The Sonoma Coast reorganized

This is the hardest seascape  composition for me. Our spectacular Sonoma Coast is so beautiful to see and SO hard to paint. After all Nature has hundreds of miles to place her stuff and I only have a few inches.

There's a lot to handle, no two shapes should be alike, and each time a rock is placed it affects all the others, the logical mind wants to line up all the edges, points the ends, and forgets perspective, and then that makes the shapes between like runways. Notice everything in Nature is different, no 2 leaves an a tree of thousands is exactly alike, and neither are the rocks. Our eye is always after novelty an grows bored very easliy, so on a painting it's important to keep that variety. Every time a rock is placed it means carefully looking to see how it affects the overall space relationships. There are 19 rocks in this work each took quite some time to get the shape and exact place it needed to be.

There is  a lot to get right, and only practice can give the painter the skills needed to do it.

In the first drawing you see the orange pastel pencil I use to compose, it easily rubs off for changes.
Next is the bright underpainting that helps me check out the shapes over all
Then the rocks are blocked in

And finally  the painting is fully blocked in the local colors and values. Now I'll let it dry and do the final details which I will post later.

Alexander Harrison

In my quest to become a seascape painter I've searched back through time to find the very best examples of the genre. I have lots to share as we go.... today  it's Alexander Harrison, an Am. Tonalist painter of great repute in his day. In particular one painting called The Wave.  You can enlarge the link I gave, but what we can't get is the real impact. The painting is 40 inches high(99.7 cm) by almost TEN FEET long (299.7) Can you imagine the experience this must give you! Even in the poor internet reproduction you can see the amazing subtle colors he's captured in the overcast light I love so much...Here are just a few things to appreciate and for painters to learn from.

Horizion line
notice how it changes across the work, nowhere is it hard, which would flatten the space, and in some places it's obscured altogether,

Lead ins. 
notice how he leads our eye into the painting with the little wavelets and on a more subconscious level with the reflected darks of the wave in the foreground wet sand linking us to the dark of the wave.

Gradated color/value shifts.
In the sky, a deeper value fog is played off against the light on the water on the right side of the painting, if the sky tone had not shifted that light would not glow so much

The wave itself is pure magic, notice how much he varies the top line, the intervals of dark water and lighter foam, the dimension of the foam and the treatment of the bottom edge shadows and reflections into the water below.

I will be doing some small studies based on some of his paintings. This is how I'm teaching myself seascape painting. I have a few good books by E John Robinson, and one by Roger Curtis, most of the others out there have not been useful to the way I want to paint. But I've learned much more, once past the basics, from study of the great painters who've gone before me.  They are not painters on the radar of the art world anymore, except maybe Homer, but in their day were greatly respected and well known.

more links for Harrison
artencyclopedia.com the way to find all his work on the internet, some have large files
wikipedia.org

and on American Tonalism, (Harrison was a Tonalist) the only home grown Americn art movement, that crashed when Impressionism came along. The paintings are very quiet and subtle and have an intentional spiritual quality. Tonalism has a great influence on my current work as the quality of light along the N. California coast, is that way in nature.

Wave Eye View

One of the new friends I've made with this blog sent me a link to a photographer who lives in Hawaii
Clark Little I love the photos and what it encourages me to do is add more color to my waves. I see it very fleetingly out there but the freeze action of the photo lets me see how much more there is. So I can use my Artistic License( #4736 issued to me for a lifetime)  to add more. Of course the water in Hawaii is a very different situation than here along the No California coast. I lived on the Big Island for 3 years( so blessed to be there before a huge amount of development took place) the color and light here make it a different animal all together.

My new friend and I love waves and chase them along the Sonoma Coast, and someday we might meet out there. I'll post what he shares with me as we go along. Friday is supposed to be a big wave day, so I'll be out there. Enjoy!

