Hoover Tower - Stanford

Hoover Tower, Stanford
12"x16" oil on canvas

This is a view of Hoover Tower from the Dish trail in the evening.  You are looking at Stanford University campus, the bottom of the SF Bay, and the dry hills beyond in the east.  The tower ended up a strong focal point leading me inclined to call this "Axis Mundi" but I thought better of that and will merely mention that we are looking at a vertical tower pointing to the heavens from a place of higher learning.  The composition is very stable, the buildings blend into the trees, and busy minds are at work among the greenery.

Watercooler Chat - Marbled Godwits

"Watercooler Chat"
Marbled Godwits at Ulloa St. Beach, San Francisco
12"x12" oil on canvas

These are Marbled Godwits with mottled feathers and long red-tinted beaks standing in the thinnest remains of a wave.  I took the photographs of the beach at Ulloa Street in San Francisco almost exactly a year ago, and finally painted them this weekend.  I cannot recall having painted birds before, so their shapes are interesting to observe along with how the shadow overlapped the reflection of the Godwit on the right and made the reflection appear darker in that area.  I did get back to Garrapata Park, south of Carmel again just before sunset this week, to have the very briefest amount of time before the sun was blocked by a cloud bank.  This had the odd effect of lighting the hills up bright red while leaving the foliage in cool light, maybe enough for a painting, just have to wait and see.

Coast at Wilder Ranch

"Solid Coast" at Wilder Ranch
12"x16" oil on canvas

Wilder Ranch is north of Santa Cruz and is a public park with hiking trails and the old white buildings from when it was a dairy.  The property is right on the coast and has miles of sandstone cliffs.  This painting is from a vibrant sunny day hiking along the edge of the cliffs with a nice, steady sea breeze. 

This size canvas is a little different to work with, and it gets exaggerated with the high horizon line.  That made a pretty neat area for all the water colors on the left.  I hope to be out when it's later in the day to see the sunset lighting the rocks and see how that turns out.

Blazing Vineyard, Napa Valley

Blazing Vineyard, Napa Valley
12"x16" oil on canvas



This painting of the vineyard was originally very naturalistic, which was fine, but I decided to experiment and alter the palette quite a lot while still keeping the same shape outlines.  This is now a fall vineyard with some sense of the energy which goes into these vines and the winemaking to come.  Fantasy mixed with reality.  This is a view of a vineyard on the west side of St. Helena heading towards a park.  On that point (parks in Napa Valley) the Bale Grist Mill tour was one of the best I have been on and I will share some photos from this: 


Rows of Organic Flours of several types for sale $5

working grind stones





working water wheel

work bench,  nice lighting!

This mill was in Napa Valley long before it became wine making country and the farmers would bring their grist to have it milled into flour.  The mill has been kept very nicely with a lot of hand sawn and scraped timbers.  They still grind flour, corn, and buckwheat, powered by the water wheel during the tour, explain how the whole thing works, and the history of the valley is also shared.  Flour sacks ground at this mill are available to purchase for $5 a bag.  We have been enjoying the buckwheat and whole wheat flour in pancakes.    





This nifty crank machine will take a dried ear of corn and scrape off the kernels and drops the cob into the bucket below.  The dried kernels then get ground into polenta or corn meal. 

Halloween Paintings and Ideas

I was shocked to read Halloween is just 8 weeks away, because it will slip by so fast and I have a pile of ideas left over from last year.  HGTV posted some cute and pretty fast decorating ideas, and if you want to paint a Halloween painting I am sharing the ones I posted last fall which have some how-to information.  I am planning to make a nice Halloween still life with my trusty plastic skull, that will be coming in a few weeks.

This is a painting demo of two pumpkins backlit outdoors.  It is a nice fall painting because it hints strongly of Halloween but they are not Jack-o-Lanterns yet.  This is 12" x 16" oil on canvas.

 

This is our yard from last year, the ghosts were a last minute idea to make a backdrop.

 

They grow an enormous amount of pumpkins in Half Moon Bay, CA and this is a view looking into a bin of them on a foggy fall day.  This is a 12"x12" oil on canvas.

 

Piper's Sunflowers Drying

Piper's Sunflowers Drying

I liked the previous Piper's Sunflower so I painted a grouping of sunflowers.  This is 16"x20" oil on canvas, no time lapse movie made this time.  These are several more of the dried out sunflowers I enjoyed looking at during my son's bagpipe lessons.  The blue background has a few close value colors to liven it, and I've veered back into impressionism with the colors of the sunflowers. 

One of the things I worked with is the use of a really dark purple, then deadening it with raw umber to make the shape roll back to appear rounded and going over the top of that to indicate the sunflower.  The round one in the center nearer the bottom of the painting illustrates this.  Then the interesting negative spaces needed amping up because the leaf colors were too close in value to the sky.  It is such a scattering of sunflowers that the composition is pretty irregular which is the way they grew.

Little birds came and feasted on these seed heads, quite a nice treat!