Resuming the Watercolor of Trinidad, Colorado

Savoy Coffee Shop in downtown Trinidad, Colorado

For about two months, I have been of a mind to throw this watercolor away, nothing was going the way I wanted it to.  After letting it lay dormant for weeks, I took it to school today and decided after my classes were finished to see if I could salvage it.  Fortunately, the painting turned itself around today, and I am very pleased with the direction it is taking.  I darkened the shadows in many areas, and intensified the reds in several other places.  Finally, I laid in the basic wash for the street and put down the yellow striping.

Sitting and staring at it from across the classroom, I recorded eight more observations of things that need to be done with the picture, so I am still a good ways from finishing it.  But I am much happier with it today than I have been in a long, long time.

The watercolor measures 22 x 28″ and I must say I was lost in it for a good while.  That is why I laid it aside.  I was exhausted by the process and unhappy with the results, until this afternoon.  I have locked the painting away in my classroom, and for the time being, have decided only to work on it during the afternoons following classes.  I’ll tend other important matters at home in the evenings.

I have all my art work on display and for sale in my classroom (Room 114) at Arlington Martin High School until December 21 when we go home for the Christmas holidays.  This is something I have done every December for a number of years now.  It is nice to see all the work out in front of me, not only while I’m teaching (it’s in the back of the classroom, in my line of sight, over the students’ heads) and in the afternoons while I’m enjoying coffee and working on my big Trinidad watercolor.

Thanks for reading.

 

Still Buzzed by the Weekend Road Trip

Fort Worth Stockyards

“Right over those knolls over there, something wonderful is going to be.  Uh, but you found out that, the more you went, there was just more knolls.”      (interview with Ken Kesey)

In the past few days, I have reopened Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, thus renewing my own favorite past time.  As I journeyed two hours toward Tyler, Texas early yesterday morning, I laughed to myself as I recalled the words above that Ken Kesey uttered in a moment of candor.  Many times I have found nothing more than extra knolls waiting for me as I journeyed hopefully toward some kind of grail at the end of my road odyssey.  But yesterday, something wonderful indeed was waiting at the end of my search.  I was greeted by the embrace of Wyeth’s spirit, and delighted myself in the company of his marvelous art.

Today has been an all-day romp over this painting (except for some stolen moments re-assembling my man cave in the garage–it’s nice to have cold weather in Texas and be able to work in the garage, putting that abandoned studio back in order).  As I linger over the surface of this cattle drive, I continue to stitch up loose details.  I spent most of today on the right-hand side of the composition, detailing and separating the bodies of the longhorns and trying to finish the background foliage, signage and grounds.  Then I switched to the left, laying in the basic colors and textures of the street beneath the foreground horse’s hooves.  I still have plenty of work to do on the horse and rider.

As I retired to bed last evening, thinking over the events of the Andrew Wyeth day I had just experienced, I could not stop writing in my journal and perusing the volumes I have on Wyeth’s work.  Plenty of ideas for new work emerged, and I am anxious to see where they take me.  I have not only Wyeth to thank for the new ideas, but some key ideas that have sprung from recent readings in T. S. Eliot, Henry David Thoreau and especially Joseph Heller’s Something Happened.  I found the reading of Heller’s novel very sobering when I first went through it back in 2005.  When we get past mid-life, things happen that often turn our world dark, and Something Happened explores that world with frankness.  Well, yesterday I can certainly say Something Happened, and it is much larger than Wyeth and an art museum, and I cannot express enough gratitude for it.  For the first time in years, I feel that I could be on to something quite special as I make this new excursion into art production.  Indeed, I have heightened expectations for new discoveries.

Thanks for reading.

Off to St. Louis

Sun Rising on Winfield, Missouri

Dear Friends,

If you don’t hear from me for awhile, it will mean that I am without Internet access.  I leave in the morning for St. Louis to participate in the Taste of St. Louis art festival.  Two weeks ago, at Grapefest, I was unable to get adequate Internet access to blog from my booth (I always like to blog onsite at festivals).  So, if the blog goes silent, please understand that I am unplugged.

