Deeper into watercolor

  The morning began with a persistent rain.  It was steady enough to persuade the Plein Air Washington Artists, scheduled to paint at the Ballard Locks in Seattle, to call off today's event.      
  Spared of driving my 10-mpg. Chevy truck all that way north, I left it at the curb by the house.  I rode Pierce Transit to downtown Tacoma.  On Opera Alley, I found a sheltered

View across St. Helen's Avenue, Tacoma

doorway, out of the rain.   My kit is three REI hiker's tripods.  One is my stool.  The second holds my watercolor paper block.  The third, inverted, tucks into a 9x12-inch canvas frame to make a lightweight, serviceable table for my paints and water jars.  Everything is carried in a small knapsack and a tripod sack.
  For 90 minutes I played with brushes and watercolor washes.  When I wearied of trying to paint over washes that never seemed to dry, I packed my kit and hiked down the block to the B Sharp Coffee House.  This is my second home for the season--I worked upstairs at The Tacoma News Tribune from 1964 until Elbert Baker moved his presses up to the Allenmore District.  The coffee house is tucked into where the old presses rumbled.  The diamond-metal flooring for the metal-wheeled paper-roll trucks is still underfoot.

This was my lunch at B Sharp Coffee House

  Another attraction for me is the guitar performance of Michelle Beaudry.  She plays an amplified box guitar, light  jazz arrangements of tunes mostly from the '40s and '50s.  Michelle prowls second-hand shops looking for old sheet music.  If she doesn't keep these melodies alive, she said, who will?
  While listening to her musical magic, I painted my lunch.  Then I ate it.
  By the time I caught the bus in front of the old Elks Temple to come home, there was a cerulean blue sky almost everywhere.

A house-warming of the heart

This was a heart-warming event, an early Valentine just in time to heal community feelings rubbed raw by events of the recent January.  A house ravaged by an accidental fire had been refurbished, like new.  The house-warming was billed as "a house-cooling," no doubt in defiance of the flames.  The weather cooperated.  Hardly had the sun set on the suburban street than snowflakes arrived, the first in a year.  By morning there would be 3 inches of snow on the lawns and streets.  But this evening warmth was the by-word and good cheer was the theme.
Coats and scarves were dragged somewhere upstairs while hosts filled glasses for the stream of arriving guests.  Sliced oranges swam in a cauldron of mulled cider on the kitchen range.  Bowls and plates and trays of food crowded for space on the serving table:  pasta, salads, chips, olives, cakes, cookies.  The never-ending cornicopia emptied onto paper plates. 

The elbowing mob of diners migrated to the sunken living room.  There was just one couple across the dining area, soon joined in conversation by a woman.  I seized the moment to begin a postcard sketch.  I leaned against the doorway leading into the room.  My pen captured one face, then another.  And the front door behind me opened.  In came another couple, then three people, and more.  

My vantage point suddenly was in the midst of a traffic stream shouldering through the narrow hallway to reach the food, the wine, the smiles and greetings.  More subjects for my pen, to be sure.  But more broad backs to block my sight, more jostling to disturb the images I was attempting to commit to paper.  But the sketchpad filled, as they seem to do.

Next morning, I copied the black-and-white sketch into the computer.  I painted the original postcard sketch with watercolors and copied that, as well.  In the process, I realized that few of the faces I had drawn would be recognized by any at the party.  It doesn't seem to matter.  The sketch reminds me of the good time that I had.  It warms my heart, as it, and the party, were intended to do.

Slices of life

  Friend John left the table to refill his coffee mug.  I used the interval to sketch a young man in a nearby booth.  He had an I-Pad bud in at least one ear.  He was holding his radio telephone to the other.  He had the far-focused look of the typical cell-phoner, so I knew he wouldn't notice that I was drawing him.  John and I had been discussing the value that "drop-in" artwork adds to text.

  The phoner closed his conversation.  John returned to the table.  We resumed our talk.

