My friend MariaFe started calling me “El Artista Muy Macho”, and insisted that we hit the beach to escape the heat. You can see that I hit it pretty hard.

Here is a Time lapse demo of me starting an oil painting in 100 degree heat. If you are getting this via email message, you may have to click on the webiste link to see it. Check it out!

Next Day…..

I am in the Madrid Airport right now, and taking a flight to Lisbon in a few minutes. I just want to mention that TRAVEL IS MIRACULOUS…..just the logisitcal craziness of thousands of people zooming all over the planet, and somehow it all works out.

Of course when it doesn’t work out, we get pretty bent out of shape.

I want to thank MariaFe and Gelo for being so gracious and hosting me, and lending me their car, and taking me out to great places to eat, and for hanging out, and for the future invite of returing and doing some logo design for Gelo’s business as well.

Gabi- Ready or not, here I come. And Arlette and Giacomo will be joining me in a few days!!!

I have not left this house for three days, eventhough I have been provided a car by Mariafe and Angel. Thank you!!! I think they think I am crazy…..this strange hermitage while on vacation. But it is not an ordinary vacation. It is…a quest. A quest to get out of the rut of not painting, and being a tourist takes just as much time as having a full time job. If I was a tourist, I would not be painting.

“Hacienda Vista” Oil on Paper. This one kind of reminds me of Cezanne, which was by no means intentional. I never really got why he was such a big deal. I think it was because he started to break the world into simplified planes of color and value. Revolutionary for the time, when blending, realism and the Academy ruled.

This painting took two days. By the end of the day yesterday I was chasing the light, so I decided to take another crack at it today in the morning. Who said that landscapes were easy? I think what made this one tricky is the lack of a strong focal point.

Notice how I ignored the foreground fig tree and how all that stuff in the distance reads mostly just as “stuff in the distance”. Fairly non-descript. Notice how I simplify shapes and create lines of connection. Emphasize shadows. I really push angle relationships. My images are often made up of a bunch of triangular shapes.

Also, as usual, exhaggerating color. Although there is more color actually there in the landscape than this photo reveals. Photos by no means = Truth. And photo realism bores me. ( I mean…blow up the photo and have it printed).

More on Photos vs. Real Life in another post down the road. .

So here is the process. After I post this I am going to blow this popcicle stand, and go out into the world!

Hola! It has been a couple days since i posted. (it has felt like months).

In Murcia I am staying at the new hacienda of long-time dear friend MariaFe Vilda. Her and partner Angel are preparing to move in, and they don’t have wifi yet….I felt like a baby who just had their pacifier plucked from their mouth….you know, that wide eyed surprised expression that quickly crumples into sobbing. But Angel came to the rescue and hooked me up with a phone that I can use as a hot spot, so here we are.

She hasn’t aged at all! I suspect witchery.

MariaFe and I did pottery together at Jawbone pottery on Vashon. Worked on the Islewilde Performance Celebration together doing giant puppets and pageants, and also did a puppet show version of George Orwel’s “Anmial Farm” with a soundtrack by Darryl Redeker. I’ve known her almost 30 years.

I got back to painting yesterday! Big environment change from Northern Spain. Murcia is about an hour from the southeastern coast of Spain and is dry and hot. (mid 90s today and yesterday. In the 100s tomorrow and the next). So far, I had spent most of my time in the cities. Now I am in a rural area, alone; me, the cooing doves and occasional barking perro. Luckily MariaFe’s garden is beautiful and has ample shade for this Northwest gringo.

“El jardin de las Brujas” . Oil on paper primed with gesso and casein.

IT MUST BE SO RELAXING…

Every Painting is a struggle. People say “Ah, painting….it must be so relaxing!” It’s relaxing in the way that writing an essay is relaxing. If you are trying to do something that is good, it is not relaxing, at least not for me. It’s always a challenge involving a gaziilion decisions, each of which could be the wrong one, and which often are. If you want to go beyond a brief, notational study (my chair painting as an example) then the time commitment goes up exponentially, and the quality of product is by no means ensured. More time can = worse. It is fairly easy to make a brief study have appeal, because it is fresh and spontaneous. All well and good, but making a painting that you can live with for years requires another level of intention.

