I entered the Santa Clara County Plein Air Art in the Park competition a few weeks ago. The location chosen was Martial Cottle State Park, a relatively new park in San Jose about six miles from me. I entered both the two-hour Quick Draw event, in which artists were given access to the Martial Cottle Life Estate (a restricted area within the park) and the main Plein Air competition.
The acrylic painting above won 3rd Place in the Plein Air competition, and my Quick Draw watercolor painting won an Honorable Mention. I don't have a picture of the Quick Draw painting yet, as I had to turn it in right away for judging. I'll post a picture of it once I get it back from the county.
Here I am at the Martial Cottle Park Spring Celebration, where all the paintings were displayed last weekend (thanks M. for the picture).
It was wonderful to meet other plein air painters in the area, including Kevin Kasik, who has participated in Los Gatos Plein Air before. He advised me to approach it like a sporting event -- eat right, get lots of sleep, etc. Great tips!
Finished this one today! I started the final stretch by creating some "sky holes" in the tree foliage and breaking up the masses.
I used some inexpensive new brushes: a synthetic filbert and a bright. I'm finding that these Taklon and nylon brushes are ideal for acrylics as they glide across the panel and enable soft edges.
My paintings of the hills behind our house are done and framed and up on the wall!
Golden Open acrylic on canvas. Really pleased with the gold floater frames from PictureFrames.com. Here's how they look in the room.
Plein air acrylic, painted on a hot afternoon while dodging bees at Almaden Lake Park in San Jose. Not quite done with it -- needs a few studio touchups.
I've been working on a pair of paintings of the hills behind our house. Took the reference photos on a hike and sketched it out quite a while ago. Now committing it to canvas using Golden Open Acrylics and the biggest brushes I can find in my studio. I'm starting with a red underpainting and laying in big blocks of color.
Wow, can't believe that PACE16 is just a memory! It was three intense days of learning, watching, sketching, painting, networking, and shopping.
We flew into Phoenix the evening of Friday, April 15, and drove down to Tucson that night. Saturday morning's lineup included Matt Smith's demonstration. He showed us how to use the palette knife to scratch out branches in the foreground, and how to use a bit of red with white for the highlights on saguaro cacti.
At lunch, I met Heather Goldstein, a vice president at Jerry's Artarama. We talked about how rare it is to find people who are both art- and business-savvy.
As I relaxed on the patio at the Hilton El Conquistador I sketched Pusch Ridge in my Stillman & Birn Gamma sketchbook, with a tiny set of watercolors and a waterbrush.
While I was browsing the paintings displayed for sale in the hall, I met Randall Sexton and we chatted about the painting workshop he's offering at Carquinez Strait, through Arts Benicia. I've been thinking about signing up.
I skipped the afternoon's paintout on the grounds of the hotel; M. and I went to Saguaro National Park instead and then went out for a delicious dinner at Cafe Poca Cosa in downtown Tucson. The park was otherworldly -- so many towering cacti! Now I see why cartoons of cacti look the way they do.
In addition to my Stillman & Birn, I also took along the Bee Pen Sketcher's sketchbook I've been playing with. While it does OK with ink and wash, it didn't really love a combination of Crayola Twistable colored pencils and watercolor. This was a quick sketch I did of the desert plantlife behind the Hilton.
I did a lot of thumbnails during the trip, working out compositions for potential acrylic studies.
Sunday's convention highlight was easily the portrait demo by Jove Wang. With seemingly random strokes he dashed off a likeness of the sitter that was full of life. I challenged myself to do a quick sketch of him painting with just a waterbrush and watercolors -- no pencil or pen first.
From the resort, you can see quite far into the distance -- tried to capture it with ink and wash between conference sessions.
The evening's paintout was at Catalina State Park. I had only about an hour to paint, since I wanted to get back to the hotel for the urban sketching demo by Tim Oliver and Richard Sneary.
It was challenging to keep the acrylics workable even though I was in the shade of the car. The tiny canvas size meant I couldn't use huge brushes, so that made everything fiddly.
Monday I did another watercolor sketch of the view of Oro Valley from the Hilton.
I spent quite a bit of time at the expo, figuring out what I would buy. As I mentioned in the last post, I'd had my eye on a Strada easel, so I decided to spring for the Mini version. I also got an Easyl tripod to go with it, and picked up various odds and ends at other vendors: the RayMar panels and wet panel carrier, a Rosemary & Co. travel sable watercolor brush, some brushes from Trekell and Judson's, an Easel Brush Clip, etc. Golden Artist Colors kindly gave me a few free tubes of their OPEN acrylic paint to supplement the ones I'd brought.
