Spring has been utterly glorious here in Southern Oregon this year. Everything is lush and green and my roses are having a banner year. The yellow one is called Jeri Jennings and the red is Unconditional Love. Both are Paul Barden roses, both came from Rogue Valley Roses – a place I’ve mentioned before on this blog. Janet has collected a fantastic variety of roses that grow on their own rootstock, all meticulously categorized and documented and REALLY hard to choose which to plant, because there are so many good ones.
In my eagerness to share this image, I’ve had to photograph it before it’s been varnished, so there are some matte and shiny places. I’ll re document the image and replace it in a few months when it’s been properly varnished.
It started with this composition for a smaller panel, but decided to move to the larger panel with more background info, which gave me a chance to play with an idea I’d been kicking around for a while. I had been looking at the “Classical” landscape painting formulas and wanted to make a painting that used these principles.
Classical Landscape by Claude Lorrain – there are a million billion paintings made with this formula in the 18th and even into the 19th century. The Ecole de Beaux Arts clearly taught this was the way you had to do it. Nobody cares now, but it’s interesting how many paintings were made this way.
The composition spirals to for you to enter the picture on either side, the bottom is always darker value.
They always zig zag with close distance object on one side, going nearly top to bottom, then swing over to the opposite side for middle distance subject and then swing back for the far away view.
The close middle far is obvious in my painting. I elected not to try to make spirals with clouds etc, because after all, my work is more about stark, aging American landscapes instead of fantastical ideal pastorals. I did look for stuff to point to the subject, which was the green building, though, as well as the secondary subject of the far power lines. I don’t always take time to carefully compose a plein air landscape, but it’s pretty satisfying when I do.
The location for this painting has a story too. The green building houses a business called Barrel 42. Brian Gruber and Herb Quady make Rogue Valley wines here, including the fabulous Quady North wines. This is of particular interest to me, a native Southern Oregonian with an agricultural family history, because wine is overturning pears as the dominant agricultural product in Southern Oregon. The big aqua building (so many of the old pear buildings are painted aqua –???) is called SOS – Southern Oregon Storage, or something like that. The walls are super thick and maintain cool temperatures year round, perfect for storing barrels of wine, pears etc. Of course these interesting places are always along railroad tracks because they used to use rails to ship things. Not much anymore, as you see the side track to get close to the building to load up the goods is overgrown with weeds. Time marches on, and it’s nice that the railroad tracks are seldom used, because they offer a quiet place to paint, and the tracks always have nice lines to play with.
I usually resist paint out competition weekends, because they are never really very productive; I wind up usually making paintings in places I don’t have an affinity for and there is not enough time and there is the added pressure of knowing your work will literally be judged. Umpqua Valley Arts Association hosts a paint out in Roseburg that lasts a few days and is in a generally good time of year for weather, so I signed up. We had two full days of painting and I was able to connect with some really excellent Oregon painters. So, it was worth going to.
This dying oak tree was the painting I liked the best out of all I made that weekend. 7.5″ x 10″
Two days in a row, different weather, slightly different composition.
Each measures 10″ x 16″.
12″ x 20″ Maybe I liked this one best. I don’t know.
Pilot Rock – As seen from the Pacific Crest Trail near Hobart Bluff, in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.
I painted this in September after the smoke cleared out of the valley. (We had a terrible, terrible smokey summer from all the wild fires this year. This is the only bummer about living surrounded by wilderness. Avoid the Rogue Valley in August.) Painting here involves a bit of a drive and a pretty short hike. Interstate 5 is tucked in between the more distant ridges.
This painting is for sale on my Etsy shop — 50% of the purchase price will go to the Friends of the Cascade- Siskiyou National Monument. They put on nature hikes with scientists (and artists), help maintain trails, do butterfly counts and all kinds of fun stuff. www.cascadesiskiyou.org
I participated in a paint out event in Roseburg, Oregon and while there, Michael Sullivan, photojournalist at the News Review created this little video profile.
The Friends of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument hold a monthly event called a Hike and Learn, where the invite someone to enhance participants’ experience of the monument with their expertise. They have invited me to lead a Hike and Learn on the subject of Landscape Sketching! The monument is pretty neat because it has some of the greatest bio-diversity in a concentrated area in the United States. I’m a big fan of using my art as a tool for documentation, so I’m looking forward to documenting this significant location this week and weekend.
The Hike and Learn is open to all, and is free to attend. On Friday evening I will give a slide talk that goes over the basics of sketching the landscape. Then Saturday morning, we will all meet up and head to Hobart Bluff to hike a little and sketch out in the wild. We’ll meet back around lunch time and share our successes and struggles.
And the local paper – Ashland Daily Tidings has done an article on the event — check it out here.
Photo by Bob Pennell for the Ashland Daily Tidings – That’s me with the crazy grin, pretending to be on my way to do some landscape painting.
Hike and Learn — FREE Limited space, please sign up as space is limited by sending email to: event.cascadesiskiyou@gmail.com. Email title: Hike & Learn SKETCH Email body: Your name, email, address, phone
Friday, August 21, 6:00-7:00 pm
Slide Talk at the Ashland Public Library
Saturday, August 22
Hike – Meet at the Shop-N-Kart Ashland Parking Lot at 9:00 am to caravan up to Hobart Bluff
Hike and Sketch from 9:30 – Noon
I came to Hanley Farm to paint and had a hard time choosing a view, because I liked so many views, so I painted one
Experimental Lavender Patch at Hanley Farm
and then painted another
Hanley Farm
and that one was painted in the same scale and basic location as the first, so they both fit together, which made me motivated to make the third view
Roxy Ann
so they all fit together like a puzzle.
I often listen to audiobooks when I paint. Whenever I look at a painting I made, I think of the book I was hearing while I worked. The middle and the left painting make me think of Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. The painting on the right makes me think of The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. And maybe the beginning of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammett. The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon feel so similar that they kind of mentally flow together. I recommend all three books.
Well this summer has been pretty brutal here in Southern Oregon. As I write this the average high temperatures have been hovering at 100 and wildfires surround us filling the valley with thick smoke. But a month and a half ago in mid June it was pretty nice out.