On Creativity, and Beyond

Vik Muniz, takes image making beyond the box of paints and brushes, his humor and quirky take on art will refresh you in this TED Talk. He uses chocolate, sugar, even dust from the floors of the Whitney Museum to make amazing representational pictures.  It is so easy as a painter or just a human being to get settled in one point of view. People like Muniz wake us up, one of the purposes of art and creativity.

 This painting is made entirely with sugar on black paper of one of the children on a plantation he visited in Saint Kitts. is "Sugar Children" series consists of photographs of drawings he made in sugar of children whose parents and grandparents have worked on the sugar plantation on the island of Saint Kitts.

The World's Most Beautiful Wave

I have a guilty pleasure,  I love surfer movies, and I have  a link on the internet that gives me the surf reports for North Salmon Creek so I know when the big waves will come. On that site is a video of the big waves at Cortes Bank off San Diego, the biggest most beautiful wave. On this vid is also some great computer modeling of wave forms so enjoy and see this primordial wave move and develop, Click on the link below the photo to see the video.

                                                           CORTES BANK WAVE 

Final Exam

I set myself a challenge of 100 paintings of waves a little over a  month ago, and as I completed it, I set myself a final exam. I did these four little paintings from memory, to test all my skills. Most of the old seascape masters I've read say you must be able to paint the sea from memory to do it well. They used sketches and studies made on the spot but all of them spent many many hours just watching and studying the water and weather.William Trost Richards son said his father spent so much time standing in a trance on the beach watching water that people thought him insane. Then in the studio( many painted before the camera was so easy) they would rely on their memory and maybe a few small sketches. We artists today do not have or use our memories so much, and even in school kids don't have to memorize poems or the Gettysburg address like  they used to. For  seascape painter memory is a must, you can't just stop the water and light.  A camera is not much use either if you want to paint like the eye sees, it is a blind mechanical thing, the human eye is attached to the heart and mind of a person with feelings, something no camera has.

So this is my exam, 4 little works about 4.5 x5 inches each...this is a great exercise to try, it tells you what you know and what you don't.  This took about an hour total

The Far Horizon

The " horizon line" in a painting is where the sea and sky meet,  at the eye level of the viewer, so if you are standing looking at the sea, it is one place, if you sit down it will shift higher. Here is the wiki definition if you want to get more technical and a picture of the horizon line from space 

The horizon line is the first thing I put down in a seascape. I have lots more to say about horzions, but placement is the basis of the painting so we'll start here. Where you draw the horizon line  dictates the point of view of the entire work, where you will stand in your own mind as you enter and enjoy the painting. It has great psychological effect and sets the tone and mood. After all it is where you are placing your viewer, so think carefully about where you put it.  Placed high you have room for a foreground and plenty of wave action, placed low the sky will start to dominate. One of the painting principals I use is; What ever is most important gets the most real estate.  So if I'm interested in the wave, it will have a big chunk of square inches in the work. I will not have room for a big wave unless I place the horizon line high.

Here are some samples of seascapes, some contemporary most from 1850-1950. Notice where the horizon line is, and how that affects the emotional state as well as you look at these. 

 Clyde Aspevig, The Headlands

Here he has put us way up in the air, on a high cliff looking down. This could be tricky except in the hands of a master like Aspevig.

 Alexander Harrison, The Wave

Here we are standing on the beach, perhaps sitting on a small sandbank, your eyes are level with the true horizon

Charles Vickery, Pacific Voyage

notice on this one the horizon is only implied, we'd have to be in a small dingy to get this view, and I would be hanging over the side getting rid of lunch. Vickery really knew his water and his ships.

Frederick Waugh, Evening Surf

We are standing on the beach or maybe some low rocks

Frederick Waugh, Glint of Sun

this is more ambiguous , we could be on a surfboard, or standing in the water or on a jetty.

                                                                                           William Trost Richards, Summer

We know exactly where we are here and not worried about storms or big waves, riptides, so we can completely relax into this tranquillity.

It is possible to paint a seascape without any horizon line at all, as in this David Curtis painting a view common if you stand overlooking the ocean from a high cliff, but here our eyes are directed down, not out as in the first Aspevig work.