out from the hike. I did get plenty of ideas and inspiration from the other members who were not too tired to set up and paint near the camp. Come morning, I resolved to do a painting from the same location as my first painting from the year before, to see if much has changed in the way I see, or the way I handle color / paint.

Gene, our cook, made a fabulous dinner of hamburgers, pasta salad, beans and I can't remember what else, but it reaaaally hit the spot.

Cook? yes, we had a cook with us, to do all the food stuff, including clean up. That is one of the things that makes these expeditions so awesome. We just paint, and not worry about cooking or cleaning. As luck would have it, Gene was amazing, and we ate VERY well.

My next post will feature some paintings. I promise.

Sierra Pack Trip

2011-08-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a wonderful painting trip from the Eastern Sierras where, along with eight other artists and a photographer, I spent six days painting at 10000+ ft elevation. It was awesome!

As with past such trips, I want to do a day-by-day, blow-by-blow report of the trip. I do have lots of pics to share so I think it best to try and post in manageable chunks.

I'm still kind of exhausted so this post will be just a short one, to set the scene for the next bunch of posts.

This is my third painting trip to the Sierras, and this year's destination is the same as last year's; Chickenfoot Lake and Gem Lakes. We hike in from Rock Creek Pack Station, some 20 minutes South of Mammoth.

But that's tomorrow. The first day is spent just getting there - from where I live, it's about five and a half hours driving. Since I got a speeding ticket last year, I was really careful and drove like a snail. Still, the beautiful scenery down Hwy 395 kept me engaged and it felt like I got down there in no time.

We met up in Mammoth, and as tradition dictates, headed over to the Taproom, a dinky little bar where we drank beer and caught up with each other's recent adventures in art. We arrive here a day before the hike-in to acclimate ourselves to the elevation a little bit. After all, we will be spending the next several days at 10000 - 11000 ft above sea level, and that's not something to take lightly.

Beer flowed and one by one, all the members showed up at the Taproom. (Except Daniel, who would meet us in the morning at the pack station) . We headed over to Slocums Grill for one last civilized sit-down dinner before a week of roughin' it. (If you heard me say it, you'd detect a bit of irony. But more about that later)

Stuffed with excellent food and wine, and excited about the adventure, we returned to the hotel and turned in early.

-to be continued-