I am posting a reproduction of a large watercolor I completed last year, that is now at the Weiler House Fine Art Gallery (www.weilerhousefineart.com).  This print is 8 x 10″ and I have put it in an 11 x 14″ matte with plastic sleeve.  The setting is Winfield, Missouri, a sleepy Mississippi River town sprawled along Highway 79 north of St. Louis.  I captured this image on camera just as the sun was rising, back in the summer of 2009.  I was saddened to see the store out of business, as it featured all the advertising and signage I had loved seeing as a child.

Well, I must get some rest for tomorrow’s road odyssey.  Thanks for reading.

Watercolor Sketching Inside an Art Festival Booth

Trinidad Residential Morning

Some classes I open a book to begin.

Today in philosophy I opened a vein.

Good afternoon.  After days of weariness, I finally feel as though I have re-entered the world.  I am coming off a four-day art festival that averaged 13-hour days sitting in a booth, then going home to catch four hours of sleep and return.  That, coupled with the strenuous load-in and load-out of my booth, furniture and art work, left me physically devastated.  The festival ran Thursday through Sunday night, and I had to rise at 6:00 Monday morning and resume teaching my high school classes.  Frankly, I remember only fragments of Monday and Tuesday.

But today was a new and splendid day.  I began with a Philosophy class at 7:35, where we reviewed our past research and findings in the Presocratic thinkers, then folded their ideas into the legacies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  The ninety-minute class (to me) seemed only to last five minutes, and it was over.  I was breathless.  I went to my journal and penned the couplet that opens this blog (I would be horrified if I were to find out that the words were already used–they felt like my own, and still do).  Next, I waited for the back-to-back ninety-minute Art History classes to arrive.  The topic was Andy Warhol as the Genius of Pop Art.  I had prepared an extensive powerpoint presentation, and used it as a springboard to open an energetic discussion on his “factory” approach to creating and marketing art, his mysterious persona, and the overall fun that springs from the creative process.  We enjoyed contrasting the Pop Artists and their bare commercial images with their predecessors–the Abstract Expressionists along with their esoteric, brooding themes and academic theories.  Again, the two classes felt as though they ran five minutes each, and then they were over.  I was finished teaching.  I just collapsed in my chair, thankful for a good day, a sublime day in an educational setting where students seemed genuinely hungry and enthused to learn, to explore new frontiers.

O.K., the painting posted above–I sketched out this watercolor on Thursday, the first of the four-day Grapefest held in Grapevine, Texas last week.  For some reason, the Wi-Fi access was spotty (unlike last year, when I blogged daily from my booth).  I could not get my photos uploaded, and the Internet access was flowing like molasses.  So, I gave up, deciding to post the stuff on the following week.  At any rate, Thursday was a very slow day for sales, and not very many patrons were flowing through the festival, especially from 10:00-5:00.  So, I brought with me my watercolor supplies and an 8 x 10″ enlarged photo of some residences I photographed in Trinidad, Colorado during one of my past vacations in that “colorful” state.  As I recall, it was in the morning when I captured this, the mountain atmosphere and golden sun rays were bathing the facades of the neighborhood houses, and I could hear that oft-quoted line of Edward Hopper: “I have been a stranger to humanity.  All I wanted to do was paint the sunlight on the side of the wall.”  I was always smitten at the sight of his painting Second Story Sunlight, wishing myself to paint one day the steep-pitched roofs and gable ends of frame houses bathed in the morning sun.  I found my opportunity at last while sitting in my art booth, looking at a splendid photo composition of a Colorado mountain morning.

The same kind of sun that flooded that Colorado morning had a way of flooding my soul during my classes this morning at Martin High School.  I’m grateful to look back now on such a day.  It is now 5:49 p.m., and I’m feeling a substantial measure of satisfaction.

Thanks for reading.

Preparing for Grapefest, (Grapevine, Texas) September 13-16

Wednesday night, I will be setting up my booth for the four-day Grapefest art festival at Grapevine, Texas.  All the pieces are nearly in place, but it looks like I could still be putting in some late nights today and tomorrow.  There is still some matting and shrink-wrapping to complete, and I have two watercolors still to finish (I would like to have them ready by festival time).

