Desert Mountains, Nevada – For sale
This is the 2nd of 3 plein air paintings I completed in Red Rocks Canyon, near Las Vegas. A really beautiful place.
Red Rock Canyon Landscape Painting 2
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Category Archives: Landscape Paintings
Hillcrest, San Diego Plein Air
Hillcrest Painting San Diego Plein Air – For sale
Morning light on the corner of Robinson and Park Blvd in San Diego. A short walk from my house in Hillcrest.
I like this corner because of the way the buildings pile up on the hill behind the art deco building in front. I like painting steep areas.
San Francisco’s vertigo- inducing streets are more famous- but San Diego’s got its fair share of knee-killing ascents. Painting the city on the hills is a new project of mine.
Here are a few of my favorites:
North Park from Hillcrest
Hillcrest
North Park
University Heights
Santa Barbara Beach Sunset
Santa Barbara, California Beach Painting – Buy now
A rosy dusk on the beach in Santa Barbara, with sailboats softly lit golden by the setting sun.
Red Rock Canyon Painting
Red Rock Canyon Painting, Las Vegas, Nevada – Buy now
A plein air painting from Red Rock national conservation area in Las Vegas, Nevada.
I planned to go at dawn.
I would paint glorious desert sunrises. I left the hotel at 6:15. It was only 20 minutes to Red Rocks.
I then got hopelessly lost. But hope is an anchor, and I did not give up.
Those of you who’ve known me for a while are familiar with the drill. The night before, I carefully copied down directions to and from my hotel. I sent maps to my phone. I double checked everything. I drove out of the parking garage, took one wrong turn, and proceeded to drive all the way around the city on the beltway.
Eventually, I did find the right road, so I exited 215 and drove out into the desert. I was rejoicing- but I rejoiced too soon. The road dead-ended in a half-built subdivision.
Turned out I was still on the opposite side of town from Red Rocks. So I executed a 3 point turn and drove straight across the city for about 20 miles, or 40 miles, or however far it was, and arrived at Red Rocks around 2 PM. Red Rocks was stunningly beautiful so I think it was worth it.
The day was wonderfully mild- not 105 as I had feared, and I was able to work on several paintings. Here’s the first one.
Red Rock Canyon Plein Air
Morning Alley, Hillcrest
Hillcrest Alley, San Diego Art Painting
Morning in a Hillcrest alley. Abandoned tower PC in the dry, crackly weeds.
North Park Deco Starbucks
North Park San Diego Painting
A corner in North Park, where a restored Deco- era movie theatre now also includes this Starbucks and a bar. This is University Ave and… Grim? 30th? Ray Street? This is a partial plein-air, partial studio piece.
North Park Cottage
Cottage in North Park, San Diego
A cottage in North Park, overhung by magnolia trees, in morning light.
And if you looked the other way that morning, you saw this:
Orange Tabby Cat Painting
View from the Cosmopolitan, Las Vegas
The view from our 51st floor balcony at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. Another plein air piece- I didn’t touch it up and just left it rough. I like it this way.
Painting in Vegas
Leaving Vegas at the crack of dawn, laden with heavy, heavy painting stuff. Shephard Fairey mural in the parking garage of the hotel.
Coronado Beach Painting
Coronado Beach, San Diego ,California – landscape painting
A bright sunny day on the beach in Coronado.
Santa Ynez Valley Landscape Painting
Santa Ynez California Landscape Painting
The rolling hills above Santa Barbara, dotted with California oaks and livestock.
The Cloudy Alley
San Diego Urban Painting
Morning in a cloudy alley in Hillcrest. Old houses and recycling bins- two of my favorite things to paint!
Industrial Landscape
San Diego Industrial Landscape Painting
An industrial building off Convoy in San Diego. This is by our favorite Korean restaurant (Grandma’s Tofu), but there’s never any parking so we park by this place. I really like the street- mid century warehouses and industrial buildings and acres of parking lots full of big trucks and delivery vans.
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout recently published this piece about her love-hate relationship with San Diego in Newsweek. (Matthew Hall of the San Diego Union- Tribune responds here.)
I don’t want to be scathing about the essay, since I think what she’s trying to say in her graceless way is that her suburban childhood blinded her to the quiet charm of this place. And I think that’s fair enough. A lot of people probably feel that way about wherever they grew up. They want to get out of there and try someplace different. Then they eventually move back to their hometown and never stop complaining about it until they die.
I wanted to mention Armantrout’s essay because my entire body of recent work deals with the “here-ness” of San Diego.
Armantrout says San Diego has no charisma, no sense of place, has a “blankness.”
But she’s wrong about that.
Gertrude Stein was equally wrong when she said of Oakland that “there’s no there there.”
There’s a there everyplace. Every painter knows this. If you think there isn’t, the thing that’s barren is not the place you live; the thing that’s barren is your imagination.
Santa Barbara Beach Clouds
Santa Barbara Beach Painting
A cool walk on the beach in Santa Barbara in a cloudy, grey morning.
Cottage Liquor, Hillcrest
Cottage Liquor in Hillcrest. This is where I go to buy 90% of my Lotto tickets.
This is as far as I got with the painting plein air before the sun got too fierce, around 9:30 AM. I’d already had to move the easel once (the date palm went behind the building when I did) to get under a tree… one of my first painting teachers told us, paint in the shade, and she’s absolutely right.
Painting of USD
Painting of University of San Diego
The University of San Diego on its hilltop, seen from across Mission Valley in… Pioneer Park? I think that’s the name.
I painted this on Labor Day in a perfect ocean breeze.
Sometimes I touch up plein air works in the studio afterwards, but this time I liked the painting the way it is.