Sometimes all it takes is a few lines or a wash (or both) to make a scene com alive. All painting is really illusion: creating the sensation of viewing a three dimensional world in only two dimensions.

I've painted various views of the farm across from Cowell Purissima Trailhead in Half Moon Bay. Beside "Bob's Vegetable Stand", when the bright yellow oxalis covers the fields it's a magical scene.

The land undulates on the fields and well into the wave form mountains behind them. Crop lines and the lines of farm paths and roads lead the eye toward depth. Sometimes a building is at the focal point, other times just the land forms themselves.

Simple, sublime, captured in vignettes. Charming.

Can you feel it?
​

Actually a "coulisse", a French word from the theater world used to describe the curtains or bracketing panels that direct the eye to the focal center. In painting it's a classical tool, particularly in landscape, most often trees (can be a building) framing the main object of the artwork. 

Here I am using the two windblown and spare trees (the left one dead) to frame the cliffs and ocean that are the main focal point of the picture. It seems to work really well, judging by the dreamy reactions many people have had to this pastel piece just painted.

Do you have that reaction too?
​

Despite being over-touristy, Taormina still has a spectacular setting. Way way way up on a mountainside on the East coast of Sicily looking over the Mt. Etna volcano, this ancient town hosts spectacular views, some lovely old architecture, and a Greco-Roman theater with one of the most iconic views in Europe!

That theater is below as is the main piazza.

No "Ah" nor exclamation point here, because little Cefalu is really just a small beachy village an hour away from Palermo on Sicily's north coast. Yes, there is a very old part of town, but the real attraction seems to be the beach. 

In any event, no matter where I am, there's usually something to paint. 

Here the view of the old town from our hotel balcony. Then their Norman church.

Architecturally, Palermo is interesting. Sicily is a mix of many cultures, European and African too, so their legacy is evidenced in both food and building styles. 

The first is a view of 4 towers against the mountain backdrop, as viewed from our hotel dining terrace in central Palermo. The second is a section of the grand Norman Cathedral in Palermo.

The famous Cinqueterre is old home to my wife and me. We've been going there since 1978 and have local friends from decades of visits. They used to call us the "first Americans", not quite true, but prior to our spreading the word through tour guide friends, the place was the playground of mostly just Europeans. 

We love the place. And there are so many subtle and sublime pleasures there that the crush of tourists (hikers, sightseers, beach goers, etc.) never really see, though they may be looking right at them. I find it a place to constantly explore, and paint of course. 

​Here are a few of my paintings from this last trip. Manarola as seen from the Via Del Amore, the walking path between the first two towns. Piazza Matteoti in Monterosso, a place I never tire of. The "pink house" on Via Roma in Monterosso. Torre Aurora also in Monterosso, this one after a dramatic thunderstorm. Lastly, a view of Vernazza in the distance between the headlands known as Porto Roca in Monterosso. 

​Have fun visiting vicariously!

I love traveling and I travel with a fanny pack full of ink and watermedia supplies. For me, painting where I am is a way of immortalizing what I feel in that place in that moment. It's the best souvenir you can have, because the Zen of painting puts you wholly where you are. Looking at a travel painting brings me back invariably to all the sensations, not just the sights.

So I'm sharing the mementos of my recent journey back to Italy and on to Malta with you.  Hope they inspire you to do both painting and traveling too.

This one is a quick ink sketch of Piazza del Duomo in Milan. Four major world quality structures in one place captured here. On the left the famous Galleria, the mother of all shopping malls (doesn't do it justice described as such). Then the greatest Gothic cathedral in Italy. Then the Royal Palace, and on the far right the brutalist Fascist structure Mussolini built and from which he gave speeches.

Siracusa on Sicily's East coast is the site of the first Greek colonization of the island. That Greek colony became bigger than the mainland classical communities. Like all of Sicily it had many civilizations: neolothic, Greek, Roman, Carthaginian, Arab Caliphate, and finally at least a couple of European Crusader groups. You would expect to see a lot of those earlier cultures reflected in the architecture, and indeed they left ruins all over the island, including in Siracusa. 

