Fog at the Narrows

Seattle has been stuck in a fog bank for the last few days and it brought back a morning last month when a group of fly fishers led by Leland Miyawaki headed to Narrows Park to fish for coho.  We arrived to find a thick fog covering Puget Sound, visibility was about 50′ at best.  I got this shot heading north from the park to a spot where I usually have good luck in the winter with resident fish.  Believe it or not, the Tacoma Narrows bridge is just out there past the last tree but was totally hidden in the fog.  It was a fun morning out on the beach, I had one grab but I don’t think anyone actually caught a fish.

This was another oil painting using a very small palette – lots of titanium white, sap green, alizaran crimson, ultramarine blue, burnt umber and a touch of raw sienna for the sand.  I covered the canvas with a layer of ‘fog’ using white, green & crimson.  Then I worked up the darker colors on the shore from there.

Yakima Canyon meets Mark Rothko

This painting was inspired a few years ago by a post entitled Art is Everywhere from my fly fishing photographer friend Louis Cahill.  He noticed that the landscape along the Henry’s Fork actually looked a lot like a painting from his favorite painter, Mark Rothko.   While I was in the Yakima Canyon a few weeks ago I too noticed the similarity.   A few nights ago, thinking about this whole painting thing I realized I had planned to do a lot of pretty typical landscapes and wondered what would happen if I tried to take a traditional landscape and turn it into a Rothko all in one canvas.  That turned into today’s experiment.

I used oils today, I knew I had enough time left for them to try.  I used a pretty limited palette of water soluble oils – yellow ochre, burnt umber, aliziran crimson, ultramarine & phthalo blue, sap green and lemon yellow.  I used quite a bit of medium to keep the paint very transparent on the majority of the canvas adding layer after layer of transparent color. After I had the basic colors on very thin I began adding fuller paint to the left side of the canvas turning it into more of a traditional landscape while leaving the right side very Rothko-like.   I added titanium white to the palette at this point.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out and maybe I’ll try to do a few more abstracted landscapes over the course of the month.  I was also very happy to be using oils again, they just ‘feel’ so much better than acrylics do.

Yakima Canyon #2

Up early again for another painting from the Yakima Canyon trip a few weeks ago, there will be more. I’m still stuck in E.WA since I don’t want to deal with all the green over here quite yet.  Green is my nemesis when it comes to painting.  This was mid-day as the sun started breaking through and the clouds began breaking up.   I don’t think I caught any trout from this spot though.

I dreamt about painting last night so I can tell this is on my mind day and night.   I’ve been painting for 7 days straight which is the most I’ve done in years and it has evidently sunk into my subconscious now.   So far these first three days have gone pretty smooth.  Last night Catherine and I were discussing it and I wondered if at some point I’ll “hit the wall” like people do in a real marathon.   For some reason I never hit the wall in any of the marathons or even the 50k I’ve done, so maybe there will be no wall in the remaining 27 days of painting.

Yakima Canyon #1

I wanted to start with a painting that would have colors I’m used to dealing with since I wasn’t used to acrylic paint so I chose one from the Yakima Canyon.  This was from a trip last week when I went over to fish the canyon water and to find some bighorn sheep.

The dry time on the acrylic is both good and bad.  It was easier to do washes to build up the colors in the hills instead of mixing wet into wet as with oils but there were quite a few times that I went for a color and it was already hard on the palette.   Detail on these small canvases is definitely easier with acrylic than oils since it isn’t as prone to just blending in with whatever is there already.   I feel pretty good knocking this out in two hours and think I’ve got a good start to the month though I’ll probably still tweak this a bit over the coming days.

That is a LOT of canvas

Catherine and I decided to make a day of it in the city since I had to go pick up canvases between 12-8 in Pioneer Square.   We took off at 10 and headed to the Seattle Art Museum where we saw the Peru show, which was pretty amazing and worth going to.   Next we drove down to the gallery and I picked up my box full of canvas panels.  Finally we went to Cafe Flora for lunch and lucked out since it was Restaurant Week and they had a great special going.

Early this morning I cleaned the studio since it was a mess, got my new paints situated and cut up some rags.  When we got back home from lunch I unloaded the box of canvas panels.  Laying them all out is kind of intimidating, facing one blank canvas is bad enough but 30 of them is a bit daunting.  Let the painting begin…