All that said, I am only giving myself a day per painting, which is almost by definition, a study. The tightwire balancing act I am trying to do is: Make a travelogue of traditionally created imagery (much like was done before the advent of photography) AND make them good enough to put in the show that I have in Nov.-Dec. at Cafe Vino-Olio on Vashon.

La Hacienda Vilda

Oh, and here is an “In Transit” drawing done at the Alicante Airport.

I didn’t have time to do the people.

So I took a side trip to Bilbao for the sole purpose of connecting with the teachers at the DigiPen Bilbao campus. SUCH A GREAT THING TO DO! Laura, Sergio and Javi are all genuinely inspired teachers, and I have had little to no contact with this sister school since I have been teaching at DigiPen for the last….11 years? Yikes!

Laura! We talked about “Leveraging Naivete” (My term, not hers). She seems great at developing assignments that keep the student’s interest.

Sergio! Has a broad approach to Color, Tone and Composition (Basically “Beginning Painting”). He get’s great results, in a short time.

Javi! Is a structuralist (Jazno Francoeur’s term, not mine) and he teaches like the internet doesn’t exist yet, only old world mastery to be achieved through careful hands-on analysis. The school is lucky to have him.

BEFORE going to the DigiPen campus, I took a stroll to the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. It was not open yet, but the outside is spectacular. Yes that is a giant dog made of flowers (Artist: Jeff Koons). No that is not a real Spider. And, yes, they have a mist pool that surrounds the river facing side of the building at regular intervals through out the day. I have never seen a building with it’s own mist pool.

Lastly, yes I did some art while waiting to meet the Digipen folks. Two drawings…..not enough time for painting. But drawing is awesome, and compared to painting, it’s like falling off a log…you know, easier. But hugely important, none the less. Remember that children.

The Bilbao River earlier in the day, when it was overcast. As I’ve said before, the weather here and in Seattle is mucho similar.

A sunny little courtyard later in the day. I love the abstract shapes that architecure and shadows make.

Okay! So I am flying off to Murcia in the morning, to stay with my friend MariaFe and her partner Angel, in her new hacienda. Murcia will be more like Arizona weather-wise, and I will be there for a whole week. Time to settle down!

LA SILLA

Travel days make it difficult to get a painting in, so instead of walking about the town and finding a location, I did a painting right in Pablo’s apartment and left it for him. Not bad for 90 minutes.

I always tell my students that it is not the subject matter that makes fantastic art, but the artist. Some of my favorite pieces are of mundane things. Things that would seem to have no import. There used to be an assignment I gave, which I had inherited from my teacher pal, Doug Parry, which involved students creating multiple black and white compostions of a styrofoam cup. Many were truly beautiful.

Now why in the world would a styrofoam cup….be worthy of depiction? Mostly, because it is not about the styrofoam cup. It’s about the lighting, the shadows, the composition, the values, the shapes, how the eye is led. The line, the gradient, the edge, the clarity or lack thereof, the mark of the artist, the slant of style (concious or not).

Visual art reveals not only how the artist sees and thinks, but also reveals how anyone who looks at it sees and thinks. That is why good ole 2D visual art is still fascinating. Each time we look at a piece, we are unpacking how we see. An artist needs to respect that we are all visually fluent, in that we are all native to the visual world. We are all expert see-ers.

The artist seeks to become literate in a language that everyone is already fluent in. Then they have the ability to create with humanity’s native tongue.

It is odd that so many are iliterate in their own dominant language: Sight. It is not talent that makes people literate. Like reading and writing, it is studying it for years.

Today I visit the DigiPen Bilbao School and meet some of the teachers there! Then….the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum if there is time.

Pablo- Great guy and instant friend who so graciously hosted me without hardly knowing me. ( He came to Vashon like 20 years ago, when Louisa was like 3 years old). He toured me through the city twice on long legs that are used to walking. We swam at the glorious beach, then hiked up to the old fort and had wine and Gildas (olives, pickled green beans and anchovies…..yes, I’m pescatarian for this trip) then went down to town to a tapas bar where he spoke basque with the slightly surly, in a charming way, owner/ waiter.