Unfortunately, an earthquake in 1693 or so devastated many of the buildings from the periods after the Roman Empire period, leaving Sicily to rebuild in the then current Baroque style. I find that style of architecture overly detailed and over the top! Plus they rebuilt in the available "white" (really beige) limestone, so all the later buildings look sort of alike to me. Not my favorite for painting.

That's why this painting of the Baroque Siracusa Cathedral was my last ditty there.

Not really sure what to call my quick on-site sketches. I don't particularly like the connotation that the word "sketch" has of something rudimentary or unfinished. 

This kind of quick ink and/or watercolor is a finished product. They are not intended as studies for something larger and more elaborate, as so many sketches are. In fact, they are usually done after a larger more involved painting as yet another recording of my impressions in the moment. 

Perhaps that sense of "in the moment" works well, because I find that many viewers like them. They do seem to convey emotion, not just rote recording of a scene. 

Recently out painting near the Ritz in Half Moon Bay, after painting a beach scene in pastel, I quickly drew these two "ditties". Ink on paper, basically, with touches of InkTense pencil for light color on the second one. They are painted on watercolor "postcards" so their actual size is about 6x3.5" or so.

See what they say to you, but the one thing I will say is they are finished works in and of themselves, no matter how small or rapidly executed.

Ah, Olompali! A lovely hillside state park that few know with an intriguing history going back to the Native Miwoks, through the rancheros, then the hippie era, with famous musicians in a commune. 

A year or so ago one of my small watercolors captured the ruin of the hippie house and was well received. Despite there actually being very little left of that stucco structure to paint, I was intrigued with how it might be rendered in pastel. 

So a year later I did exactly that. See what you think. 

Believe me, I'm not blasé about having a painting chosen for a show! It remains an honor among artists and it isn't easy to get selected.

Starting July 4th the Coastal Arts League Gallery in Half Moon Bay will post their annual 2 month long Plein Air Show, now through Aug. 24th. I have one going up shortly and I'm pleased. 

For your viewing pleasure: "Montara Beach in Red", 12x9" soft pastel on blue Mi Teintes paper. One of my very first serious pastel paintings and I remain pleased.

As we approach the official start of summer, as well as the unofficial "summer season" the way we knew it back in the Borscht Belt Catskills where I was raised, this is a special time of year for me. It's filled with nostalgia for an era long gone, but hardly forgotten that I lived in a unique way.

In fact, I've written two books about the experience of growing up a "hotel brat" in the REAL Borscht Belt - far wilder than what Dirty Dancing and Mrs. Maisel depicted. You can find them on Amazon: a.co/d/7Q4Wjy0 and a.co/d/aEIcdFw

While the text resonates with anyone touched by that unique setting and time, I've found a lot of folks truly resonate with the sketch I painted for the cover of Pickle Barrel Tales of the hotel frontage. Simple but evocative.

For your viewing pleasure (and be sure to buy the books, which I know you'll love!)

Though most of my current work is in soft pastel, I do alternate with my water media. Especially when I want to quickly capture fleeting light effects. 

This small 5x7" watercolor on paper was done just after the larger pastel painting at Pescadero Beach. 

In the former I was seeking to capture a vignette in my usual saturated color and strong contrast style. In this watercolor piece I was seeking the opposite: very high key, pastel diffuse color depicting a luminous light effect on a misty early morning. 

Though the colors might appear fanciful - and yes they do have significant chroma  even if they are diluted here - they do depict more realistically than you would think the colors as filtered by mist in atmospheric perspective. 

​Or not...you be the judge.

Well, it does "rock", since the ostensible subject is the rock formations at Pescadero Beach. Dark ones of volcanic stone, tinted alternately by the water and then the light reflected off the upward facing wet surfaces. Eons of weathering sculpt exciting forms.

But the other subject is actually the energy and the colors of the water as the waves circle them. It was hard to capture the range of colors, partly because I didn't have a yellow green very light pastel to mimic the foam color prevalent. And of course the ocean being what it is, the splashes, waves, troughs and eddies were constantly in flux. 
​
I do like the result of this soft pastel piece on Dark Brown PastelMat. See what you think. If you can hear the waves, we're in business!