While everyone else went off to paint Old Tucson, M. and I went to Picacho State Park, where I set up my new easel and tripod. I used the Golden OPEN acrylics on a RayMar panel. (The painting I did there is at the top of this blog post.)
The views were beautiful and it would have been great to stay longer, but we had to get to Phoenix for dinner with M.'s cousin and to check into our airport hotel. But -- one last putting of pen to paper: on the way to Phoenix, I sketched some quick studies of the highway.
It's amazing that these desert landscapes are just a short plane ride away now. I still haven't seen (or painted) the Grand Canyon, Sedona, Scottsdale -- so many more places to explore on our next AZ adventure!
Title TBD - abstraction of boats in Rowayton, Connecticut. From an original photo. Acrylic on board, 16x16.
This painting has been on and off my easel since 2011. I'm calling it done.
Here's another plein air acrylic painting done in Rowayton -- it wasn't an easy one, as the paint dried fast, there were bugs, I kicked my water container over, etc.... touched it up a bit later in the studio. I still think I'll eventually like this medium for plein air work -- I just have to learn it better (and possibly upgrade to slightly better quality paint).
Also participated in my first Quick Draw on June 8, during Jersey Central Art Studios' Paint the Town Cranford 2013 event. Note to self (and others): leave lots of extra time to arrive and scout out a location! We ambitiously thought we'd stop by my office in Secaucus to get all my belongings first (we're moving to a flexible hoteling-only workspace at EY this month) before heading to Cranford to get set up. Due to a blockage on the Saw Mill Parkway, we ended up seeing all of Yonkers stoplight by stoplight and barely made it to Cranford in time. I chose a view and squeaked something out in the two-hour timeframe allotted, but I'm not even going to show you what I painted -- it's destined to be gessoed into oblivion!
Plein air watercolor has always appealed to me -- it's the minimalism of the kit required, I suppose, and the spontaneity of the medium. However, I've always admired plein air work in other media -- oil, acrylic and pastel alike.
So when I saw that Pacific Northwest-based artist Annie Howell Adams was teaching a daylong workshop titled Fauving up the Landscape here at Rowayton Arts Center, I signed up and persuaded a friend to do the same. Figured it was a good opportunity to try a new medium and learn from an expert.
The week of the workshop, things got very busy at work. I hadn't had time to shop for supplies, so I hastily put together a bag the night before, noting with despair that I was missing some key materials -- to wit, decent canvases and a tube of alizarin crimson.
Since I wanted to meet my friend before the start of class, M. and I left the house early. On the way we saw a sign for an estate sale, so we decided on a quick detour.
"Looking for anything in particular?" asked the lady at the cashier's desk in the foyer of the estate-sale house.
"Nah, just stopping by on the way to a painting class at Rowayton Arts Center down the road," I said.
The woman brightened. "Oh, you should definitely check out the art supplies downstairs -- my aunt used to take classes there, too!"
She wasn't kidding. Her late aunt had certainly taken her hobby seriously. In 10 minutes I amassed a boxload of prime art supplies - including, by coincidence, the very items I needed for the class. New canvases? Hog-bristle brushes in various sizes? Check! Alizarin crimson acrylic paint? Check! What were the odds? Armed with my finds, I headed off to the workshop feeling very lucky indeed.
Annie, the instructor, was lovely -- so down-to-earth and such a fount of information. She shared her palette layout and did a demo outdoors showing how to mix colors. She often sketches on her canvas with black gesso before glazing with medium and adding layers of oil on top. Here's an illustration of this technique on her blog.
I love that she's unabashedly passionate about creating art in all kinds of media; so many artists these days confine themselves to a certain type of work and even limit their range of subject matter, all to keep galleries happy and establish a signature style. Yawn.
So - how did I make out? I found that my watercolor setup worked just as well for acrylic: I filled an AquaTote collapsible fabric water bucket and set it on my folding stool. On the portable easel was the butcher tray, which held paper towels, a few paint tubes and a rectangle of palette paper secured with mini spring clamps.
The sun and breeze that day meant that paint dried very fast. Next time I'll bring a spray mister to keep my paint wet. I mostly used a limited palette of a warm and a cool version of each primary, plus white, with no browns or black.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, especially as I'd never painted outdoors with acrylics before. And I'd like to think that the beloved aunt, whose materials I used for the painting, would have been happy to see her paints, canvases and brushes live on.
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