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Last month (August 2019) I returned to the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains to do a some painting with a handful of artist friends. This is I think my 7th or 8th year going up there, and it never gets old! 

 

We had pack mules haul our camping and art gear up to Garnet Lake (around 10,000ft) and hiked in from Agnew Meadows (Mammoth Lakes). The hike was beautiful but strenuous, and took pretty much all day to cover 1o or 11 miles. But our destination, Garnet Lake, is just an incredible spot and the journey was totally worth it.

 

In today's post, I wanted to share with you my sketches from the Sierra, and some thoughts about each painting. 

 The Tallest, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen  available 

 

This was the first painting I did, in the morning after the hike-in. Typically we set up base camp, and take day hikes with our art gear on our backs to go look for painting spots. But it's not as if the base camp lacks beautiful views! The mountains all around are magnificent and the lake is clear and serene. There's no shortage breathtaking scenery.

 

The problem is that it's so magnificent that it's overwhelming. I feel like I'd never be able to do it justice. So I focus on manageable subjects to start, say, a couple of trees. This view was painted from our base camp, looking toward the steep mountain side of Mt. Ritter.

 

Simple enough composition, and subject matter, which makes it all the more challenging to make it interesting. I spent about an hour covering the canvas, and another hour shaping and reshaping the boughs so that they looked natural, but designed, making sure there was enough variety of shape and edges. 

 

 

 

 

 Garnet Lake, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen available

 

A view of Banner Peak rising above Garnet Lake. The big mountain is not far, but depending on atmospheric and light conditions, there can be quite a difference in value ranges between fore and backgrounds. In this case,  the light was slightly hazy and back lit,  so that I minimized the value range in the mountain itself, and pushed it in the foreground.

 

The value difference between the granite and snow in the background is greater than that of the lighter and darker parts of the granite (in the background).

 

In the foreground, there are richer colors, darker notes, thicker paint and some smaller shapes. All these are basic devices of working with atmospheric perspective.

 

 

 

Last Winter's Snow, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen available

 

Thanks to a wetter-than-usual winter, there was plenty of snow on the mountain in August. Which makes for an interesting added element in our sketches, but it's also a problem to solve. Mainly it makes for a very contrasty background, and tends to compete with the foreground.

 

My solution here was to maintain a monochromatic structure for the background, and use richer colors only in the foreground. In order to not lose harmony, though, the colors I used in the background are mixed into the richer greens and grays in the foreground.

 

 

 Nice to See You Again, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen available

 

 This big tree stood close to our tents. I painted him the last time I was up here several years ago, and it was good to see a familiar face (?) after such a long time. He hadn't changed a bit! I remember the last time, I painted him from the other side, from my tent because it was raining. No rain this year, though.

 

I wanted to include big passive areas in the composition - you'll find this design theme repeated in my other sketches.

 

 

 Banner, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen available

 

 About 40 minute hike up and above our basecamp, at the base of Banner Peak, is a pristine alpine meadow with a series of small ponds created by the snow melt.

 

Before the pack trip, I had been looking at the vintage National Parks posters and the old rail posters, and wanted to see if I could get a similar screen or block printing  feel in my plein air sketch.

 

I know the process is totally different, but before starting the painting, I decided that I would exploit sharp edges, flat, graphic shapes, push one color, and incorporate textures.

 

I used a palette knife and a rubber scraper to kind of abuse the linen surface to get my texture - not very controlled nor methodical, but I think it came out nicely. I really love this one.

 

 

 Laundry, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen available

 

Perhaps the coolest thing about the logistical aspect of these painting expeditions, aside from the fact that a mule train hauls our gear up there, is that we have a back-country cook with us. Karen is an experienced wilderness cook and she provides for us three meals a day, and takes care of all the prep and clean-up so that we can focus on painting. We don't lose weight on these trips.

 

So I thought it might be fun to insert in a painting a piece of our daily narrative up in the high country. These are dish towels drying in the sun, and I loved the way the light came through the fabric.

 

The rope is done with the edge of a palette knife, after the rock was painted,  in case you were wondering.

 

 

 May Be Rain, 9 x 12 inches, oil on panel available

 

 For most of our week-long stay, we had extremely pleasant weather. Not too hot, not too cold, no rain, no snow. (We have had snow falling in August in the past) One morning a big cloud was scudding overhead and cast its shadow on the mountain peaks. This only lasted only a few minutes and I didn't even have my easel set up so I decided to try it from memory.

 

It's not as great a feat as it sounds. I only remembered that the tops of the mountains were dark, and the bottom was in light, and foreground was also in shadow.

