Monterey Plein Air Convention 2013. Part 1

On the way to Monterey I stopped to sketch at San Miguel Mission.

After much debating with myself whether I should shell out  1K to attend the Plein Air Convention in Monterey I decided it was just what I needed after filing for unemployment. After all, this might be the proverbial push to become a full fledged painter... I told myself. As scary as it is to take that leap of faith, it is what I dream about every single day and how much longer can I postpone the fact that to become an artist one must leave security behind.  Thomas Kitts offered sharing a room which would bring the cost down a bit so why not.

Overwhelmed by nature's drama. My first study at Cypress Cove.

The Conference was organized in the following manner:  Daily lectures/demonstrations by different speakers and artists occupy most of the day.  Sometimes these demonstrations are simultaneous. I chose  to attend  those demos I was most interested in which meant I spent most of the day at the conference hall because the roster was very impressive. A  hall of sponsors/brands  offers their quality products at a discount during the thee days. Besides the demos and lectures there are also some paint-outs with the speakers . A great opportunity to see them in action for the benefit of everyone seeking advice or just learning.

 Glenn Dean, John Burton and Thomas Kitts in Point Lobos. All at once!.

When I arrived I immediately proceeded to spend most Wednesday painting in Point Lobos, a place I'm ashamed to say I had never seen. Incredible doesn't even cut it. I was so overwhelmed by the sheer magnificence that I went into frantic painting mode.  But it was more of a coping mechanism than real art making I suppose because nothing came out right.  I met Glenn Dean and John Burton in the beach painting a timed 20 minute sketch. I missed the first lecture by Joe Paquet (I regret that)  but caught the James Gurney one on composition (based on eye-movement mapping and bias) . At 7pm there was a reception for the attendees and the excitement build up was palpable.

"Crown ad Anchor English Pub" to calm the excitement with Scotch,friends and the trusty sketch book.

 One of the main events for me was the marketing boot camp that took place at 6:30 am every morning. During this times, lectures on branding and marketing for artists were given by different experts.  Among them, Eric Rhoads, Leslie Saeta, Ed Terpening and Elaine Adams. The main point I gleaned from them all is that artists tend to see the business side (selling) as crass and dirty but one doesn't need to perceive it that way or become someone else to do it. It takes a lot of work for sure and the lectures were a bit short on specifics but pointed in some directions that I might pursue. Not all of them. Magazine advertising, for example.  Consistent magazine advertising might be great  but I've heard both sides of the arguments for and against. Learning about  the elements of a good website and newsletter was interesting.  I would highlight Ed Terpening's clean presentation on how to maximize your online presence. Here  is his generously published  slide presentation.   

Peter Adams, President of the California Art Club. Talking about his commission to paint the  Stations of the Cross in the L.A. Cathedral.

 Among the lectures that were not strictly demos, Jean Stern from the Irvine Museum on Franz Bischoff , Peter Adams from the California Art Club on his Jerusalem trip and commission ,  John Stobart and Mian Situ on their careers.... All very interesting from a documentary  or aspirational  point of view.

My notes on Skip Whitcomb lecture.

So there is something to be said about seeing so many artists demonstrating and speaking. A "cloud" of information to be sure but one that brought some points home. It's impossible for me in this blog to  try to elaborate on everything so I will talk about what the highlights were for me personally.

Thursday, after our ungodly hour marketing bootcamp, we had the pleasure of attending a demo by Skip Whitcomb who is an amazing painter all around. My favorite quote of his, I paraphrase: "Everybody says you have to leave your first bad 7.000, 10,000 even, paintings behind. But in order to do that and become good you need to understand why they were bad. Otherwise it's like setting the toaster on one number forever and putting one slice of bread after another expecting they won't burn."

He emphasized the necessity to do a quick sketch first, to calm down and gather thoughts, not jumping into painting straight away.  "There is NO TIME  to work in a bad idea" when you are a professional painter and "baby needs some shoes". That makes prep work even more essential. You know when a painting has gone south because you start "futzing" with the little things. Noodling is a big red flag. Keep the big shapes clear, the main idea. Skip doesn't sell his studies, he uses them for reference.

I did really enjoy Skip's approach and professional attitude. His dismissal of those who brag about painting eight pieces a day "it's not a race, paint for yourself." His advice on looking at books and "filling up your well" before setting out as a way of finding a standard of excellence. Copying from the masters not as a repetitive task but as a way of discovering solutions.

