Yesterday we drove up to Palomar State Park and painted at Doane Pond. I loved all the textures I saw all around me and tried to capture these in this gouache painting.
An amazing number of people marched in San Diego’s climate strikes today. I think there were demonstrations at a majority of the high schools and all of the colleges.
I went to an afternoon gathering at the Federal Building. Both of these sketches show people milling about and talking to each other before the speeches started. I wanted to draw the young speakers but I could not see them through the crowd. May great good come from this worldwide upwelling in support of our Mother Earth and the Green New Deal!
The model today struck several poses where she clasped her arms, knee, or belly. As she held each pose, her face took on a frown and her brows furrowed. I thought she seemed worried and that she may have been thinking about something important. Each time I painted her, I tried to accentuate the feel of brooding by having her look into an inner place. I also worked to keep the shapes and colors simple so that they would not distract from the face.
I painted this morning at Cabrillo National Monument from a rock shelf looking to the west. The fog was lifting but it still obscured the horizon line.
Last Saturday at Mission Bay I noticed that people kept stopping in the shade of a cluster of bottle brush trees to admire the sea. I did not have enough time on Saturday to paint it then, so today I painted it from a photo I took.
This morning I met up with some 50 plein air artists from the San Diego Watercolor Society to watch the incredible Keiko Tanabe https://ktanabefineart.com paint and then to paint our own scene. We were at Mission Bay in San Diego. I wanted to focus on the many triangles that I saw in the bay, lawn, and trees, so I rearranged the scene somewhat to emphasize these. After moving a tree and skipping the artists, easels, bathers, boats, and dogs, I found that I liked the composition quite a bit.
With this fourth version of the orchids on my desk, I wanted to capture more of the cloud like, almost floating, feeling that I see in these flowers. I made the flowers very pink, connected the blossoms into a single shape, and cropped the painting so that just the lower portion of the blossoms show.
