"Venetian Gondolier" (oil on linen; 8" x 10") sold

sold

Venice, one of the most enchanting cities in the world, on a sunny, shimmering day.  Glide on a gondola through the meandering canals.  In Venice, one forgets time and becomes timeless. It's like a dream.

"Summer Lake Cruise" (watercolor on paper; 14" x 10") sold

sold

The scene is a lake in the New York state, which I visited on way to Niagara Falls many years ago.  The vacationers were getting on board of a cruise ship festooned with patriotic flags; you can see the captain on the bench watching them.  I left the foreground and the sunlit parts of the figures and boat untouched, since nothing beats the pure white of the paper for imitating the sunlight!

"Red Boat" (watercolor on Yupo; 8" x 8") sold

sold

The scene depicts a small charming marina at Luce Creek in Annapolis, MD.  The red boat sings in this green, blue, and purple landscape, doesn't it?  Its actual color was dark blue!  I had a lot of trouble with this painting.  I wiped out and repainted the sky and water.  Still something bothered me.  But I liked the middle section with the boats so much that I couldn't give up.  So I redid the water one more time.  More disappointment.

I was about to toss it into the waste basket, because one cannot mess with a painting forever.  Suddenly a light bulb went off.  Why not crop it and get rid of the offending bottom portion?  I am raising the attitude of "Never give up, never surrender" to an art form!

Reference photo

"Sunny Marina" (oil on stretched canvas; 12" x 16")

"Sunny Marina" getting block in, next to the reference photo

A couple of weeks ago, two friends and I went to the Washington Sailing Marina on Daingerfield Island in Alexandria, VA. Believe it or not, it is right next to the Washington National Airport.  It can be noisy there and the weather forecast was HOT. But one doesn't hear anything when absorbed in painting boats.  It was actually quite nice in the breeze too.

A small plein air painting I did on that day turned out so so.  Although there were good things about it, I scraped it instead of sweating out to make it work.  Why not a fresh start?  Why torment myself and the world with a mediocre painting?

"Sunny Marina" is a bigger and more complicated painting than the destroyed painting.  I give a standing ovation to the artists who can paint good boat paintings on location.  Boats have got to be the hardest subject to paint--as hard as portraits. Even with the optimal studio painting conditions, it was taxing to paint the boats all stacked together, like sardines in a can!  By the way, I made one important change from the reference photo.  Can you tell what it is?

"Turquoise Time" (oil on linen, 12" x 9") sold

sold

On Sunday morning, Bobbi Pratte had her plein-air workshop students do a black-and-white value study prior to a full-fledged color painting.  I thought I would take it easy and paint just one boat after Saturday's challenge.  I sat down on my stool to do a study of the boat with a turquoise cover.  If you click the photo above, you can see my attempt better.  It didn't take a whole lot of time and actually looked nice, although I later ruined it by accidentally putting a plastic bag for soiled paper towels on top.

By the time I got to colors, the boat on the far right had left.  Bobbie thought I would be better off without it anyway.  She asked me what I was going to do with the top portion of the painting, which was not like what you see in my painting (there was a lot going on in that area).  I said I was going to simplify and treat it as one big shape of dark-toned reflections; she was fine with that.

One very important thing I learned from Bobbi is this: a boat sits in water, not on water.  The line created where it meets water is crucial.  Painting a simple boat was a good idea.  What I like about "Turquoise Time" is that it has a clear, strong message.  I often try to put too many things into a painting and end up with a fussy picture.  As the popular saying goes, less is often more.

"Peaceful Marina" (oil on linen, 9" x 12") sold

sold

On Saturday afternoon, Bobbi Pratte's plein-air workshop students painted a marina at Solomons Island, MD.  Water is hard to paint; boats are even harder to paint.  Two of them combined make a fabulous, but challenging subject for a plein-air painter. 

The reason why water is difficult to paint is that it's hard to tell what colors a body of water happens to be at a particular moment because it reflects sky and many other things all around.  Added to that are the currents, breeze, and the ripples caused by boats going by, which keep shifting the shapes of reflections.  Boats come in so many different shapes and sizes that drawing them in perspective is always a big headache.  I tried them last year en plein air and was not happy with what I produced.  So I challenged myself again this year.

As you can see from the photo above, I moved the boat on the right so that it would be within my picture to balance what's going on on the left side of the painting.  You cannot see in the photo the colors inside the boat shed.  There was a lot of reflected light bouncing into the wall, poles, and the boat.  That's why we paint outside, to really see.  It was chilly in the shade; the ducks in their mating season made quite a bit of noise; and sea gulls hovered in the air as the fishing boats returned.  Whenever I look at the painting, I will always remember these things.

"Maine Event" (mixed media; 14" x 20")

click here to buy

Here is an old painting of mine out of which I got a lot of mileage, since it was juried into The Art League American Landscape Show in 2000, and received the second place in the Potomac Valley Watercolorists Invitational Show in 2003.  You will be surprised at how it all got started.

First of all, it is not quite in my usual realistic style.  My foray into a semi-abstract art happened out of my thriftiness.  On a piece of a half-sheet watercolor paper, I had done a drawing of Cliffs of Moher in Ireland.  I didn't like it; instead I decided to paint fishing boats in Maine.  Unfortunately, I must have marred the paper with the pencil line, which became noticeable as I began to drop paints onto the water area.  Oops.  As the painting was going fine so far, I waited until the paper was bone dry, then connected the indented line, changing here and there to make the dark shape interesting.  (As you can sort of tell, I had turned the paper upside down when I started the second project.)

The painting proceeded in the usual watercolor fashion--layers of darks on lighter shapes.  But when it was done, something was missing.  It felt empty and boring.  I brought out my big box of colored pencils and began to add dots--I went pointillist.  After thousands of dots, the painting glowed, partly because of the wax in colored pencils, but mostly thanks to many dots scintillating against the water--light against dark, dark against light, complementary colors, and so on so forth.  The pointillist masters such as Georges Seurat knew all about it.  A friend of mine tells me that she dreams about "Maine Event."

"Cherry Blossom" (watercolor on paper; 18" x 14") sold

sold

Cherry Blossom is the name of a tour boat that goes up and down the Potomac River.  On the day when I took the reference photo, it was glowing with the sunlight.  A perfect subject to try out the  watercolor technique that I learned in Jean Grastorf 's workshop!  She uses only three colors--a red, blue, and yellow--in large tubes, which she dilutes to a creamy consistency in small separate cups.  On a stretched paper, the whites on the drawing have to be protected with masking fluid. 

Then the messy and fun part begins--you pour the colors, letting them mix and mingle.  As the paper dries, you have to do this in several stages for darker values, at each stage protecting the areas of lighter tones with more masking fluid.  Tedious, yes.  But you just cannot get the same glowing effect with brushes.  The painting was juried into the Art League show in Alexandria, VA in 2005.