  We recalled the old New Yorker magazine.  Before color-printing had usurped the elegant and expressive lines of its contributors' contour sketches, its editors brought life to gray pages of agate typefaces by adding column-filler drop-ins of tiny sketches, doodles, if you will.  They seemed to be mostly of street scenes -- a trash can, a fire hydrant, the wheels of a vendor's cart.  Another might be a rapid drawing of a dog walker, with the dog's tail extended into a curlicue of stars.

  When I published my Tacoma's Express magazine some 20 years ago, I reminded John, I filled out my columns with similar sketches.  That led us into a discussion of my drawing technique.

I start with the eyes, I explained.   The pupil, the lids, the eyebrow.  I find these easy to lay down in relation to each other.  Simple strokes.  Simple lines.  When you have an eye, you have the soul.  Then the second eye, if visible.  The curve of the nose where it leaves the plane of the forehead.  A nostril.  The septum, that groove that drops between the nostrils to the mouth.  The line of the cheek where it departs from the nose, and drops down to define the widest edge of the mouth.  The chin. 

  Once I have a few lines on the paper, I  use triangulation to place the others, in turn.  I find it easiest to plot three points in a problem.  I hold up a pencil to see how far to one side of a vertical line the edge of the jaw might be.  I hold it horizontally to see how far above or below the tip of the nose the ear should be placed.

  My working rule of life-sketching, I told John, is to draw what I see, not what I know.   If the model moves, or as my cell-phoner did -- set down his phone, flip closed the lid of his laptop computer, gather up these and his jacket and walk out -- I stop drawing.  And sometimes that makes for a satisfying sketch.

  But John, I've seen your work.  You knew all this all along.

Postings from another blog

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Birding with oils

My backyard studio

Scarlet blooms of crocosmia brighten an otherwise emerald wall of grape- vines cascading down one side of my stuccoed garage.  They've been blossoming all summer.  But now they seem to sense that I'm trying to paint them, and they're tiptoeing away.

This summer, I'm determined to once and for all face the challenge of oil paints bequeathed to me by the late Charles Foster, New Orleans portraitist and composer who settled in Tacoma following the loss of his studio to Hurricane Katrina.

For the past year or so, I've collected How-To books on the subject.  I talk with painters.  I inventoried the thumb-stained tubes and worn brushes Charlie left me. I've uncapped the jug of turpentine and sniffed the jar of linseed oil, all but gagging at the overpowering stench.  If this is the price of printing "oil on canvas" in my catalogs, I think, forget it!  I won't have the smell in the house.

But sailing in on this summer's high-pressure atmospheric jet stream is my opportunity, I realized.  With little likelihood of rain, I set up a 10-foot pop-up canopy in my  back yard.  Paint cans filled with concrete provided anchors.  I hauled a studio easel downstairs.  I set it up near the crocosmia.  A portable vinyl table and a lawn chair completed the studio furniture.

A recycled pastries tray from Costco is my palette.  I spread out a half-dozen tubes of Charlie's paints.  I circled the tray with my basic colors.  I diluted a  green oil with turpentine and lay what I'd thought was a thin ground on a stretched canvas.  Apparently it was not thin enough.  Three days later it was still damp.  And it still stunk.

When I paint plein air with my acrylics or oil pastels, I seldom sit long at a canvas.  For better or for worse, i lay the pigments down with almost rhythmic deliberation, often bypassing the palette to blend paint right on the canvas.  I work from horizon to foreground.  That's the beauty of acrylic--paint dries to the touch within minutes, especially in this warm summer weather.  I need not imagine my "whites" in advance.  I can change composition as I go.  Or paint out problem areas and start over.  In any case, in two hours I pack up my kit and I'm gone!

But I've been 10 days into this one painting.  I began with a white ground and thinned the oils with an odorless mineral spirit.  I work as far as I can over dry areas and then walk away, usually until the next day.  A few times I paint both morning and evening.  For all the attention I'm able to pay to the different lights, I may as well be working from photos.  But I'm slowly filling the canvas.  And if I didn't believe I will have something worth hanging at the end of this summerlong journey, I wouldn't continue.

