Paintings Since My Early Posts

The painting on this post are of paintings done mostly since 2016. By updating my blog with more recent works, some progress may be seen. A number of the paintings shown on this post are sold. Others are not for sale but are in the collection of the artist. May you find them enjoyable and see some progress. 

This one is a scene from France done from a photograph my daughter took during a trip there with her husband. It is owned by her mother-in-law.

This painting is of a barn with an old gas pump near Gonzales, Texas and is owned by the Bob Vackar of McAllen, Texas.

This is of a bridge in rural England and was done from a photo sent to me by a fellow artist who lived south of Gonzales, Texas when I was a pastor there. Sold.

This small fawn painting was a lot of fun to do. I think it is 8x8 and is sold.

This 8x10 oil painting is of some oyster fisherman unloading near Fulton Beach, Texas. Sold.

These are my daughter's two cats painted from a photo she gave me to use. Fun to do. Sold.

This is another painting in oil of my daughter's cat. I feel I got the eyes pretty good.

Small oils of one of the light houses near Portland, Maine from photos taken by me while on a trip there with my wife. They are both sold.

These trees in a swamp are from a photo I took on a trip along the southeast U.S. coast. Small oil painting. Owned by my youngest daughter and her family.

This is probably one of my favorite paintings I've done. I call it the Maine Man. It is from a photo I took with permission of a man sitting in front of a Dairy Queen at a mall in Maine. It is looser in style and more as I want to paint. Look closely though and you will see reflections of the mall shops in his sun glasses. My own collection

Another small oil painting done from a photo taken on our trip to Maine. It is of The Corner Room where we ate one evening. In my own collection.

This watercolor is called "So That's How It's Done" It is one of only two or three watercolors I have done. I really enjoyed this and did each of the spots individually rather than mask to retain the white parts of its coat. I am keeping this one in my own collection.

Another oil painting done from a photo of a barn near Gonzales, Texas. I played here with pushing the intensity of the colors and limiting my palate. It is sold.

On a trip to California, I took the reference photo of this small oil painting from a pier near the Golden Gate Bridge. It is sold.

This small oil painting of a cypress tree is from a photo I took while on a trip to Jefferson, Texas and the surrounding area. It is sold.

This small 8x8 oil painting is from a photo I took south of Fort Worth, Texas. It is sold.

Another small oil from a photo taken on our trip to Maine. Sold.

A field of poppies in an 8x10 oil from a reference photo my daughter took in France.

A small oil painting, 6x8, from a photo taken on our trip to Maine.

This 8x10 is from a photo my daughter took while on a trip to France.

An 8x10 oil painting of a swampy area along the coast of Southeast U.S. From a photo taken while on a trip through the area. Colors and values pushed to get more vibrancy. Sold

This 16x20 acrylic painting of a lion from the Fort Worth, Texas zoo from a photo taken there. My own collection. Not for sale.

This small oil painting of an iris is 6x8 and is sold. I liked the more loose approach I took. Sold

Another 8x10 oil from a photo taken on a trip. I think this is Savannah, Georgia. Sold.

An 8x10 oil of the San Antonio River Walk from a photo taken while there. Sold.

An 8X8 oil painting. Sold.

A 6x8 oil. Sold.

An 8x10 oil from a photo taken by me at the Fort Worth, Texas zoo. The fur and his posture were a lot of fun. My collection.

Well, that should catch me up a bit. I'll post more as I study and as I paint. Thanks for looking. I hope you enjoy. Feel free to comment.

Well, the best-laid plans...

This blog began in 2009. Chasing technology and providing services related to that discipline provided a good livelihood for over 34 years. However, it is a younger person's field and wearisome keeping up to provide the best services possible.

Cleaning up, throwing out, recycling, re-purposing, and organizing for a new job: "To occupy until He comes." Some goals and structures to guide "retirement" have been set. The journey of learning is exciting. So much of the planning is toward that end. After reorganizing office space and clearing up some other home spaces the game will be afoot.

Monday through Thursday will start with coffee with my wife. Following this will be one hour of bible study making observations, interpretation, and applications of as many books of the bible as possible starting with Paul's letter to the Ephesians and following with similar letters to the believers Colosse and at Philippi before moving to an Old Testament book or two.

The next hour will be spent drawing or sketching. The only way to get better is to practice, practice, practice. However, practice must be done properly. If a pianist doesn't practice scales and arpeggios then she will never get better. However, if the practice is not correctly done then progress will not be made and skills will not be acquired. Work will be done in pen and ink, pencil, carbon pencil, and lampblack watercolor using photos or still life objects for reference. I have never spent much time practicing drawing or sketching so learning a proper approach is underway. To this end, reading and applying the guidelines (no pun intended) and instruction in Carl Purcell's fine book, Your Artist's Brain (ISBN-10: 1-4403-0844-6; ISBN-13: 978-1-4403-0844-4), is where the focus is being placed. Its big idea is to develop better skills of observation of relationships between shapes, spaces, subjects, backgrounds, angles, sizes, values, and more. This is basic to producing good art of the type I like to do.