Another impressive demo was that of Peggy Kroll-Roberts, painting from the model (Ali, daughter of Ray and Peggy). She talked about her use of the mirror as a means to look at paintings as if someone else had done them and thus allowing the space to find errors. She talked about the importance of decision making. Sounds trite but deciding on what color or shape is something I struggle with and Peggy's work can be regarded as a constant exercise on decision. Likeness in a portrait is about the big stuff, not the small details. So again, big shapes, clear ideas and excellent draftmanship. She recommended Loomis book on drawing. As it usually happens, now I see Peggy's work differently and appreciate the boldness of it.

Other demos I attended that day were offered by Michael Godfrey who brought a semi-finished piece and talked about composition, painting on foggy days and creating mystery. Alexey Steele did a drawing demo and Rosemary showed how she makes her famous brushes .

Of course most of the fun conversation happens in the lobbies, where does Rosemary get her mongoose hair, what is it about BYU Art school that produces such accomplished painters; did they really rent a mule to go to the Sierras; is Wordpress the most economical way to set a website or build it yourself from scratch.; etc, etc.. And making new friends. I did make a few new ones like Dave Tanner and meet up with some old ones like Michelle de Braganca.

No lack of subject matter in Monterey.

"Ou Shared Light" The Exhibition.

 

What makes an exhibition great is rarely the artwork no matter how fabulous it is. What makes an exhibition great is the people that show up, the ones that want to show up but can't, the ones that wish they could, forgot, don't want to, etc.... because an art show is about dialogue. Not the academic kind or strictly a dialogue about art but the mixing and matching of people sharing impressions, eating cheese and bumping into each other.

Guess what, the title of the show was meant to mean exactly that.

Thank you to the auspices and trust of Laura Segil, a long held dream of mine, may be the only dream that really mattered to me, has come to pass.  From the dialogue point of view, the show was  a TOTAL unmitigated success. I also sold nine paintings which is awesome in itself and great validation considering the economy. And it is even better now that I got laid off from my job of the last ten years (yep, the day before the show, terrifying and weird at the same time).

I want to thank EVERYONE that even took a look at the artwork and specially those who made the trek to Monrovia the same day Glenn Dean was having his opening in the other side of town. I am deeply honored.

I chose 40 paintings that more or less reflect my intention of showcasing the beauty of everyday, with its highlights and its focus on human interaction (and some chickens too). A few landscapes but mostly people in context, working, walking and milling around. People commented on the variety of subject matter. Possibly that comes from the many starts and stops that working on this show involved while keeping a full time job. It is up till May 4th, some paintings are already gone, you can still make it ;)

A computer cheat defeated

In my previous post Judy wrote that may be using a computer amounts to a "cheat". She is right to a certain extent. Vermeer  and Ingres didn't have Photoshop. However, they *did* use devices. Click on either painter's name  to see what they were up to.

But just as an example. The other day I visited the Huntington with my dear friend Molly Lipsher. While we were there, a painting caught my attention. I am not particularly fond of it, it's very nice and all but what attracted me to it was the subordination of the whole painting to one note of very saturated color. This is exactly the kind of thing a "garyscale map" in Photoshop might not resolve if taken from a photograph.

Here is the original "The Last Gleanings" by Jules Andre Breton.

 

And here is the Photoshop treatment of the painting as I explained in my posting before.  In the grayscale version you would never guess the prominence the red sun in the real painting. The chromatic saturation stands out more than the tonal value so while the whole painting hangs on that touch of red ,tonally speaking, it's not even an accent.

Ah, but that's not all there is. In the image bellow I used the "levels" adjustment in Photoshop to eliminate all the middle and low reds, basically leaving only the top saturated reds. Not surprisingly, the sun glows now  like a traffic light. Sold!

Values made easy...with the computer.

How do you manipulate images in the computer to obtain a grayscale tone map.
It is very easy in Photoshop or any other paint package with similar functions. You can do this to any image you want to paint to aid you in discovering the true tones or families of related tones.



Let's start with a random image. Here is one of a Motel in L.A.







It is a not a very complicated image but it can be tricky to determine  what are the prevalent tonal values just by looking at it.

PHOTOSHOP INSTRUCTIONS:

First , let's discard the color.
Image > Mode > Grayscale (discard color info , yes, but do not save the image over the old one)

Second, let's posterize . There are infinite ways of doing this.
Posterize just removes all gradations and returns an image with the amount of levels you specify.
Image >Adjustment> Posterize (level 3)

Third:
Because it's a little grainy, let's blur it a bit.
Filters>Gaussian blur.

Fourth :
Posterize yet again

And there you have it.The Motel reduced to grayscale. I bet you didn't guess the sky was closer in value to the asphalt.

Preconceptions as teachable moments.

