Evening Reflections

Evening Reflections, Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough Paper, 7"h x 10"w, 2016 #16

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Low Tide, Linda Mar Beach - Day Twenty-Six of the 30/30 Challenge

Low Tide, Linda Mar Beach,

 Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #28

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Day Twenty-Six of the challenge -- another little plein air study I completed at the Linda Mar beach of Pacifica. The sun was setting behind a thin veil of clouds, and there is an intense purple-magenta glow through moistened air. The tide is out, ten thousand little channels on the wet sand beach glisten with warm golden reflections. Because the fog is closing in, this busy beach is surprisingly empty, when the near-shore rock formations were back lid into a parade of strange and a little intimidating gigantic mystical beast sculptures. One slender figure in red drifts in with the wind, almost silently, and lingers near the distant rock form. I just had to add her into my painting. Love it when a painting almost paints itself for me -- one of those rare occasions...

Edge of the Sea - Day Fifteen of the 30/30 Challenge

Edge of the Sea, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #17

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Day fifteen of the challenge -- can't believe I actually made it half-way this time!!! This is another Plein Air piece from the white cliffs of Limartour Beach at Point Reyes National Seashore. From the usually foggy horizon one can still tell the emerging silhouette of the Bodega Head in the distance, floating in a sea of clouds merging into the shoreline. Ice plants grows on the top of some of the white cliffs, together with other shore grass and scrub bushes give a sense of lush growth even at the end of a long, dry summer. One local naturalist once told me that even in the driest year this shore gets plenty of water by means of condensation. Near the bottom of the cliff, piles of darker rocks are scattered around, covered by sea weeds and barnacles, chitons and like. The water beyond them a dark blue-grey. 

The moist air at shore kept my watercolor paper from drying, so I was able to do a fairly wet-in-wet lay-in of the major value shapes in my first wash, which I was almost never able to do in even the smaller plein air pieces. After that I played with different brushes making marks with fairly fluid washes, trying to form interesting shapes that reads as "grass" and "foliage" without actually painting the individual blades. I painted the darker rocks first as one mass, later adding smaller, even darker planes on their shadowed side. Some spattering with stiff bristle brushes finished the work. It's an overcast day without strong light and shadows, but I liked the subtle colors revealed by this less harsh light. Colors often seem more saturated and nuanced on overcast days to me. Since such days are plenty in the Bay area from June to October, I decide to paint outdoors more often on them to practice observing the difference in light qualities between these and sunny days. Plein Air painting is really great learning experiences to me -- one is always marvelling at the infinite variety nature presents and humbled by our limited ability in capturing them with brush and paint. Never a dull moment...

Heart's Desire - Day Eleven of the 30/30 Challenge

Heart's Desire, Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #13

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Day eleven of the challenge -- I made it to the double digits! Again, a very busy day and I did not get to start painting until much later in the day. So I worked on this piece based on a previously finished plein air version of it at Ruby Beach, Olympia National Park, Washington. I used analogous color scheme of blues and purples as well as greyed-down versions of them by adding a bit Cadmium Orange and Quinacridone Burnt Orange to the mixture, hoping to create a more somber mood. For the tree and shrub shapes, I tried to design the linear elements to contrast and compliment the diffused cloud mass and the distant headland with soft edges. For the near-shore rocks I combined staining and granulating pigments so that when I use a palette knife to scrape off the damp colors to create the light planes of the rock, only the staining colors were left in the scraped park, creating more interesting color variations. I love the mood of evening gradually sinking in and hope to convey it in this painting... Dusky hours are my favorite ones in a day. How about you, my friend?...

Raging Surf - Day Nine of the 30/30 Challenge

Raging Surf, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #11

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Day nine of the challenge -- I completed this plein air painting from memory back at my studio. When I am out in nature, facing awe-inspiring landscape, I am usually very excited by what I see, hear, smell... etc., and can hardly control myself from laying my brush frenetically on paper to try to capture the energy I feel from the scene in front of me, especially if it is something as dynamic and powerful as surf crashing onto shoreline rocks. Even though I try to do a small value sketch before drawing out the composition on my watercolor paper, and think about the color combinations I am going to use, most of the times I still rely on my intuition and paint rather "literally" of what's in front of me. In the quietness of the studio, there is often more room to ponder, analyze, design. Away from the source of inspiration -- nature, the distance can be good for the artist to assert his or her own voice instead of being "overwhelmed" by what's actually out there. This is often hard to do when the scene is right in front of you. But in the end, the painting needs to stand as an entity of itself alone and the shape, value, color, edges have to make sense as a whole. It will not be judged as how accurately it is as a copy of the actual scene.

