Fresh Air

Seeing as how it's been over a year, and I'm really tired of looking at that ugly old painting I did of Mike (no offense Mike), I thought I'd post an "Early Bird" I did up in the Eastern Sierra. You can read more about the trip here. : )

Temple Crag above Second Lake. About 6:30 ish am. 6X8 Oil on Panel

The artist in landscape

Here's Mike working on his "experiment"

6x8 oil on panel.

Armand was in front of Mike and I would have put him in, but he was sneezing so much and I'm no good at painting action shots ; ) Ahhh spring, ya gotta love hay fever! (And he was STILL able to knock out a killer painting!)

Oils As Pastel Experiment

It was great to get a session in with the Early Birds! There's a lot of new folks this 'season', so I'm really excited to see more results from our first day out.

This one was an experiment in treating oils more like chalk pastel. I laid a piece of cardboard on my palette and squeezed my oils onto it. The cardboard sucked out the oil, giving the pigment a consistency perfect for scumbling... an old trick I learned from my instructor, Bill Maughan, way back in my art school days. The already super-absorbent clayboard really lent itself nicely to this method.

The piece itself could use some more work (especially if I let ol' Maughan's voice get into my head), but it was fun at any rate! As for why this method instead of just using pastel? I don't own a pastel set. :P I gues it's also an alternative to framing without glass.

Spring Training

Another season of green is upon us and it is time to pull out the field gear and get in shape. There was a good crowd on the Radio Tower Hill this morning, co-workers and blogfounders. Warm and big gusts of wind. Pollen. Sneezing. (not me).
Left to right in the photo above is Mike Dutton, Armand Balthazar, Jimmy Guiterrez, Huy Nguyen, Tim Evatt, and Daniela Strijleva.
Katy Wu was off to the left, and Paul Kratter misread the directions. Post 'em if you got 'em. It was fun.

Sharon Calahan's Painting Blog

Fellow Early Bird Painter Sharon Calahan has been cranking out paintings left and right over the past couple months! They also happen to be gorgeous, as you can see here:

She's been kind enough to share her progress on a blog. Like her friend and colleague, Bill Cone, she also documents the journey behind each piece, whether it's painting on an empty stomach and one hour's sleep, having her paints fall into muddy creekbeds, or recalling the scent of sage and berries in the air during the approach to painting locations. All the things that make working en plein air memorable. Go have a look!

Sharon Calahan's Blog

Getting Back Into It - Slowly

Hmm, I think this blog is in need of some luvin'. Here's some recent early-ish bird stuff:



Hope the rest of the gang is well!

Early Bird Reception Photos

Thanks to those who contributed photos, and sorry to everyone else that I'm so slow in getting these up. Enjoy!

The Studio Gallery at a distance. Unfortunately, it rained a bit that evening, but we still had a great turnout.

The display window, featuring a piece by each artist in the show.


The crowds came in waves, and remained consistent throughout the reception. New and familiar faces, colleagues and collectors, family and friends, and art lovers alike stopped by.


Enrico's watercolors alonside Ernesto's oils. It was a treat to see so many drastically different styles and approaches hanging together, while all remaining equally beautiful.

Noah Klocek (left) with wife Lori, and daughter on the right, and Stefan in the middle.

Jimmy and Sharon's paintings.

Sharon and Bill's. And a green sticker to boot.

Jimmy Gutierrez (facing us) chats up the crowd.

Daisuke and Enrico documenting the evening's festivities, or each others' iPhones in this case.

Me, answering a few questions about my work.

The scene.

Robert Kondo, girlfriend Jenny, and a friend.

Thanks to all who came out to support us!

Before the fog

Well I wasn’t quite as lucky as Mike on Tuesday. I’m still trying to figure out how to use gouache and this sketch is sort of what I saw, and what I wanted to paint in oils before a great big fog bank rolled in killing that great contrast, and my crushing my spirit. I had just finished my block-in, and had a few color notes but I scraped my canvas down anyway. So it goes… I came down the hill to find Bill and Paul packing up their stuff. They had seen the same great light on their way in, only to see it grayed out by the time they got to the site. Needless to say, the minute they drove off, the sun cleared the fog and it was a brand new scene! I hung around with Mike and got another little sketch in too ugly to post though: ) Check out Mike basking in the sun.

View of Diablo from Radio Tower

There are exactly three-hundred and twenty-four things wrong with this sketch, but I decided it was better to embarrass myself for the sake of keeping the blog going! Actually, once the sun decided to stay out, it was an enjoyable session. Hopefully, the trend will continue and we'll all be able to get out more and paint.

As for the show, I'm hoping to gather some photos from the reception last Saturday night before posting a recap. At the moment, I have one, maybe two at best. If anyone else has more, please send them my way.

Early Bird Painters - Show with Reception Feb. 23

My how time flies. It seems like only a few months ago that I met up with some of the Early Birds for the first time to go out on a morning painting session. Err wait, it was just a few months ago.... yet here we are a short time later, with a gallery show just for us!

Here are the dates:

Wednesday, February 20th - Sunday, March 9th

reception: Saturday, February 23rd, 4-8 pm

And here's the Gallery info:

Studio Gallery

1718A Polk Street (between Clay & Washington)

San Francisco, CA 94109

415.931.3130

You can read their write-up and details on this page or visit their website.

It's going to be a fun evening, so those of you living locally in the Bay Area will definitely want to mark your calendars. Stay tuned for photos from the reception.... and maybe some more artwork in the near future if the weather continues to be this nice.

