boats or trains?

Made a glorious discovery today. Tried to meet up with Plein Air Washington at Fishermen's Terminal, but found no one to meet up with! So I felt free to follow my merry way, and found that if you park by Net Building 9, not only can you park for 3 days (!!!) but there is a little bike trail nearby that goes under the bridge and voila! you are looking at the rail yard I've craved to paint for quite a while!

Showing you my beloved Beauport easel. This was flat ground but it is stable whether or not! Light enough to carry but as a weakling I put everything on wheels. This means, of course, I tend to bring the kitchen sink along, but oh well, it comes in handy!

farther along on the burke-gilman

so here is my best attempt at a photo of the new wet 12 x 16 oil on panel of the same scene sketched a few days ago. This has been an illuminating experience in many ways. First, I don't get tired of painting the same thing, plus it's a different puzzle to solve in different media; second, this process causes me to look at and see the scene again and then again; third, working in black and white helps me work out values. These are no-brainers to visual artists, but I relearn a lot of these every day as I clump towards enlightenment.

I am sure many of my friends on flickr will go on liking one of the sketches better than this painting; but this is a step closer to my own goal -- if only because I addictively struggle to bend this beloved medium to my will.

blue day behind the locks

Finally got to muck around a bit with my little 8x8 oil sketch from last week at the locks! This is pretty much how the day felt to me, I enjoyed it!

blue house

Visiting green lake so I snuck off to make a sketch. I've been admiring the houses around the lake, you could spend all your time painting them and never get done. This one is east of the lake, across the street. Being in a hurry adds drama!

Bardens' garden

Here are a couple small plein air oil sketches from yesterday's "Secret Gardens of Lake Forest Park" tour! Many thanks to Carolyn and Chuff Barden for inviting Frances and me to paint in their garden! The upper image was painted on gold-gessoed hardboard, 8" x 8". The lower one is painted over a red acrylic base on canvasboard, 12" x 12".

view from gas works

Here's a little sketch (4 x 4) of a piece of a photo looking east from Gas Works Park, sgraffito in oil on black-gessoed hardboard. I wanted to see if I could scrape out a line drawing from previously massed-in color. Don't know if it worked as such, but I sort of like it anyway!

boats and sun

A great day painting with Frances and Sue at fishermen's terminal. Imagine a studio with ever-changing scenes of workaday industry, and sunshine (or rain)... here are the day's oil sketches, 6 x 8 and 8 x 8, respectively.

storm at decoursey park

A terrific week sketching in Tacoma and Puyallup; At DeCoursey Park we brought out the rain! Sketched this in a big hurry before the drops started splatting!
Here's Frances at her "easel," painting the factory behind Freighthouse Square.

ballard locks

Saturday we met up at the Hiram M. Chittenden locks. Fun, windy and cold out on the locks themselves! Here are a couple little sketches:
First, ink and gouache in my little Moleskine watercolor book, 3.25 x 5, looking southeast: Then a 5x7 oil sketch looking west at the railroad bridge, from the west end of the large lock:

community space!

Friday my friend-the-longest (43 years!) Teresa and I went to Third Place Books to look and paint and drink iced tea.
Here is Teresa's painting of the table where the poems are made.

There was a gentleman working in this area, whom I sketched as if closer up.











Lots of people using the Commons there as their third place -- just as intended!

Then we moved on to the windows facing south. Teresa captured the tree-lined path along Bothell Way:

Here is her photo of me sketching the scene.












Thank you, Teresa! I'm so lucky you're my friend!

beautiful Tacoma

Wonderful trip yesterday, painting on the Ruston Point waterway with Frances. Wish every day could be like this: meditation time, grand companionship, sunshine, lost in painting!

Here's my first little (5 x 7) oil sketch of the day, from under the bridge!

gas works park

Raining, windy, freezing! So naturally, 6 brave artists soldiered forth into the deluge. It was great to meet some new friends and reconnect with old ones! Here is my oil sketch, its progress truncated by the need to get warm and flexible again! Maybe a return trip to refine it will be in order soon. Yet I kind of like it as is, a picture of this day in my life!

duck island

Hey, here's a little (9 x 12) plein air oil sketch from last summer!

shrub of flame

Okay, so here's today's daily effort! If you are reading this you must be my friends, so you can see this progression. You have to start at the bottom of today's post.
Here's the current permutation. I like it to look at, but we'll see if it stops there.

Next, the first stage in today's transformation of this painting in the studio:
First, the 6 x 8 plein air oil sketch from a couple months ago that never had quite enough value differentiation to make me happy. This is how it really looked though, a red bush and yellow trees in my neighborhood on a grey day:

parking lot trees!

Here's a little (6 x 8) oil sketch I did sitting in the front seat of my car in a parking lot at Green Lake last fall, when the trees were still full of paint, I mean leaves.

the life of wine

Painted this 8 x 6 oil sketch today for Monday Artday's movie quote challenge.

From Sideways:

Maya: No, I- I like to think about the life of wine.

Miles Raymond: Yeah.

Maya: How it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks, like your '61. And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline.