Carmel in review

Starting off with a better pic of the painting that I won with, I figured I'd sort of retrace the days events, in nutshell fashion. A side note, the paintings are a tad out of order, I can't figure out how to place them correctly. First Don Sondag and I get in on monday around noon to San Jose and after a few hours looking for things like paper towels and rain coats (pouring rain) and art stuff, we wrapped up without painting. The next morning was clear and beautiful and we headed down to Garapatta for some rocks and water. That thing we don't get much of around here. I posted one of the paintings earlier, "rocks are hard", I think it was... I've since reworked it and made it somewhat better. After a day or two of failures (for me) we went to the check in for the event at 5 pm and were pretty much 1st in line. This is a 2 and 1/4 day event. There's not a whole lot of time to screw around here. So we headed down to Point Lobos, Don, Stacy Barter and I to start something. After about a half hour of getting excited about everything, I listened to that little voice that said, do this one. And I blocked in the above painting until dark, hoping that tomorrow the conditions would be the same for the finish.

Second day we headed down to Garapatta where it was overcast and gray. Having been there the day before I kinda knew what I wanted and went for the next painting down, Garapatta looking south. As it was gray the whole time there's was ample amounts of consistent light to get what I wanted. Towards the end the light broke in the distance so I put that in as a counter point to the tree. I think the rest of the day was failursville with at least one scraper. Feels good to scrape, even under duress. Then back to Pt. Lobos to finish what I had started.

Friday we had to have at least two good ones but hopefully more for turn in by 6 pm. No pressure there. We spent the morning driving for hours looking for light (overcast again) in an agricultural setting... hours. Bad idea. We ended up at a little park across from a luncheon place. And just decided to paint something with trees because they were there. This 16x20 (at right) was just a tad complicated for a couple hours of painting, made more so because the sun came out at the end and changed everything, but I just used the light at the center point and kept everything else in shade. During the show on sunday, since there was no one there, I repainted the whole thing. Drew a crowd. I left it with my new gallery out there. Rieser Fine Art.

Once that was done we drove like hell for the boats at Moss Landing. White hulls on gray on gray equals not interesting but as the clock was running out we chose this scene with 3 boats "on the hard". And here's the funniest damn thing, those boats had been there probably 6 months to a year or more. We set up to paint, I get to sketching in and the big blue mover starts heading toward the boat on the right, with the guys scrambling to get all the crap on the ground out of the way. Uh-oh.

I had no choice but to concentrate on that boat  and block in and memorize as much as possible. I've found if you get in the essence of light and shadow and key shapes, you can fudge the rest. 15 minutes later, there was a big gaping hole in my composition. But it turned out okay. I had to push the color difference between the hulls and sky as they were almost identical in real life. I only had 3 good ones to turn in.

Last was the quickdraw for the award winners on sunday. 2 hours to come up with something. I had only 1 12x16 frame so that was the size I had to work with. No plan so there was a bit of wasted time in deciding. I did this last one in about 1 hour 45 minutes. I called it Ocean spray.

On the last day of our trip we had time to paint with John Burton and Jesse Powell, two great California painters and really great people. John had shown us the town earlier in the week, that is all the great secret spots. We also got to see both their studios. Lucky bastards.