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?
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Reminder that our opening night for the "Canopy: The Sheltering Trees" exhibit at Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica is a week from now: Feb. 23rd from 7 - 9 PM.
Bring friends, relatives, neighbors, even folks you pick up on the street! And spread the word on your social media, please. The show will be up for a month through Mar. 24th. There will be a gallery walk with the artists on Sunday, Mar. 10th from 1:30 - 3 PM Much of painting is in fact rendering shapes in light and shadow. Sure, you can add color and really play with its ramifications, but the shapes in different values (white, grays, black) are the heart of a painting.
Wayne Thiebaud is a sadly now deceased modern master, one of the inheritors of the Impressionist traditions, even though most people would only know his 1960s pop art paintings of lunch counter items. Believe it or not, those paintings were really just color shape studies (in my opinion) that informed his explorations later into landscape. Yes, cakes as landscapes, landscapes as cakes! If you understand that, you will fathom that these paintings are really explorations of the same shape and value studies, to which he masterfully adds playful color (more about that another time.) Do you see it yet? Some subjects, some views grow old. Photographing them, painting them over and over can feel played out. But you can never rule out a new angle on an old theme, because a minor shift in light, or the sky, or the perspective can bring out the same excitement.
I've done the pix and the paintings of Pigeon Point Lighthouse in Pescadero, CA so many times over the past 49 years and somehow I never tire of this place. Apparently Hollywood doesn't either, because the classic shapes and scene, the architecture of the lighthouse can be made to mimic anywhere on the East or West Coasts. A couple of months ago our group was out there enjoying everything from the flowers to the sea otters, and yet again I was captivated by the lighthouse and a couple of its attendant structures. Simple watercolor and ink was enough. Nothing spectacular but always captivating in its iconic presence. For the record here are both my very first "serious" watercolor of the lighthouse from about 30 years ago and the latest. |