California gold

Back from the Carmel Art festival trip and it was good. Better than I expected anyway. Don Sondag (from the Mcrae studio) and I got there on monday and painted from sunrise to sunset everyday to ramp up to the coast and it's vast differences from the Florida landscape. The event started Wednesday eve with 55 or so artists checking their canvases starting at 5. Since Don and I had already been all over and found a few new places I knew that I wanted to start with what I thought would be the best painting, a 16x20 of the cypress trees on 17 mile drive (seen above). Got that blocked in between 6 and 8 pm and got up bright an early to go down the coast past Garrapata and painted a scene looking south (i'll post some of these later) and personally I thought I did a pretty good job both paintings and was feeling pretty good. Next painting was a stinker so my runners high was quelled back to normal levels of insecurity. Back to the spot where I had started the above painting to finish it off in the fog.. the good news was that I had the basic shapes and color notes in and almost could have finished it at the hotel, so it worked out. With some daylight left, ended the day with what I think is a darn good start. My mental roller coaster ended on an up note.  Next day I did two more and really felt pretty darn good about what I had accomplished in two days. This painting in particular was one I have looked for over and over in the last 7 years and finally found on 17 mile drive, a place I have avoided for years.

I'll post more on the trip and paintings in the next edition but this painting won Best oil or acrylic, an odd category to me because they already had 1st,2nd and 3rd plus a few other awards like best local and artists and peoples choice. But the judges were two highly respected artists John Burton and Jesse Powell so I'll take it. This piece ended up going to live auction and was heavily bid on by two or three people. My first time going to live auction actually. Kind of exciting. Didn't sell anything else during the weekend but did okay. Maybe even a gallery in the works.. who knows.