The next hour will be used to start and complete a 6" X 6" or 6" X 8" oil painting either from a still life setup or a photograph. The goal here will be to develop more looseness and speed to prepare for doing Plein air outdoor painting. It is a fairly common practice of many painters to do a daily painting (see Daily Paintworks site).

Following painting, one hour will be spent writing. Initially, the goal is to write small sketches of personal memories or just describe a setting, person, smell, emotion, or experience.

The fifth hour will be spent reading on theology, philosophy, bible and creative tasks perhaps choosing to read into a different one each of the four days of the week.

The sixth hour will be spent studying other humanities subjects. The list will include history, philosophy, literature, and critical thinking. The current reading is about the life of John Calvin along with two multi-volume histories by Winston Churchill: Marlborough: His Life and Times (a descendant of the duke) and The History of the English Speaking People. Included will be two surveys of history by Susan Rice Bauer--one Medieval and the other Reformation.

Five days a week thirty minutes of exercise: fifteen minutes walking on the treadmill and fifteen minutes of weight training on Precor stationary equipment and free weights. Thirty minutes a day will be used for training Chase, a Bichon Frise dog who needs attitude adjustments. Friday and Saturday will be household chores such as yard, cleaning, and organizing. Sunday will be church activities and rest.

Evenings will be spent watching some favorite shows via our Amazon Prime subscription such as The Closer, Doc Martin, and Hercule Poirot. While watching TV some knitting projects started some while ago such as a sweater for my wife will be continued. Knitting was learned while in the Naval Hospital in San Diego recovering from pneumonia.

Sounds ambitious but changing from busy life of support and development in computer technology to vegging out is not an option. The structure will help keep the mind alert learning new things and continuing personal development.

March 31st and my retirement from 30 years of an IT systems engineering and development career are approaching fast. I will finally be able to dedicate substantial daily time to working on my painting in my studio. I am now 70 and yet very excited about returning to the palette and easel to continue my journey to let the artist in me out.

Thanks for visiting and please stay tuned as I share the next chapter in my journey.

Due to heavy loads at my workplace where I am Developer and Systems Engineer for a large prosecutor's office in Texas, I have not been able to paint or even draw for some time now.  I also have not been able to post anything concerning my progress.

In addition, on February 4, 2013, my wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, underwent surgery and chemotherapy, and upon completion of that was diagnosed with breast cancer.  She had rotator cuff surgery in late December of 2013 and will be incapacitated for about six months.

I plan to retire from my employment at the end of March and go into fractional support of computer systems as well as software development.  Hopefully, I can resume my painting efforts as well.  When I do I will resume my blogging.

Same Song, Second Verse - 20 More to Come

Well, upon seeing what I had done and posted to this blog, my mentor, Mark Keathley, responded with encouragement and a couple of recommendations.  The first was to apply thicker paint in the lighter areas of the starts where I am trying to portray light.  While I already understood this principle I had difficulty carrying it out.  He provided brief guidance as to how best accomplish that.  He described the application of paint in those areas to putting on icing with the brush held more parallel to the canvas.  He also suggested that I mix about twenty piles of colors to use, including pastel shades, greens, blues and purples that don't come in the tube colors.

For the benefit of those who may want to know, the principle of painting darks thinly and lights with thicker paint when painting in oils is foundational as is painting thin to thick and dark to light.  The reasoning is pretty easy to grasp and demonstrate.  You cannot see the color of dark hues if applied thickly.  They need some light shinning through them to transmit their hue.  By the same token, light colors if not applied thickly will allow darker color underneath to show through.  Also the brightest brights are most often highlights reflecting off some surface and should stand out or sort of sparkle, whereas darker shadow areas should lay back.  This is also controlled by color temperature: cool colors like blues and greens tend to recede and warm colors like yellow and red tend to advance, visually.

Mark also suggested that I do another set of starts using the guidance he offered described above.  Since I enjoyed doing the first set of starts he recommended and feel that I made some progress, I'm certainly going to take his further advice and do another set of starts.  Therefore, I'm now making selections from my photo images that I would like to paint.  Most of these I'll do even smaller in a 6"X8" panel as I have quite a few of those prepared with gesso and some with canvas applied to the panel.  These starts are similar to learning to do scales before performing a recital, but a lot more fun.

The purpose of doing them even smaller is to avoid putting in too much detail in these starts, concentrating more on the design of the compositions. This is done by combining shapes and values to simplify and strenghten the compositions in this underpainting stage.  Doing so will help me gain the ability to more simply and dynamically express what I want to communicate. 