Another Late Bird...

Hey! I’ve been inspired by Bill too! This was from my first outing with this Early Bird Crew back in October, and was from the same spot as the ones Bill posted. Just a quickie 6x6 sketch because the light was changing so fast. I think I was there for a grand total of 45 minutes, but man, what a great way to start the day. I have some pics from that morning showing Bill, Paul Kratter, Ernesto, and Sharon(?) hard at work. Let me know if it’s ok with those mentioned, and I’ll post ‘em.

This one is from a few days later at the same time and area but overcast and hazy and none of the drama of the earlier session.

Snow !

Inspired by Bill, I recently started to pick up pastel, trying to learn the nature of the medium. I'm using what i had in hand, some left over hard pastel, and some 'sticky' pastel, and some new soft pastel Bill introduced me to.
I found all different pastels can serve different functions. Like, soft pastel is easier to mix colors and blend, and sticky ones are good for strong high light or texture surfaces, then, the hard pastels can do good sharp edges and accents of shadows... It's kinda fun to experiment with different pastels, like having a set of different sized and hairs of brushes...
Here are a few sketches I've made during a short weekend trip to Tahoe, I wanted to try out painting snow!
which is a subject that I'm not so familiar with and didn't grew up with. the whole time I was so fascinated with the bright, high key colors of snow,
and some odd funny sceneries, like cars buried in deep snow, or grand scale of ski runs on the hills...

A late bird here

Clear Cut west:
~10 x 10.5"
Pastel on paper

Thanks to Dice, Mike, and Jennifer for encouraging and helping me post here. It is great to see the energy of all these painters. Kind of makes it easier to get out there and do it, when other's are painting and posting the results.

Painted the same morning with Nick and Jennifer nearby. Paul Kratter was a few hundred yards away, and Sharon was up on top of the hill. The East Bay hills above Berkeley and Oakland are being systematically clearcut of Eucalyptus, a quick-burning, non-native species which grows in abundance up here. It is a bit ironic that a lot of early California landscape painting celebrated the distinctive Eucalyptus silhouettes and groves in the Bay Area and Southern California.

One result of this clearing out of trees is that new vistas are appearing, as well as places to paint them from. To get to this spot, I hiked over several acres of Eucalyptus 'shreds' that had been laid down over the hillside, burying poison oak plants among other flora. At this point the hill became very steep, so I stopped, and ended up sitting on the ground, as it was too sloped to set up my stool. The wind followed me all the way down the hill, and the chill factor began to kick in after about a half hour. Jennifer and Nick appeared soon behind me and started painting. It's always worth it in the end, even if you aren't completely satisfied with the result.

I was interested in this view as it looked down into a foliage choked ravine, then out onto the ridge line that began to turn blue as it angled away to the right. Beyond that lay Berkeley and Emeryville, providing different texture and color, as it lay in sunlight. Some grand old Eucalyptus are standing up on the ridge at left, catching the light. I don't know if they'll be spared or not.

I'm not crazy about the overall color range, and some of the values are a bit suspect. Specifically the far ridge should be lighter in value against the city. It's easy to get tricked by a contrasting edge, which is what I think happened to me here.


Here's one more, painted a few weeks earlier, up on the hill where Sharon was painting on this morning. It's looking East at sunrise. The North peak of Diablo is visible on the right.

ok, it's been too long....

Crappy weather in SF and us being "lazy birds" during the holidays made no new uploads for too long...

So here it is. It's no early bird plein air but I'm posting my first figure painting at Pixar Tuesday night's class.

Come on Bill! Jennifer can help you upload your work!!! :)

Tilden Grizzly Hill

yes, it was Very Very cold...
though the view of the bay was incredible !
I could even see the ocean beyond S.F. !

Tilden

Something of a gouache painting from Tilden park this morning, with Jennifer and Bill; it was very very cold, and very very windy, and my painting is very very value adjusted in photoshop.

back to early bird!

back from Japan and here is at the Tilden.
I have been doing too much cityscape and need to do more landscapes now..(I used to have hard time with cityscapes when I started..)

anyhow, hope to do more of organic nature stuff.

Week in Painting

That can be read as "Weak in Painting" if you prefer. :P But regardless of good or bad, I was very glad to be able to devote quite a bit of time to painting outside the past week. Here's a bulk of the results. Apologies for the poor image quality. Most of these were wet when I shot them. I'll try to scan them in at some point.

paintings from Japan trip

Hi guys,

Awesome paintings all of you while I was absent!
I also heard Bill, Ernest and Sharon came to paint too! How can we ask them to post their pieces?? I wanna see~~!!

anyhow,

I just finished scanning and uploading my sketches from my Japan trip.
I was able to do quite a few paintings considering I had all my friends and family to see over there!

Hope you like some of them!
http://www.simplestroke.com/wp/?page_id=77

View from My Backyard

I was really excited about joining up with everybody at Grizzly Peak, but around a quarter mile from the parking lot, I realized I left one crucial piece of material back home..... panels. I didn't even have scratch paper with me, nor a phone signal to see if anyone had any spare panels, so rather than risk the long hike up with nothing to paint on, I turned around. There's some kind of strange curse with me and meeting other Early Birds in the hillside sessions!

By the time I got home, it was pretty much too late to go back up, so I set up in... uhh... my backyard. I painted my rear neighbor's trees and their house. Two crows settled on the highest point in the trees just as I was painting that area, so they're in there too.

"Two Crows" 5x7 inches. Oil on Clayboard