As for this one, I glazed over the water with different near-horizontal shapes to counter-balance the diagonal movement of the surf, and shaped the rocks a bit better, casting darker shadows underneath them to anchor them better onto the sand beach. I added sprayed color to indicate foam, and create a bit more surface texture to add interest. I think it is nearly finished at this point, but may continue to pull it out and look at it from time to time, to evaluate whether bits and pieces need to be put in, taken out or altered here and there. This process is the most time-consuming for any painting, any may hardly get notices at the first glance of the before and after images. However, most of the times the inconspicuous changes could make great differences in terms of tying the whole painting together, making it look more homogeneous. Sometimes I will feel that I prefer one of two very similar images infinitely more than the other, but cannot quite tell the "why" explicitly, I would guess the artist has done the ponder, and the back-and-forth dance with the painting.

The Beachcombers - Day Eight of the 30/30 Challenge

The Beachcombers, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #10

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Day eight of the challenge -- A busy day today and I did not get to paint until very late in the day. This is no time for fiddling! I took out my 1" synthetic hair flat and quickly laid a light wash of sky and sand color on very wet paper to establish the composition. The distant headland and modelling on the beach came next, as the paper just started to dry. When I added the darker color of the surf, leaving out a stripe of white paper to indicate the foam, I noticed that the paper is getting quite dry, and I was able to get some dry-brush effects by using thicker paints picked up by the barely damp brush. I added the near-shore rocks as well as the darkest color of the headland last, scraping with palette knife again to indicate some lighter planes on the rock, and get a bit variations of surface texture. To balance the composition and reduce the "emptiness" of the large sand foreground, I added some silhouette of a few sandpipers, as I painted this painting based on a previous plein-air piece at Linda Mar Beach of Pacifica, and you really can see these lovely little critters everywhere near the tide line on that beach! Now time for bed...

While You are Gone - Day Six of the 30/30 Challenge

While You are Gone (Plein Air at Rodeo Beach), 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2015 #8

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Day six of the challenge started as a plein air piece at the Rodeo Beach of Marin last month. It was an overcast day and the wind was blowing incessantly. The water at Rodeo Lagoon takes the same somber turquoise-grey tone as the sky. I really want to capture the feeling of the wind ravaging through shoreline vegetation, and its power shaping the land, the water and the growth. I was not exactly happy when it started to drizzle before I was able to finish, but sometimes having a little distance in the studio to complete a piece like this is not bad -- I was able to spot some major composition mistakes such as there is not enough value difference between the foreground bluff and the one behind it to saperate them, and the value of the bluff itself was too light, making it indistinguishable from foreground sand beach. So, here it is, a plein air piece finished in the studio. I hope I have not lost all its freshness... What do you think, my friends?

Beachcombers -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 17

Beachcombers at Linda Mar, Pacifica, 

Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough Paper , 6"h x 8"w, 2013 #68

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I had a fabulous day enjoying the brilliant summer light, cool ocean air and roaring breaking surf at Linda Mar beach of Pacifica -- I went out painting plein air again!!! (I cannot believe that I don't do this often enough, as it was such a great experience every time I do it. Maybe I should just set a schedule for myself, like "go out and paint plein air every Friday morning at 6:30", so that I can stick to it, like I have stuck to this challenge..."

There isn't any shade on Linda Mar beach and it is difficult to do wet in wet under direct sun, so I used a very wet squirrel quill brush and lots of water to dilute the paint, and did most of the painting wet-on-dry. I also chose a rough surface for the paper so that I can do dry-brush more easily, which is something that is not hard to do outdoors -- the underlying wash almost dries instantaneously, so you can put the dry-brushed details on top of it immediately. ;-) Again, not many people on the beach on a weekday (this is the time that I thank the universe for letting me be an artist so that I can get out on such a beautiful day and enjoy the outdoors, instead of being confined in a cubical; but then, the cubical comes with a more steady paycheck which I do miss! :-P), but a handful of sandpipers are combing the wet sand for their afternoon snack -- just the center of interest I need for this little study. I happily added these lovely little creatures, and watched them busy poking and digging around where the wave just left, immersing myself in their world for a precious moment. I am a grateful women, when I know I am at peace with what's around me.

