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.
Category Archives: Landscape Paintings
Coronado Beach
Painted on the beach in Coronado.
Rialto at Night
Venice at night, just as a light autumn rain began to fall. Several monuments were under construction including the Rialto bridge, whose scaffolding was wrapped in a Guess ad.
Canalscape
A secret garden on a quiet canal in Venice.
Del Mar Bluffscape
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.
Stormy Weather
Sunset Cliffs, San Diego
Rock and Surf
The original title for this one was Rock And Bird Shit, but I hate to be crass.
Street, Ocean Beach
This mid century building and its stumpy date palm really spoke to me about the vernacular here.
San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Seen from the Molo across the water. Ah, Venice. This is my last picture from the trip, except two from Rome that I’m iffy about. To celebrate, I’m going to replicate a supper we ate there- pasta alla norma followed by chicken milanese (basically a breaded chicken cutlet.) And plot my next trip!
Piazza del Popolo
Wet, Piazza del Popolo, Rome. There’s an obelisk here- brought from Egypt, and in the famous view paintings of these almost-twin churches, they are usually seen with the obelisk in front. But the obelisk was under construction and had a giant screen in front of it (with a Samsung phone ad on the screen), so that wasn’t an option- or so it seemed at the time. Kind of regret not including it now.
The Piazza del Popolo is also where you can go see this stunning Caravaggio, which is one of my favorites:
You can pay 1 Euro to light up both paintings- This one, The Conversion of St Paul on the Road to Damascus- truly a masterpiece- and the Martyrdom of St Peter next to it. I paid the Euro.
Il Redentore
Palladio’s famous church on La Giudecca. This is one of the views I especially wanted to paint in Venice, because I wanted to feel the connection to art history and the veduta tradition that originated here.
On a Dock, Venice
Piazza San Marco, Venice
I was absolutely fascinated by the acqua alta, or high water in the lower streets in Venice. It laid out for me the engineering feat that building this city was- and the ongoing challenges as well. Not sure how to express this sentiment but I’ll try- even though it’s surpassingly beautiful, the sheer will, determination, and stubbornness of the long ago Venetians to build a city in the water impresses me even more.
Foro Romano
In no particular order will follow the rest of the pictures from my trip to Rome and Venice.
I wanted to visit some of the classic sites that inspired so many 18th century “view” paintings (or vedute in Italian.) That’s where it all comes from, a hundred years before the Impressionists, and those historical pictures got in my head a few years ago and started me painting them here in San Diego.
I didn’t realize it at the time but this isn’t the vantage point I had intended to paint. I think I should have been on the other side of the Capitoline hill, which is the vantage point (I think) from Turner’s famous version of this. That painting was on the cover of copy of The Silmarillion I stole from my sister when I was kid. I loved that picture.