Except for a few boy and girl geniuses, we've all asked silly questions at some point or another. Actually, it is true there are no silly questions except when they are repeated . I saw a funny t-shirt that aimed to answer common questions asked to plein air painters from people that walk by and have the blessed curiosity to ask.  This got me thinking about innocent, annoying or just plain repeated comments  uttered by painters and workshop attendees. Many of them based in preconceptions.   I've made similar comments so this isn't meant to embarrass anyone. It's about seeing the humor in their recurrence.

SOLD IT! Gone to a good home.
All in capitals. Like the ding ding ding of a casino slot machine. While sales are a wonderful validation and it is so very  hard not to share your success this has to be the worst offender on Facebook.  At least I find it a bit off, may be I'm wrong.  Unless you are a gallery owner  showing off your market prowess or the lucky seller is taking us for dinner I wonder what  purpose loudly announcing sales really fulfills.  Is it just just braggin'?  Creating the impression that you better hurry or you'll miss out if you are a patron?  If the announcement is accompanied by the  actual monetary value, I'd say that would be great information, I am not advocating any sort of  "discrete classiness", being an artist is a business too. This business aspect of being an artist interests me greatly, what about sharing your business plans? What about sharing your struggles, monetary or otherwise? Now THAT would be worth reading abbout.  As for the "good home"...what are you selling...puppies? You know you'd sell a painting to a mafia overlord/lady  if he/she came knocking.


What colors did you mix to get that color?
The eternal search for the recipe. It takes time and color charts to know your colors. Moreover, a color is meaningless unless another color sits beside it. The same grey can be a shiny green in one canvas and a neutral mud in another. While color mixes can be interesting, it is not a paint by numbers world. The formula that makes a good painting for one is the kiss of death for another. That's why we practice incessantly.  
Similar to this is the issue of  priming colors.  "I always prime my canvas bright red (or any other color)." Self-imposed habits and rules are great but there has to be a why behind them. Similar formulas abound. For example:  "Adding people sells paintings.".People and human figures add a certain scale and narrative accent to paintings of landscape. But like highlights on a glass bottle, the more you abuse this formula, the more you start to rely on  it and things go downhill in a hurry. People, highlights, they all  are compositional elements, not something to be "added" to guarantee sales.

"I hate to paint cars/cows/people..."
I think when people say they hate painting something specific like cars what they really are saying is: "I don't know how to see cars as a painter yet, I still see them as things and not as light and shadow." This is actually a great opening for teaching.   Of course our hearts go to certain subjects, cats, flowers, women, banks on fire, the devil in high heels... but the "hating" of a subject or its difficulty lies within the painter's knowledge or experience of painting itself, not it's inherent beauty. A scene can be complex or simple but the objects in it have very little to do with  whether they would make a good or a bad painting. The other side of this is that the public has similar prejudices and might not go for   a superior painting based on subject matter alone. Similar to this : "The light at noon is too flat". "It's not sunny so I can't paint."etc...


Do I need to know perspective.
Yes. You do. Especially if you are going to paint buildings, interiors, even still lives . The good news is that painters don't need to calculate orthographic projections like a scenographer  would or cast shadows mathematically. The perspective you need to know as a painter is very easily understood but nevertheless essential. Where's your horizon, your vanishing points, your choice of p.o.v....done.It's hard to teach this on the field but it's the perfect homework assignment. Same thing with anatomy. We need a certain level of  anatomy education to paint the figure.


"I'm just experimenting. "
A failure is a failure, not an experiment. Nothing to be ashamed of..Failure is expected, even desired. An experiment limits the variables to test an unknown outcome but has a purpose. An experiment requires preparation and method. In other words, an experiment takes even more time and effort than just humming along.  A train wreck is not an experiment. Move on.  to the next painting or try hard to figure out what went wrong and seek advice. Failures can be as powerful or more than great paintings if we don't dismiss them as experiments.
Similar to this : "I need to finish this painting" and the very famous "The light changed so (my painting went south)" Start a new one and don't linger. It's the light changing that makes painting outdoor a challenge . Commit to a light situation and memorize it. Can't use that as an excuse.
 


I didn't bring  sun lotion. It's your skin.

A book to go with it.

In anticipation of my solo show I decided to squeeze some time to make a small book showing a bit of everything I've been up to in the last two years. I am happy with it even if I might modify it a bit now that I have it in my hands.

Click on the upper right panel to review and purchase. 

Enjoy!

My first solo show is here.

My first solo show is almost here.  Saturday April 6th 2013 from 5 to 7pm I will be presenting my artwork at the Segil Gallery in Monrovia, CA , just a few miles East of Pasadena. 

Everybody and their mothers are invited of course.

 

See some of the paintings here :"Our Shared Light"