If the composition and design "works" in this small format it will also work when a larger painting is done, and the larger painting will not be as much about copying details as it will be about communicating the emotions I feel about the image I chose to paint.

Following Mark Keathley's counsel is somewhat like the story behind the movie "Julie and Julia" which was partly responsible for my returning to paint and doing this blog.  In the movie, Julie blogs her journey through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."  It was after seeing this movie with my younger daughter and wife that my daughter challenged me to do this blog and start painting again.  I'm like the young "Julia" and Mark's counsel to me is guiding me like Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."  I'm extremely grateful for his willingness to give me guidance.  I have never been more excited about painting than I am now.  At nearly 66, I'll take all the non-medical excitement I can get.

So, with another set of starts to come, the journey to become a better painter continues...

Acting on Good Counsel - 22 "Starts"

At the advice of Mark Keathley, an accomplished and successful artist, I have spent all my spare time since my last post, doing twenty-two "starts."  Starts, if I have understood what he meant by the term, are beginning of paintings on which one spends an hour to an hour and a half covering the panel or canvas by blocking in the colors, values color temperatures and larger shapes combining values and shapes where possible to simplify the underpainting.  Most will not be very far along when the surface is covered with paint but the basic idea the artist wants to convey to the viewer will be evident most of the time.

I'm including photos of these starts as a group and individually to demonstrate some of my experiences, thoughts and ideas as I discuss them over the next few posts.  Below is a photo of my drawing table and bookcase where I've laid out 20 of the starts.

All of the starts except one are painted on 8X10 canvas (from Dick Blick) or hardboard panels some of which have been given a rougher texture when coating them with Utrecht New Temp Artist's white acrylic gesso.  The one exception was the first start done and it was done on a 6"X9" panel.  All but one of these starts were painted in regular artists oil colors while the one of the carnival ferris wheel was painted with Winsor & Newton Artisan water soluble artists oil colors.  A few of them were started by blocking in the larger darkest shapes with black acrylic gesso and when that dried the entire surface was given a wash of burnt sienna Golden Acrylic before continuing to lay in the underpainting with regular oil paints.  All of the starts were done using only pure boar bristle brushes usually with sizes 6, 4, and 2.  Very little oil painting medium was used but when it was necessary Winsor & Newton Liquin was used.  Turpenoid was the solvent used with the regular oil paints for cleaning brushes and water was used for the one painting started with water soluble oils.

Working with the water soluble oils took a bit of getting used to and I found no advantage in their use other than that of not having to use Turpenoid, which is virually odorless, as the solvent.  I have noticed that drying time is considerably slower with the water soluble oils especially when Liquin is used with the regular artists oils.

Most often my darkest darks including my blacks were made from a mixture of French Ultamarine Blue and Burnt Sienna.  This allows me to easily mix a wide range of warm and cool greys by varying the amount of each pigment and titanium white.  Occasionally I also used Viridian Green and Permanent Alizarin where I wanted a really dark color in rendering green vegetation.

The first attempt at these "starts" since the first painting in 10 years post was made was a 6"X9" covered bridge scene from Tennessee that Mark Keathley had sent me to use as I began acting on his counsel.  He told me, "Do 20 starts before attempting to bring any of them along to a point where you might consider them finished."  His only instruction was that I should not spend more than 1 to 1 1/2 hours on each.  He sent me a couple of photos showing one of his starts and the reference photo used for that start.  I already had an email from him of the finished painting.  This was used to visually show me what the goal was.

I took this first one and several others beyond the "starts" point as I worked my way through the twenty and beyond to twenty-two.  Okay, I'm a bit O.C. (obsessive compulsive) and tend to do more than asked or than necessary figuring that if twenty is good, twenty-two is better.  Mark Keathley told me that when I had finished the twenty starts I'd know what I wanted to do next and would know the road on which I would continue my journey to becoming a better painter. 

Mark was right.  I had a great time doing these small starts each day anxiously looking forward to the time I could get off work and get back to painting.  I looked toward each weekend with great anticipation.  Not all the starts are that pleasing to me but all have some potential for a finished painting and some seem almost finished.  I gained facility in mixing and applying paint.  My earliest attempts have some muddy areas where I tried to adjust hue or color temperature and made a mess of it.  These however can and will be corrected as I move next to work on the starts bringing along the ones that I'm most excited about to a finished piece of art.  This will bear the fruit of another stage of development as I go back and work on the starts and try to know when they are finished.

So, here are photos of the starts without going into much commentary about each one.  All were done very quickly and all are at a basic underpainting stage.  I'll bring them further along to completion over the next few months.  I think it might be interesting, and possibly helpful to other persons wishing to work toward becoming a better artist, to show the source and progress or problems if there be some on each.

The above scene of vineyard in France.  Reference photo was taken by my daughter, Laura Vassberg.

