8x8 watercolor

This 7.5”x7.5” painting was the final demo in my workshop “From Photo to Final Painting”. We did the piece in one go, all wet into wet for an hour. Then a touch of dry work later to cut a few edges. I love these sort of quiet, moody pieces full of soft edges.

This view is from the Benicia State Park, looking out on an inlet of the SF Bay.

8x8, unframed watercolor

This is from Basin Creek, up in the Sierra foothills. We used to go here as kids, to go camping, and swim in the creek. A good place, cool and shady and full of playing kids.

The shapes of these ferns overlapping is fascinating to me. Form and symmetry versus disorder and chaos. Light and shadow. I just had to paint it!

I like these secret, briny spaces under a dock. Here, where the waves break and splinter in unexpected ways, we’re not supposed to be. It’s somehow public, but secret. Shaded, but with darts of sunshine. A place to hide and be safe, but also a place for adventure.

This subject I did in one quick go. It kept me loose, helped me simplify, and I got interesting results I might not have aimed for if I had more time. Love the pale blue shadows, expressing the white of the petals in the morning sun.

We’re all floating downstream. Falling from a tree. Tumbling along, over little waterfalls, caught against a rock, spinning on the surface of a pool, caught in a patch of unexpected sunlight, pulled by the flow of water we don’t understand.

I make a lot of trips up to the redwoods. Being along the river and in their ancient groves is always a peaceful kind of joy for me. This is from up near Jedediah Smith, at the northern tip of California.

From up on the bluffs just north of Santa Cruz. Love that glow across the Pacific, melting the land away.

For me, painting clouds never gets old. Love this view from up in the Oakland hills. Great light, looking out in the afternoon after a storm.

Another creek in the redwoods, from up on the Mendocino coats. These sorts of scenes can be really difficult to paint. For this, I had to move back and forth from transparent watercolors into thick, goopy applications of white to capture some of the startling light!

t’s Friday, which means it’s a time to pull back on ambition. ;). But still do my daily painting! Saw this dinner-plate-sized Aeonium, and thought it’s symmetrical, sunny, resplendent form a good metaphor for the slow, clock-ticking-by laziness of the day. :)

I made this one thinking of my wife. She’s off at a silent retreat this week in the redwoods along the coast, but she sent me this picture on the first day. It’s good to make time for yourself when you can. To be silent for a while and listen.

My wife sent me this photo while she’s been away at her retreat. She sends it silently to me. I paint it, and send it silently back to her. Imagining being in the woods along the coast up north.

This is from a trip of ours to Spain. I remember walking down the narrow stone streets of Barcelona, of Grenada, or Cordoba. Sometimes you would hear guitar music, drifting like a sweet scent on the air, before you could find where the player was. Then you would come around a corner, and they’d be snuggled down a corridor like this, making you stop, and listen, and fall in love with being alive again.

I grew up in the mountains and love this area up just a bit past Gold Country. The mountain air never grows old.

These sort of groves of eucalyptus are so indicative of the Central Valley to me. I grew up in the foothills, and we would drive through farm country on our way to almost anywhere, so these sorts of scenes are something I feel very at ease with. Folks like a bit of shade late in the day, when they’ve been working in the heat.

This is the view out the window of our dining room, into the Japanese maple. I took this photo last spring, when all the leaves were new and thin and transparent. I love that green. So glad that Spring still comes back around each year.

This is a closeup form the Bristlecone Pine forest. Swipe left to see the reference photo and the step by step. You go up and over the Sierras, into the wide open emptiness of the eastern side. As you head out into the desert, you can find this forest at a very high elevation. The trees are ancient- some of them the oldest living things on the planet. Literally thousands of years old. They grow only a little every year, twisting and turning in the wind and heat, sometimes only growing 1” in a century!! I love how these objects in the desert, where there is so little water, look so fluid.

I love Barcelona. One of my all time favorite cities. The little narrow streets of the old town just felt like home to me when I arrived. I love the shafts of sunlight that stream down, and the narrow stone passageways you come through where you come out of the darkness to arrive at a pure blue sky.

This view of the long rolling hills comes from the Sierra foothills, outside of Sonora, where I grew up. I liked to go out to the “Back 40” and have adventures in the woods.

8x8, unframed watercolor

8x8, unframed watercolor

8x8, unframed watercolor

An 8x8 watercolor, unframed