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Misty Dawn -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 10, and Thoughts on How Artists Create Art

Misty Dawn, Ruby Beach,
 Watercolor on Richeson Zoltan Szabo #140 Cold Press paper, 5"h x 7"w, 2013 #61

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Since I was going through the reference photos I took on the trip to Ruby Beach, Washington when doing "Sea Stacks, Ruby Beach" a couple of days ago, I couldn't help but picking out a few more favorites to work from, hence this little one today (and a few more to come). Lucky for me, it still fits in my theme for the current week: landscape with water (ok, ok, yesterday's piece was landscape but without water, I got it :-P... I just got carried away designing those trees and finished it in the end...)

It has been a long time since I took the trip, but I stood on that beach from dawn (which was nice and sunny) till past dusk (which gradually got very cloudy and finally started to rain -- as I complained in the post about "Sea Stacks, Ruby Beach", looked, listened, smelled, pondered, drew and painted, even took a nap! The place with its unique windy, salty atmosphere was well burnt into my memory. Had I not spent such precious time lingering in a place like this, but only snapped a photo and left, I probably wouldn't have felt being suddenly transported back again when my eye accidentally scanned across the reference photo I took there at dawn. I remembered how the warm mist gradually rose from water as the sun slowly climbed up, as if the spirit of the land was waking up along with the warmth provided by this source of life. I remembered the amazing rosy golden glow around everything behind the veil of fog, and the purple-orange shadows of the back-lid sea stacks standing against the rising sun...  I just had to get it down on paper.

After finishing this piece I started pondering about the creative process -- what an artist, every artist goes through after being hitting by that overwhelming sense "I have to paint that!!!"... First comes looking: a sensation; seeing a piece of nature and saying, "There is a beautiful tree", or "I love the light reflected on water's surface". We as artists start to be aware of the "present". Eyesight reception stirs up a chaos inside us. Something has to be done. Then it all quiets down to a more pure, condensed perception: the artist acknowledges him/herself the existence of the scene, and a deep, more real "seeing" is retained within our memory with every extra stare, providing a storehouse of visual data for us to mull over and over, ponder and digest, which finally may be integrated into a "concept" -- a perceived experience with intention. At this stage we as artists have gained an awareness of what stood in front of us in the totality of personal experience. It has become axiomatic, and can be held as a scheme in our mind's eye as an integration of similar units whenever we want to recall it. It matures, and waited to be executed, carried out as a visual statement about the experience -- experience not as what happened to us but what happened in us. And as we finally do that, the finished work becomes separated from us, the artists by time and space. It enters a life of its own, to stand or fall, no longer within our control. There is often a sense of deep vulnerability felt by the artist when such a product makes its public appearance, as for so long we have lived with it, held it deeply in ours minds and hearts, being tortured by its will of coming out of us, worrying that even after giving it our best effort, the result still could not stand up to the beauty we see in our minds' eye... 

It is such a painful, labored exhilaration, an addiction, a powerful experience that we repeat again and again, everyday. The most powerful and most vulnerable position: the position of the creator. 

... And that, is exactly why I am doing it again today.

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Sea Stacks, Ruby Beach -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge (Round Two), Day 7 (And I Did Finish This One!...)

Sea Stacks, Ruby Beach,
 Watercolor on Arches #140 Rough paper, 7"h x 10"w, 2013 #58

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I've always loved Travel. A journey to somewhere always seem to give an aim of some sort to me: I have to get on with the trip every day when waking up, and the road is right there in front of me;  accommodations and dinning options are often frugally simple, far from extravagant to say the least, but just because of this, I believe journeys are addictive, at least to me. In between a long journey's quiet loneliness and busy clamor, there is often a clear river of thoughts extending until infinity. Thoughts about past. Thoughts about future. Thoughts about people I have met and people I have missed. Whenever I have a little bit time, anytime, I often would rather spend it on the road. This one has started as a plein-air sketch on the Ruby Beach of Washington coast. Time was late. The sky is always cloudy there. It almost seemed like it was going to rain, but finally didn't. Last light of the day has gradually seeped though the bottom of the meandering clouds, back-lighting all the sea stacks. The sky was a strange deep, saturated blue-purple, with a tinge of warmth along the horizon. Then it started to drizzle. My paper got damp. I got back into the car.

But I've never forgotten that moment, just like I've not forgotten another ten thousand random moments on my journeys.