 

After I set up my easel, I painted all the shapes from observation, but referred to my remembered basic value structure to block it in. Because I actually have the shapes in front of me, it's not as if I needed to remember everything. (I can't)  Consequently the rendering of form is very much simplified, but this sketch is not about that, so I was happy to ignore it.

 

After I brought it home, my 12 year old daughter took one look at this sketch and said, "Mordor".  I guess it does have that kinda mood!

 

 

 

Base camp, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen available

 

 Every pack trip, I like to do at least one sketch of the base camp. It's a hard hike to get up there, where the air is thin and the trail sometimes unclear. And we go on day-hikes still, in search of the next painting. My next painting sometimes is right next to the coffee pot and I don't need to go looking for something else.

 

Perhaps a more truthful statement is that I'm too tired to hike up to 11,000 ft and I need a day to just chill out and paint near the camp.

 

Fortunately base camp offers a great variety of subject matter. These camp chairs were brought up by the mules as well. The tent belongs to Karen, our cook. I didn't arrange the chairs for this sketch - I just wanted to paint them where they were, as they were.

 

One technical tip (for you aspiring painters!); When painting a scene like this where the sun shining through an already intensely colored fabric makes for glowing spots of high-chroma'd color, establish that brightest red first. Or at least very early on, and key everything else from that. Otherwise, you may find that you run out of wiggle room when you get to that intense color. You might not be able to get it bright enough. You can't just make it lighter in value, because you'll lose intensity if you start adding white to it. You can affected with a bit of yellow, but then you'll have an orange chair, not red.  So get that red first, as intense as you can, and figure out all the adjacent colors and values accordingly. I find that I end up painting everything a little darker than I actually see it, in order to accommodate that hot spot.

 

 

 Take A Left At The Snow, 9 x 12 inches, oil on linen available

 

After a long day of painting, we kick our feet up and relax with a nice glass of wine. Hey, just because we're up there in the wilderness, doesn't mean we have to give up all of our creature comforts. In fact one of the pleasures that we look forward to is hanging out together after a day's work, talking shop, and sipping really good wine. What's that got to do with this sketch, you ask? Well the wine bottles get chilled in that snow!

 

 

 Granite At Garnet, 9 x 12 inches, oil on panel available

 

 Another thing on this trip that I wanted to push myself on, is working with a different surface. Oil primed linen is my go-to for plein air sketches, but in the studio I try different surfaces just to see what happens and to put myself out of my comfort zone. I wanted to do this in plein air situations.

 

I've been intrigued by smooth surfaces like sanded gesso, plastic, and paper; I'm interested in the strokes I get on a smooth surface using stiff bristle brushes - really hard to control the calligraphic quality of the strokes - and also the marks I get by smooshing paint with a palette knife across a smooth surface.

 

The juxtaposition of the crude, brushy marks and smoothly flattened knife marks has a lot of potential, and I was determined to work with them in the field. I need to become more familiar with these mark-making processes, so that I can control them.

 

Well I didn't achieve control, but I feel like I made some progress toward understanding it. The white snow in the background is untouched gesso surface. I didn't put any paint on it.

 

 

 Crystal Clear, 12 x 9 inches, oil on linen available

 

 This little waterfall is part of the outlet from the upper meadows and eventually feeds into Garnet Lake. It's snowmelt, cold, clear, and delicious. I even had a shady flat rock on which to set up my easel. It doesn't get much better than this....except I can do without mosquitos. But I guess that's a price we have to pay for having so much snow in August.

 

 

 

 Perched, 12 x 9 inches, oil on panel available

 

 ...And this is the last one. This is another one I did on a gessoed panel. I do like the challenge of working differently from time to time. That feeling of barely hanging on to some semblance of control is exciting, frustrating, and liberating.

 

This backlit little tree grew out of a crack in the massive granite, and was not much to look at, but I liked it. Seemed to me like a metaphor for something more...meaningful? What do I know? I just paint. 

 

That's it for this year's Sierra Pack Trip sketches. It was an epic week of painting in the magnificent setting of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and I'm very happy to have been able to capture little pieces of it on canvas. I hope you enjoyed seeing them!

 

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These sketches are available for purchase. If you'd like to add one to your collection, please shoot me an email and I'll be happy to give you more information. As always, there's never any pressure to buy, so don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions! 

 

 

 

Clockwise from left: Ernesto Nemesio, Bill Cone, Michele de Bragança, Jeanne Sofen, Me, Scott Hamill, Carol Marine, and Leanne Dare