This is a painting of the ghost town of St. Elmo, Colorado, near Tin Cup Pass.  I photographed it on 35mm slides about ten years ago, and finally got around to painting it this summer on a full-size sheet of watercolor paper.  I’m getting ready to shrink-wrap it and matte it for sale in the booth this weekend.

Thanks for reading.

Feeling the Andy Warhol Adrenalin, Preparing for the Next Festival

Trinidad, Colorado

It’s Friday night.  My next art festival (Grapefest) begins in the middle of next week.  I have a weekend free to pursue the Andy Warhol/Factory lifestyle.  The only difference is that I will not have 21 employees working out of my studio, packaging my inventory.  But, I have plenty of coffee, plenty of time, plenty of space and two Andy Warhol documentary DVDs to keep me company as I work at finishing up some incomplete watercolors and matting and shrinkwrapping the ones already finished.

Above is my large 22 x 28″ piece from Trinidad, Colorado.  I still have plenty of ghost sign details to clean up, plenty of building left on the left side of the composition, and the street and sidewalk out front.  I hope to have this wrapped up on Saturday.  I’m getting ready to post other photos I’ve taken of the other works I’m packaging.  So, there is more to follow . . .

Thanks for reading.

There’s a Certain Slant of Light

There’s a Slant of Light

There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
‘Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ‘t is like the distance
On the look of death.

–Emily Dickinson

From my childhood, I have been arrested at the sight of dramatic sunlight and shadows falling across abandoned structures such as this one I found north of Weatherford several summers ago.  I believe, however, that my sentiments have always lay closer to the painter Edward Hopper than the poet Emily Dickinson, though I confess that Dickinson’s poetry evokes considerably more than Hopper’s testimony:  “All I ever wanted to do was paint the light on the side of the building.”  Having read hundreds of pages of biography on Hopper, I have come to the conclusion that his disposition was closer to Emily than mine.  I personally find a sense of joy and the sublime when I see a 45-degree slant of sunlight across a dilapidated structure, and have felt that for as long as I can remember.  The young Henry David Thoreau recorded in his journal: “Aeschylus had a clear eye for the commonest things.”  I could say the same for myself, except that, to me, these “commonest things” cease being prosaic the moment they are bathed in natural light, the moment a geometric, hard-edge shadow emerges to define their contours.

I have spent some of this Friday morning, gazing out the window of my studio into the backyard, admiring the patterns of sun and shadow falling across my privacy fence.  I often wish I could call up the kind of language that Wordsworth did when he described the stirrings he felt deep within, as nature invited him for a closer inspection.  All of these things matter to me as I write this morning, and seek a way to complete this small watercolor that I started and abandoned over a week ago.

studio

My apologies for leaving the blog dangling for so long, again.  I spent the past week attending the Advanced Placement Summer Institute at TCU.  I have to fulfill my Art History requirement there every third summer.  The classes lasted from 8-4:30 daily, and I hadn’t realized how many years it had been since I sat and listened for such long stretches, taking notes, focusing and experiencing brain drain.  When I got home every evening, I had nothing left to give at the studio.  So, I gave my painting a rest.

This morning, I am thinking of finishing this small piece, matting and framing it to put in a Craft Show tomorrow (Saturday) from 9-3:00 at the Stephen United Methodist Church, 1800 W. Randol Mill Rd., Arlington, Texas.  It is time to get some more of my original small watercolors out into the marketplace.

Thanks for reading.

Lost in Colorado Wonder

Painting St. Elmo, Colorado, late night in the studio

I always laughed at the stories of Pablo Picasso working in his studio at 3 a.m.  Long ago, I lost the ability to pull all-nighters.  I miss them.  But this could be a late one.  I took a nap this evening (had a pretty miserable afternoon) and now am waking more as the hours roll by, and am getting lost in the rustic architecture of this Colorado mountain town.  I recall it as vividly as if it were yesterday.  Four of us were about to embark on a foolhardy trip over Tin Cup pass in a Jeep Grand Cherokee 4-wheel drive.  We made the trip, but I still think the decision was foolish.  I don’t bother to sport the bumper sticker “I Survived Tin Cup Pass”‘; I don’t take a lot of pride in doing that trip with a vehicle not quite cut out for it (Geez, 4-ply tires even!  What a fool).