Yesterday morning, I was outside about 10.  The sun wasn't high enough to light up the scarlet blossoms, but I had plenty of background to lay in.  Across the street, a neighbor practiced her scales on an alto recorder.  jFrom two blocks further, I could hear the young voices of a cheerleader camp, under weigh at the university.  And suddenly, these sounds were drowned by the whirrrrr-whirrrrr-whirrrr of a hummingbird's wings as it fed from the crocosmia. 

The bird hovered, darted, backed away, dived in again.  And then it spotted my reddish-colored shirt.  It came within a foot of my shoulder, slid sideways a few inches, then back, eyeing me all the while.  Deciding I was not a flower, it buzzed away in a grand loop, out through the arched sidewalk gate and to the red feeder outside the kitchen window.

Each day I return to my palette, there seem to be fewer crocosmia.  It must be near the end of their season.  But even if they're not around to let me finish my painting,
I'll have that hummingbird's visit to remember.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The old Dash Point dock

The old Dash Point dock in 1964

When I moved from the sandhills of eastern Montana to Dash Point in 1964, Puget Sound was a grand and welcomed lake. At first opportunity I hauled a piece of plywood and my latex house paints and tints to the shore beneath the dock in the county park.

This was my first major work.  I have dabbled in tempura and watercolor all my life but this grand structure, glowing in the late-afternoon light, had captivated me.  A half-century later, I remain entranced by the composition, the color, the repetition of the pilings.

I must have been a fast study with my paints.  Using a household latex satin interior paint, I colored the basic white with intense drops of tint.  These came in metal tubes, common before the "espresso machine" automatic mixers of today.  I had acquired them from paint stores that discarded them in favor of the more accurate mixers.  I blended my colors right on the canvas--or in this case, plywood. 

You can see that the upper sands have dried out, indicating that what is pictured is an incoming tide.  Well, it wasn't incoming when I set up my easel, I remember that.  But it was certainly incoming when I hastily ended my plein air session that day.

It was a week before I had an opportunity to return to the dock, to complete the painting--the water needed attention, and I had hoped to add the feet and legs of some people up on the dock.  But a week later, as any Northwesterner would know, the tide was already in.  And the unfinished painting was pushed aside in the trailer where I lived above the state park, and later in the beachfront home where Virginia and I made our first home together.

A friend who is curator of a small art gallery was left high and dry last week by his scheduled artist.  I came to the rescue with a dozen small acrylics and oil pastels I've done in the past year or so.  And there, behind the door in my studio, was--the old Dash Point dock!

I touched it up a little and stapled on a quick frame.  I'm sure it won't sell, and it won't win any prizes.

But old friend, it is good to see you again!

Urban sketching--at Harley-Davidson

Saturday morning at the Harley store is a contemporary cultural event not to be missed:  Black leather jackets, a half-acre of chrome, a light-jazz trio setting up by the coffee counter.  And the sight of some 100 gleaming motorcycles on a showroom floor is, to say the least, overwhelming --at least for this artist.   Where to begin?

In the showroom at Harley-Davidson  --  a  watercolor by R.J. Lane

I found a quiet corner near the parts department and focused on a mountain of fiber-glass and steel, all rigged out for an interstate tour.  I set up my stool and table.  I soaked the paper with a background wash.  While it dried, I slithered through avlabyrinth of motorcycles and sequined touring T's to the coffee pump.  Leaning on the counter, sprawled on the sofas, kicking tires (figuratively--who'd want to be responsible for tipping over a dozen shining Harleys?) were a score of afficianados.  None seemed like the cast of a Brando-Marvin movie.  Conversations were quiet.  Beards, if any, were trimmed.  I felt as old as I am, and as out of date.

The watercolor went well enough, for plein air.  Until I was too far along with the colors to correct it, I hadn't noticed my perspective was way out of whack on the luggage box.  Not to worry, another sketcher told me:  Nobody will notice, and if they do, they won't care.

Well, I care!  But I left the sketch with one of the salespeople, and she seemed to be pleased with it.  They'll have it framed, she said, and put it on the wall.  No glass, I responded.  Not on a watercolor!  No glass, she promised.

There were 10 of us at this monthly outing of Tacoma Urban Sketchers.  Afterwards, a couple of us went a half-mile north to the Pick-Quick Drive-In for polish dogs.  Dining out in the plein February air!