At first I was a bit put off by San Sebastian when I arrived for three reasons:

#1) The weather was just like what we have had too much of in the PNW this spring: Cold and wet. Comparatively, Madrid weather had been dry and awesome.

#2) I, and 60 other passengers got off the trainat the wrong stop, toting luggage, after a 7 hour train ride, expecting a bus to be waiting for us. I wish I had taken a picture of us all standing confused alongside the roadway.

#3) It is a resort boom town, and my crabby mood elicited visions of Leavenworth times 100.

But now that I am leaving for Bilbao today, I want at least another 5 days here, and would definetly return again. The two bays, the three little mountains, the tiny island, the promendade, the narrow streets and secrets places, the whimsical architecture, and lots of people having an amazing time, the way warmer ocean than puget sound and the promenade literally made for kings and queens.

All that said….I spent about half my time on the less touristy, and more practical adjacent harbor town of Pasaia. That is where my boat painting and this painting was done. The town was more relaxed and real. And I love the conversations that the older locals have with me. They do not let the language barrier get in the way at all. After 10 minutes, I am pretty sure I understand about 3/4s of what they intended to commuincate, and vice versa. My performance skills come in quite handy, as do theirs.

This painting was a bit rushed, as I had a deadline to meet Pablo at the Beach, but I like how it is coming along. Not sure if I will have time to rework any paintings while on this trip and keep up with my “One a Day” commitment. Probably not.

Below is a gallery of the process. See you in Bilbao!

I met a lot of people yesterday while painting on the San Sebastian promenade that circum-navigates the mini mountain on the east side of La Bahia De Concha (Concha Bay). Many of them were French, as France is but a half hour away from San Sebastian.

Ishmael, from Turkey, kept talking to me about “The Fifth DImension” and wanted know how I achieved opening up to that dimension when doing my paintings. Weirdly, I think I kind of knew what he was talking about. It’s nice when people approach your art with something other than “It’s pretty”, which kind of begins and ends the conversation, with a smile and a thumbs up.

Hedvig (pictured above) is from Sweden. We talked for about half an hour on a wide range of subjects, from doing art whie traveling, to the the evils of social media to traveling Mexico and Central America. Yes, Hedvig is traditionally a female name. I did not know this. ( I always associated the name with “The Angry Inch” and the owl on Harry Potter). Delightful human! I was shocked when she said she was twenty: Worldy, present, mature, confident, knows multiple languages. I thought she was from the states at first when hearing her accent.

THE PAINTING: I am not going to show a close up of it, because I am not that happy with it. The composition was not set up for success (like the previous boat painting) and the light was tricky: It was frontal at first (from behind me). Frontal light erases much of the sculptural depth of subjects, making the foreground island and the background mountain seem to merge together.

Below is a picture of the island later in the day. The shadows clearly show the form of the island. Maybe I will revisit the painting with this photo in mind. (If the commitment to one painting per day permits)

CHASING THE LIGHT

Which brings me to my geeky visual artist section of this Blog post. “Chasing the Light” is a term used by Plein air artists , and refers to the phenomenon of begining a painting with a particular lighting direction and quality, and then the light inevitably changing as the painting continues. This can be hugely frustrating, and can potential erase any dynamism and clear commitment in your paintings. Cast and shadows shift, it is sunny, then it is overcast. The world is a whirlwind of ceacelss activity. The plein air painter knows this. People wonder why I want to paint faster…..this is why. Decisions need to be made quickly and confidently in order to have a chance of capturing what is happening.

Sometimes, it works in your advantage…..for instance, you start painting when it is overcast, without a lot of high contrast shapes to work with….then the weather shifts, the sky becomes dynamic, shadows become allies of definition.

SHADOWS as ANCHORS:

I have learned that commiting to shadows early on, can be an antidote to “chasing the light”. Despite the shifts of lighting direction, if you stay commited to the shadows you began with, then there is a much better chance of the painting remaing cohesive.

