Non-descript urban

I painted this Glendale bridge in an outing with mega-talented Jennifer McChristian. We stood on a freeway ramp in the summer heat.

If you have to travel for 100 miles to find some pristine area of majestic natural beauty, you are painting something less and less people get to see on a daily basis. That is unfortunate, but it is a fact of our time. Today's urban painters might have no money for gas to travel to Wyoming and be "pretend-cowboys" for a month and appeal to real estate developers with large canvases of mountains soon to be developed, crouching cougars and long-gone scenes of native-american nostalgia with silly titles like "Sorrow in their eyes" or "Warriors of the plains." Carl Rungius, Clyde Aspevig, Howard Terpening, Bill Anton and others have earned their place in art history for sure but can this retro kitsch be held for long? Same goes for european traveler wannabe aesthetes inflicting yet another Tuscany SingerSargent-y farmhouse watercolor on the world. It sells but ... it leaves you with that vanished world emptiness, you might as well have painted the Roman Forum in its full 30BC splendor.

I see a trend to paint what it is in your backyard, even if it is a freeway. The time will come when it also becomes difficult to paint a beautiful industrial/urban wasteland but for now...