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Aloha~!  Maui Plein Air Invitational was awesome! Great fun with amazing painters in Paradise. Life is good!

 

During the week there were three scheduled events where all the artists (25 of us) in one location, painting and the public was invited to see what we were up to. This one is the Quickdraw on Canoe Beach in Lahaina. It's a beautiful beach, and has many cool things to paint besides the sand and the water - there were rocks, colorful canoes, picture-perfect palms, life guard huts... So there was something for everyone. 

 

Because I'm a contrarian (this was pointed out to me) I didn't want to paint the beautiful beach or the beautiful people in bikinis on the beautiful beach. I decided to turn my easel the other direction, and painted an old VW bus. 

 

This being a Quickdraw event, we had just a couple of hours. I decided to record the process sequence for all you loyal blog followers (thank you so much! ). If I crashed and burned, I'll have a record of where I went wrong. 

 

Fortunately I managed to pull this one off. 

 

 

So here's my start. The panel is 12 x 9. Claessens No.20 oil primed linen mounted on a 1/8 inch luan (lauan) ply.

 

After a quick investigation of the composition in thumbnail sketches (Keep It Simple, Stupid was my mantra) I placed the bus on the canvas. Roughly drawn at this point, but the idea is to work out the hard stuff –the drawing of the bus – first, then treat everything else as a gestural, expressive, abstract jumble. 

 

I used asphaltum thinned out with solvent to draw this in.

 

 

So that I can get a better sense of the drawing in the context of the picture, I blocked some darker values around it. This way, I can see the drawing as shapes, which is a whole lot easier to see and judge than if I had just used line.

 

 

I then proceeded to start with color. The bus was white, and was parked in a shady spot in the trees, so it was not getting much direct light at all - just a little spot here and there. I ignored these spots and just tried to block it in as sitting in indirect light. I can hit the sunlight later. 

 

The main concern here was to differentiate the side plane from the back, and to try and get the shapes accurately. 

 

The bottom part of the bus was obscured by bushes (to be painted later) so I couldn't really make out what was happening there.  I didn't really need that information so it didn't matter.

 

 

Refining the bus. Still unsure about just how light or dark it should be. I didn't want to commit at this point, so the paint is still fairly thin. My guess was that I would need to lighten it up a bit. But I decided to wait till I had some idea of the background values before I made the final decision on that.

 

It took a while to work out the drawing of the bus. I was determined to get it to a satisfactory point before moving on. Otherwise I may never get there.

 

 

Once I was happy with the drawing, I painted the background. My aim, again, was to be very loose, bold, shape-oriented, gestural, expressive, and abstract. Not only does this make for a more exciting surface to look at, by juxtaposition, the rendered focal area (the bus) looks a lot tighter than it actually is. 

 

The dark shadow under the bus connects with the silhouette of the tires, etc. No need to define these parts at all - just make sure the silhouette looks convincing enough. More information in this area would just draw the attention away from the more important things. Got to resist the urge to paint detail, because detail has doesn't do anything but detract from the overall composition.

 

As I suspected, the bus needed to be lightened up. Once I know what color / value I need for an area, I'm able to go thicker with the paint application. I don't do that before I'm sure, because chances are, I'd have to change it. And it's a pain to change something if it's already thickly painted.

 

 

Some adjustments in the shapes, additional accents, etc. The abstract marks are placed with the intention of directing the eye, as well as suggesting additional texture and interest. I want these strokes –all other strokes too, but especially these ones because they're more obvious –to look like fast strokes. as if they just fell off the brush, but in actuality, they're placed very slowly and carefully. I think, as a rule, the fastest looking strokes are put down the slowest because I can' t control its exact placement and shape if I actually painted them fast. 

 

And that's the end of the painting. It took about an hour and a half, and most of that was spent on making sure the drawing on the bus was correct.

 

I'll post the other paintings from Maui soon. I need better pictures of the paintings first. So the ones I brought home (that is to say, unsold pieces) will need to be photographed properly. I tried taking photos while I was there but these pieces had such subtle colors and values that I found it impossible to take good pics without the proper set up. 

 

Stay tuned~