Then recently, I have thought about how ancient Chinese Sumi Paintings are taught, and started to do another type of study -- I realized that landscape painting is largely about creating your own symbol of different landscape items (trees, rocks, clouds, grass, water, etc.) and express them with abstract brush-stroke-created-shapes. Dots and Dashes. Lines and Curves. The next question is: how do you translate the landscape in front of you into an image basically composed of these dots, dashes and various shapes? I believe this is like learning a language: you have to learn the vocabulary before being able to make a prose. Then, can brushwork be learned? Some say not -- they say it is part of you and has to come from within yourself, but I believe otherwise: one's "self" is constantly being shaped by what we take in from others -- by that I mean from other artists as well as the nature. You can collect the silhouette of a real tree by sketching it on paper, and you can collect a beautiful tree shape created by another artist by practicing making it on a scrap piece of paper as well. Guaranteed, it will probably not be identical as the original, but by this practice you can learn how the individual brush strokes creating that shape is made -- their direction, strength and timing, as well as just practicing making a pleasant abstract shape. 

That is exactly what I do every morning nowadays: just like the morning workout routines for some people. I would take a random piece of image from an artist I like for his/her ability to create beautiful shapes of landscape elements, and isolate one shape -- a tree, a rock, a cloud shadow, you name it -- and try to analyze how he/she has made that shape with their brush marks, and try to recreate it on my practice paper. By isolating the shapes the task does not seem as daunting: I am not asking myself to recreate an often seemingly "fast and loose" master landscape painting entirely, but just a tiny section of it -- one shape. By doing this again and again, I've already realized that I've started to incorporate these learned shapes into my own paintings out of memory. Again, they won't be exact copies, but my hand seems to have gained some muscle memory of the dots and dashes it has been making again and again!

So finally I've taken out this piece and decided to give it another try. This time I felt much more smooth and confident, more at ease with it, and much less mechanical when making the cloud and rocks of this painting compared to my first attempt of it (which I did not dare to share with you guys), and I think I have to thank such exercise for it. Maybe I should also thank time -- it is time that has made the scene simmer in my heart until it was ready to flow out.

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Work in Progress: New Plein Air Pieces

Lately I've been pondering the question why I have not painted more landscape paintings -- I really love landscapes and they've been my initial motivation to become a painter, but I have only occasionally dabbled on some small landscapes here and there. Why? After much reflection I've concluded that landscape for me are much less literal, and more poetic; a whole lot has to go into the initial preparation stage -- dissecting the reference image (or the sweeping vista in front of me), deciding the mood I want to convey and the color scheme that can evoke such mood the best, doing small value sketches to choose which elements in the reference materials to include, and which ones to exclude. Also, a good landscape painting requires much more abstraction, utilizing simplified shapes to suggest objects, and pay a lot of attention to the actual mark-making process so that each individual mark on paper creates the illusion that it's representing something in the actual landscape. A good landscape is seldom a truthful copy of the reference material or the real vista in front of the artist's eye, but a rearranged, abstracted combination of value and color shapes that comes from within the artist's mind, guided by a good sense of design. It is in my mind one of the hardest genres of representational art and actually the closest to abstract works. I've been, subconsciously, quite intimidated by the process.

Since the best way to overcome fear is practice, I decide to work on landscape painting everyday from this point on -- this does not mean I will be able to finish a piece a day, and I can imagine there will be many throw-aways. But I will keep at it until I feel more comfortable for the entire process. I will probably do some studies of master artists' works, some plein-air exercises, and some practice projects from good how-to books, as well as work on some larger pieces from my own reference materials. Some days I may only be able to complete a few sketches or composition studies, other days I may be able to finish a couple of small works -- but I will share my successes and failures here, as well as what I have learned from them.

So here they are -- the first exercises, both started en plein air but would get finished in the studio. The first one is a river estuary view along Carmel Beach, where I am exploring the possibility of not painting any actual "objects", but just utilizing mark making to hint the undergrowth, river and sand beach. The focus is creating interesting color-variations and surface textures using various brush-marks. I did this one in a workshop with the wonderful artist Dale Laitinen, who is a master of abstracting shapes and create surface interest using brush-marks. I decided to study his work closely to add a weapon or two into my arsenal...

Carmel River Estuary,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Rough Paper , 7"h x 10"w, WIP 1

The second one is a near dusk view of headlands and rocky shorelines near Drake's Beach, in Point Reyes National Seashore. My focus is to use cool, low-key colors to hint the chilly, foggy atmosphere in the evening, and practice wet-in-wet in different stages. Again, I try to use brush-marks to hint the texture on the headland and rocks, as well as the undergrowth on the beach, instead of delineating everything I see while standing there. I did not get to finish it before dark, so the rest of the image will come from my imagination in the studio. Let's see how it goes! I will update tomorrow...

Dusk at Drake's Beach, Point Reyes,

  Watercolor on Arches 140# Rough Paper , 6"h x 8"w, WIP 1