Tag Archives: beach

Coronado Beach Plein Air

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.

Plein Air, Coronado

Coronado Beach Plein Air

Heat wave in San Diego. When I started this yesterday it was very clear and hot, with strong gusty furnace like winds.

Coronado Day 1

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.

Coronado Day 2

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.