I lingered around St. Elmo for quite a long time that afternoon, shooting my old 35mm camera, using Kodachrome slide film.  I’m glad I saved the slides, though technology in the schools has all but made them obsolete.  I don’t know how much longer this Kodak carousel projector is going to hold up.

I took a break from painting to read a bit (I’m re-reading Basquiat by Phoebe Hoban), and to look at this work-in-progress on an easel across the room from my man cave.  I like the habit of Andrew Wyeth, putting up his work so he could glance up at it while doing something else, or while entering a room, and thus get a snapshot impression of it to know what works, what doesn’t, and most of all, figure out when to quit the thing.  I’m making myself stop right now because I’ve crawled into the painting to the point that I’m focusing on all these minute details and forgetting to see the entire work, compositionally.  That’s how I lose a painting.  There is a haunting soliloquy in the motion picture Six Degrees of Separation, where Donald Sutherland muses over how it feels to “lose a painting.”  I have no words for this.  But I regret those countless times when, signing a painting, I sighed and admitted to myself that it “looked better a week ago.”  I pushed it too far.  Right now, I have questions about this Colorado painting, and so I’ve decided to set it aside while I muse over it, and meanwhile, continue reading Basquiat. 

Thanks always for reading.

Watercoloring the Colorado High Places

Colorado Mountain Town

I tried to make today count, studio-wise.  But it got intolerably hot in the man cave this afternoon.  Now with the Texas night temperatures dropping, I find myself wishing for some of those St. Elmo, Colorado mountain temperatures right about now.  Despite the bugs everywhere around me (they must really like these citronella Tiki torches), I am finding the opportunity to paint again.  Posted is what I managed to do during the morning hours when it was cool and pleasant.

I’m working overtime, trying to “fold” these buildings with better contrasts.  There is a deep shadow between them.  I’ve decided to render the one on the right in gold and the one on left (not in this picture yet) in brick red.  The siding is peeling badly, which is just what I like in watercolor rendering.  I’m trying to use my brushes more as pencils, taking advantage of the cold-press texture of this paper, in capturing the blistered wooden surfaces of the buildings.

I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll have this painting finished in time for the weekend show at Levitt Pavilion.  That was not my design, but I’m surprised at how fast this one is shaping up.  It is not as large as the ones I’ve done previously, this one measuring 16.5 x 22.5 inches.  Thanks to an afternoon nap, I just may be able to stay with this one late into the night.  We’ll see how it goes.

Thanks always for reading.

Preparing for Exhibit at DeSoto City Hall

Tell Me Where the Road Is

I feel the constant need to apologize to my faithful readers for not creating new work.  I’ve been so sick this past week, and have gone to school each day anyway, and then come home to collapse into bed.  Every day I am getting a little  better, but I’m still not back to full health.

This afternoon, I’ll deliver fifteen framed watercolors to DeSoto City Hall for an April exhibit.  I’m honored to be asked to exhibit there, and it is a beautiful venue for art.

This posted painting will be the centerpiece of my new show.  I’m showing the cover of a shopper that published the image a few years ago.  I’ve managed to get plenty of mileage out of this particular watercolor.  The image is a 1946 International truck that belonged to my 4th grade teacher, Betty Langhauser.  For decades, I saw this truck parked beside her home when I traveled to St. Louis to visit my own parents.  Mrs. Langhauser died a few years ago on the 4th of July.  On my next visit home, I saw that the vehicle had been removed from the property, and know that I’ll never see it again.  I’m glad I photographed it the year before she passed away and made the painting of it.

Tomorrow I begin another three-day art festival, Kennedale’s annual Art in the Park.  If I have Wi-Fi access, I’ll publish from that location.  If not, then I’ll publish from my home the delayed news.

Thanks for reading.