I painted this a few weeks ago, but it was a study for a wedding gift and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. 8 x 13 inches, oil on linen.
I painted this a few weeks ago, but it was a study for a wedding gift and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. 8 x 13 inches, oil on linen.
Lots of things happen on the cliffs. On the week I painted this there were two cliff rescues, with fire trucks and big winches. There was someone cliff diving and tourists taking pictures of it. There was a delivery of a classic corvette to a beachfront mansion. A street was closed off for a gas leak you could smell for blocks. And painting happened.
Painted on the beach in Coronado.
10th Street, I think, in Del Mar. A fun place to paint with the trains going by on one side and the surfers climbing down the cliffs on the other.
Storm rolling in off the Pacific at the Dog Beach in OB.
The original title for this one was Rock And Bird Shit, but I hate to be crass.
Painted on the beach in Coronado last week, before I left San Diego for a few days in Las Vegas. Just got around to photographing it today.
I’ve been playing around lately with a more conventional approach to Impressionism. In this piece, Pissarro’s ‘petite tache’ and palette and what all. My approach to painting doesn’t tend to come from that place- I got here via a winding path out of modernist abstraction that eventually led to being on a street corner with a paint box. So it’s fun to tinker with the style, so familiar from childhood visits to the National Gallery of Art in DC. We’ll see if it becomes a thing.
Heat wave in San Diego. When I started this yesterday it was very clear and hot, with strong gusty furnace like winds.
I didn’t quite finish, so I decided to go back this morning. The light, though, was very different today. Sort of like the apocalypse, with a brown haze over the sea horizon (which lifted eventually as it usually does) and a strange murky quality to the air.
Sometimes you have to choose between the act of copying what you see- that’s what Monet was generally trying to do, as accurately as possible – vs poetic license with your color. It would have been easy enough to edit the color to match a brighter, prettier day, but I decided to tread the path of angels and painted it over with today’s overcast light effects.
Painted on location on the Dog Beach.
A nice, relaxing morning painting at the beach.
Painted on location on the dog beach. We got some rain recently- rare around here, and for once the area did not smell like urine.