Today is overcast (so far) so I may not have these allies in today’s painting, but my caucasian skin definitley needs a break from the sun. EIther way, shade will be the main determining factor in choosing todays location.

I leave you with a gallery array of shots from picturesque San Sebastian. Buen Dia!

First Day of oil painting!!! My jam. Oil painting is the probably the least portable of all the painting mediums, so of course that is the one that I decided to use. I remember when I first started with oils…they felt so foreign and weird. Now, I feel at a loss without them. Although, it is just a matter of getting used to something else, but that takes time and I want to focus on making paintings rather than learning a new medium…although I did bring gouache, watercolors and casein paints….I always think I can do more than I actually can.

~ Look at the boat and notice how much the tide lowered ~

As anyone who is around me for any amount of time can attest, I am not an OCD neatnik. Quite the opposite; a wake of messy chaos usually surrounds me. But traveling with oil paints to another part of the world has forced me to be organzied and compact, and weigh the multiple factors involved with this complex endeavor. Like, what to carry it all in….I found a perfect Rucksack to accomodate most of my art supplies, though I still haven’t figured out how to transport freshly wet paintings and palettes…. I have to hold them in my hands, on the way home, and they love to pick up the wind and flop about.

Above note the fancy, yet minimal and somewhat portable “Open Box M” paint box/easel that mounts to a tripod (vintage 1960s, thanks to a load by Eric Perlman who lent me his father’s tripod). The canvas is actually Rives BFK paper treated with PVA, thick acrylic medium and Gesso, using a technique taught to me by Ted Kutscher. The painting is held by a spring-loaded pincers. Note the mineral spirits container hanging on the side, which does not leak when closed. In the box is a makeshift palette (i need to have glass cut to fit, which is my usual palette). The small altoids box is where I put any garbage oil paint. And I really appreciate the side shelf for storing brushes….although they tend to roll off….I will rig some method to fix that. In an odd way plein air painting is a lot like sailing, in that you have to be preparred to make whatever you have with you work once you leave port.

Probably around 50 people stopped and commented…almost none in english, but we understood one another anyway.

I did not take pictures of them. Sorry Karen, but honest, they were there!

An older couple (maybe ten years older than me) seemed fascinated, and kept talking to me as if I understood. Oddly, I sorta did. Her husband took some pictures of me, and he tried to take a picture of his wife, who started walking away when he did. I have several of her walking away….which I will not post. I gave them my business card with website, and they said they don’t do computers or the internet. I suppose that affords them the time to actually socialize with random people like me.

Here is the final painting. I am happy with it. It is more about composition and color and value and sense of light, than it is about boats, at least, that is how I approach it.

Nothing strengthens my faith in humanity more than travel. Maybe I'm just lucky, but everyone, from my awesome first host in Madrid, Antonio, to cab drivers, baristas, train conductors and random strangers, to my next host, Pablo, in San Sebastian, have been very gracious and filled with life and humor. Spain, a 15th century imperial power that conquered the world, has ossified into a genteel culture that knows how to be human.

The view from Pablo's balcony in San Sebastian (Donostia)

Views from the 7 hour train ride.

Now I'm off to paint…good or bad, I'll show you the results.

I have not been to Europe for 36 years, and at the first stop I am not dissapointed. Madrid is amazing! Being in the presence of the incredible architecture, broad avenues, narrow streets and vibrant people is a huge breath of fresh air, and distinctly not American. This city wasn’t designed around the car, thus people walk everywhere. And why not, there is gorgeousness everywhere. A city to be proud of. I thought I was only going to be here two days, but I am extending it to three, ‘cause there’s too much to see.

The Painting below is my first of this trip and was hard won. It is done in Gouache, which is like water color paint, but thicker. I have not used guoache like, maybe ever, so I felt pretty clutzy the whole way through. This is a corner of the Playa de Santa Ana. My AirBnB host, Antonio, mentioned that it reminded him of an Edward Hopper painting, and I agree. Tomorrow, hopefully I can get some oil painting going. That is much more my comfort zone.

The Process

It’s hard not to look up when you are in Madrid.