This scene of the San Fransico Bay Bridge will have two rows of lamplights running back in the distance with a very dark foreground while I've only indicated two to get the perspective and spacing.  This start has some pretty muddy areas in it.   Reference photo was taken by my daughter.

This is a hillside full of red poppies in France.  I have just indicated a couple of the flowers to show the complementary colors (colors opposite each other on the color wheel or nearly so) of the red and green.  This will take some time to finish properly even if kept lose.  The reference photo was taken by my oldest daughter during a trip to France.

This scene is San Francisco with the bay bridge in the faint distance.  At this stage I just have the basic underpainting. If you look carefully, you can see the Golden Gate bridge just above the horizon between the two rows of buildings. The large white building will have many darkened windows added as I develop this one further.  Reference is my daughter's photo.

Reference photo was taken by my daughter.  I've pushed the contrasts and colors to get the complementary colors to make the scene more dynamic.

Scene is from England.  I think this has potential due to the great range from foreground to background.  Reference photo by friends of Mark Keathley who passed some on to me for my use in these starts.

This scene is from a scanned slide my father took of my grandmother and mother exiting a restaurant in the 50s.  The three boys on the left are me, in the green jacket nearest the building, the larger one is my older brother, the smaller one is my younger brother probably around 7 years old.  I thought this might be fun.

Another scene from England from photo taken by Mark Keathley's friends.

Scene is Apalachicola, Florida.  I was inspired to do this one due to the complimentary blue and orange colors. Reference photo was taken by me from the walkway of our motel while on vacation in October of 2009.

Cypress tree and lily pads in Caddo Lake near Jefferson, Texas while on a short vacation there.  Reference photo is taken by me and looks a bit like a Monet scene to me.  This was fun to this point.  I'll certainly take this one further.

Oyster fishermen in Port Aransas, Texas.  Reference photo taken by me.

Shrimp boats at Fulton Beach, Texas north of Rockport.  Reference photo taken by me.  Boat on the right is named "Ole No. One."  This start went together easily taking less than an hour.  Finishing it might take some time.

Scene in France.  Reference photo taken by my daughter.  This one was difficult to do in the small scale format and will take a good deal of work to get it where I like it.

Another scene from France with reference photo taken by my daughter.  I like the value range and colors in this.  It almost "works" the way it is.

Another scene from England.  Reference photo taken  by Mark Keathley's friends and passed along to me for use in these stars.

This unusual scene is pretty accurate and is from a photo I took in a swamp on a plantation we visited near Savanah, Georgia on our vacation thorugh the South in October of 2009.  I found the patterns that the light and the shapes of the trees make very interesting.  The area was somewhat mysterious in feeling and I want to capture that as I continue working this one to completion.

Reference photo taken by my daughter while in France.  This one came together very quickly and strongly to this point.  I'm looking forward to taking it to a finish but since this photo I have already struggled a bit with keeping it loose.

This start was done using water soluble artist's oil paints.  I had never worked with these before and decided to experiment on this scene from a carnival in Pharr, Texas.  Reference photo taken by me.  I'm fascinated by the carnivals and games I remember from my youth.  I doubt I will use these water-soluable paints again.  They took several weeks for the underpainting show above to dry.

This is of the lead singer, Alan Barnett, of the Psychic Cowboys, a very entertaining cover band from Austin.  The reference photo was taken by my daughter whose husband play electric bass and signs with this band.  The setting is The Oasis overlooking Lake Travis west of Austin.  This one was done by first laying in all the darkest darks with black acrylic gesso, covering that with a wash of burnt sienna acrylic when the black dried quickly.  Then the brightest values were laid in and "pieces of paint" applied with local color to bring it to this point.  Probably took me about 45 minutes.  I think this one has potential to be very strong.   I pushed both the values and complementary blue and orange colors to get a more dynamic image.  Look forward to correcting some "muddy" areas in the face and bringing it along to finish.  I don't think it has far to go to be finished.

I found the small size of these starts to be a challenge and look forward to completing them and beginning some larger canvases--perhaps of some of these small painting  subjects.  I also have a couple I'd like to try in watercolor and at least one that I want to do in pastels.  I have not done many paintings in either of these media.  However, here's a watercolor that I did of part of the San Antonio Riverwalk near Jim Cullum's Jazz Club that is part of the collection of my oldest daughter and son-in-law.

I welcome your comments and criticism, both positive and negative.  Art is a form of communication as is this blog.  Due to my work I don't get out of the house very much and welcome and enjoy the interaction with friends, family, co-workers, and anonymous comments on this blog.   Discussions are welcome about the art I am producing, the writing of the blog, and methods I'm following.  This is all a learning process for me and one model for learning is placing yourself in an interactive environment such as this.

Thanks for taking time to look, read, and comment.