I used to paint quick portraits of friends at parties. Not caricatures, rather just rapidly sketched faces, given that folks at events have no patience for sitting still. I also painted people from imagination. While painting humans, particularly faces and hands, is among the most difficult subjects of all - particularly from life when they're moving about - it was the issue of resemblance that put me off it.

"Good painting of a person, but Joe doesn't look like that." "I think I am thinner than you made me." You get the picture and they got the paintings for free, but there was always a wise guy who was sure that it wasn't a perfect likeness. I got tired of it and basically put that subject aside.

Having time on my hands during painting sessions, however, I am still drawn to drawing my companions. And when they're busy painting they aren't usually moving about quite so much for a long time. So give me 20-30 minutes and I'll capture a likeness, even if not photographically accurate. The trick for me these days is to paint them how I most often encounter them: from a back view!

​Skips the face issue. It does work rather well, and almost always my companions can spot who the subject is very well, so my impressions are spot on.

Here's one. A new painter in our group was busy trying to capture the ocean and didn't realize that I was caught by her form as a subject. Came out pretty well, don't you think? 

I've been a professional photographer, as well as a painter. Believe me, there is a very big difference between what you see in your "mind's eye", what you see in a photo, and what you portray in a painting. I took up painting (long before digital manipulation changed the artistic landscape) because photography was so limiting of what you chose to show in a picture compared to what you can depict with your own hand.

I have just returned from a terrific workshop with a renowned artist, whose observational skills of nature are wonderful, I still maintain that what you "see" as an artist it most important of all. Light in nature is extraordinarily variable, subtle to strong, and depicting it in a way that excites the brain as "reality" is what most folks strive for. Not exactly in my case, however. 

I strive for the lyrical more than the literal. That's why I paint. Impressionism and Expressionism are my north stars. What I "see" in my head is more important for me to put onto canvas or paper than what your cell phone can capture. 

My instructor was scratching his head at my choice of red-orange colors in the foliage. No, those trees and bushes were not truly red nor orange, In morning light they were actually shades of brown. But on seeing them my brain went immediately to the orange/red spectrum. And I found that it truly made the painting pop and the vision is my own, thank you very much! YMMV of course.

Just had a marvelous 3 days in a workshop with artist Bill Cone. Billed as about rocks and water, this master pastelist demonstrated how to use observational skills to depict all the subtlety of light playing on those two subjects. 

I learned a lot from Bill's gentle humorous instruction and have half a dozen really good paintings to prove it. 
​
This one, "Rocky Point", is the one I like best. 10x8" in soft pastel on Sienna PastelMat. 

Sometimes I avoid boats - too many details, too complicated. Sometimes I simply cannot avoid them - sinuous lines, patina of age and the sea exposure, color and dramatic angles. 

Here are a few done over the years that did attract my eye and didn't distract me overmuch with impossibly complex details. 

See what you think.
​

Back in 1964, Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan kicked off a whole field of communication theory with his book, The Medium Is The Message. It was a catchy phrase that made it a best-seller, that is often translated into ordinary language in a couple of different ways.

1) “The medium is the message” is a phrase meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.
2) Long before the creation of the Internet, implying that it's not so much what is being said but how that is important.

He confused a lot of  folks by even considering a light bulb to be a "medium", but beyond all that, was he right? Could be. 

In applying those concepts to my art I find the former to be more prevalent, but some of my colleagues might exemplify the opposite in theirs.

Looking at the painting comparisons below:
- Left basket is gouache meant to convey the apples by contrast; right basket is Ceracolors (cold wax) meant to convey the apples by color.
- Both pear paintings are meant to convey volume and shape by using color and shading, but the left one is in Ceracolors while the right is in watercolor pencil. 
- Left landscape in pastels on colored paper is meant to convey time of day and weather via color and both horizontal and vertical lines; right ink on paper is meant to convey only horizontal rhythm of shapes.

​How do you see them?

As with Wayne Thiebaud, my paintings of the California coasts are pretty much the same conceptually: shape and shadow studies.

That's because the contours of the beach cliffs are shaped into repetitive forms as you look across a panorama. Wind and waves hitting the rocks from the same directions over the years and millennia create the same shapes over and over again.

But also as with Thiebaud, they could as easily have been buildings, or with a little more imagination something like his cakes.

Do you get the picture?