"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

"Morning Harbor" (watercolor on Yupo; 20" x 26") sold

sold

As you know, I used to be a daredevil watercolorist.  I would occasionally pull out a full-sheet of Yupo, the  slick, synthetic "paper" with zero absorbency, let my hair down, and do the wild thing.  With Yupo, the artist has very little control over the painting process.  Paints puddle in oddest places and do their own crazy stuff.  "Red Sails" is the probably the best Yupo painting I have ever done.  I absolutely adore its drippy, watery, lyrical quality.

"Red Sails" (watercolor on Yupo, 20" x 26") sold

"Morning Harbor" is another watercolor painting on Yupo.  It depicts a harbor in northern England bathed in the morning light.  There are no puddles in the painting!  I don't know how I was able to pull it off.  I probably tried a few times to get it just right. (The Yupo surface mars easily; one cannot make corrections easily.)  If I had not told you, you would not have thought it was a Yupo painting.  It has an airy, serene, whispering quality.  Which painting do you like better?

"Golden Gate Bridge on a Stormy Day" (oil on stretched canvas; 12" x 16") sold

sold

From the Marin Headlands, one can see a spectacular view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco skyline.  It is even more spectacular on a windy, stormy day when there is a break in the sky.  I did another Golden Gate Bridge painting recently, as you can see below.  The earlier painting shows the famous red suspension bridge from Baker Beach, which stretches a mile below the rugged cliffs on the Presidio's western shoreline.  You can see the Marin Headlands in the distance.

I casually mentioned to my husband how I wished I had had more references of the bridge.  He said, "Really?  I have some."  He went to his computer right away and showed me the pictures he took while visiting San Francisco on a business trip last year. That's how the second painting above came about.  I don't know what I would do without him!

"Golden Gate Bridge" (oil on linen; 9" x 12")
sold

So which painting of the Golden Gate Bridge do you like better?  By the way, I am counting today's painting as one of my June Challenge series because it has a ship in it!

"Blue Canoe" (oil on linen; 8" x 8") sold

sold

I have a soft spot for dappled light.  Almost any subject looks mysterious and enchanting in dappled light.  Not everything is exposed to the full glare of the sun. Light bounces and shimmers.  Things in the background are bound to be in deep shadow.

Look at this ordinary summer scene.  It was a weekday last week.  A friend of mine and I took a walk through the woods to Luce Creek in Annapolis, MD to see boats.  On the way, a blue canoe, resting with kayaks on a canoe stand, stopped us in our tracks. Dappled light turned the scene into a setting for a fairy tale!

"Sail Away" (oil on linen; 8" x 8") sold

sold

Reference photo of the sail boat

Fishing Creek

Last Thursday, an artist friend of mine and I went to Annapolis, MD for a day of sketching.  The weather could not have been better--sunny, low humidity, and in the mid-70's!  We visited several sites for my friend's future workshop, had a nice lunch, and did a sketch or two at a park.  At the end of the day, we visited Thomas Point Park, from which one can get a nice view of the Bay Bridge.

On the way to the car, we saw a sail boat returning for the day. I was dying to paint a scene like this, but the background of the reference photo lacked poetry.  So I superimposed the image on another picture of the same place, Fishing Creek, just a few minutes' walk from the first location.  I changed the time of the day to a sunset too. How do you like my artistic license?

"After Independence Day" (oil on stretched canvas; 12" x 16") sold

sold

The day after the Independence Day in 2002, I visited a marina along the Potomac River and saw the scene.  The contrast between the brilliant sun-lit boats and those in the shadow made an indelible impression.  Full of enthusiasm, I painted a full-sheet watercolor painting, also titled "After Independence Day."

The painting won the Potomac Valley Watercolorists Award (something like the second-place award) in the prestigious American Landscape Show at the Art League Gallery in August 2002!  It was before the age of the digital camera; I wasn't much of a photographer either.  Unfortunately, I didn't have the chance to get the painting photographed properly in slides before the show.

When the painting got sold on the last day of the show, I didn't know whether I should be happy or sad.  Dang!  All I have left of the entire exhilarating experience is a snapshot.  I took a picture of the picture to prove that I didn't make up the story!

"After Independence Day" (watercolor, 22" x 30"; sold)

I cropped the scene for the new, much smaller, oil painting.  Unlike the original watercolor version, for which I did a lot of careful pencil drawing, the new version was done with a minimal pre-drawing.  The background is barely suggested in the watercolor painting; in the new painting the background is treated more boldly.  The result is that the sun-lit boats are highlighted between the darker values of the background landscape and the foreground boats.  So, which painting do you prefer?

"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?

"Red Sails" (oil on stretched canvas; 18" x 18")

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Also titled "Red Sails" (watercolor on Yupo, 20" x 26")
sold

Hello, June!  With one foot into the summer, I thought it would be a terrific idea to do a series of boat/ship paintings this month.  The June Challenge is "Sail Away"!  To kick off the series, I revisited an old painting of Newport, OR.  The fishing boat with red sails had become a floating museum of seafaring in this picturesque working harbor, where my family spent a lovely day during a vacation in 2001.

I painted the first "Red Sails" in watercolor on an unpredictable support, Yupo.  It turned out well to my relief; it went on to be juried into the Art League Landscape Show in 2002 and was sold in my first solo show in 2006.

It was my husband who suggested that I should do a painting of "Red Sails" in oil.  Why not?  I cropped the scene into a square format and came up with a new color scheme of red and green with blue gray and grayed yellow orange as the neutral backdrop.  It was a perfect project to test out Gregory Packard's method of a neutral, mid-tone beginning.  The busiest, brightest, lightest, and darkest elements of the painting are all packed into the central area.  

I loved the watercolor version and was a little sad when it got sold.  Now I have a new "Red Sails" to look at.  So please tell me which version you like better?