Beach Paintings

"Child at Play"

Work in progress

18 x 24

Oil on canvas

The ocean and beach is one of my favorite places to go and to paint.  The light on a clear summer day with the big expansive views allow a painter so many subjects to choose from, not to mention all the figures.  The figures bathed in light and often at rest are perfect models.  I also love drawing and painting my own family at the beach. These have been really rewarding as many include my wife and children as models.  The beach is a great place to draw as you don't really stick out as you are drawing. The views from sitting down in a chair can be interesting rather than standing.  Also, all the figures over a great distance are fascinating to me as they appear in different sizes as the perspective moves back into the horizon.

      I started the below painting by covering canvas in a warm color.  Vermillion thinned down works nicely.  Below is the almost finished painting where you can see I added my son to the composition as I wanted another figure in the foreground.  Painting at the beach also allows me to place objects like chairs and umbrellas in the painting from drawings to balance the painting with color and form that works for the composition of the painting. 

  I really enjoyed seeing some of the photographs of people at the beach by Vivian Maier recently.  The figure against the ocean as a back drop creates a great tension.  The flexing of mussels against the movement of the ocean is beautiful. Another artist who I admire and enjoy their figure paintings is Wayne Thiebaud. playfulness of Wayne Thiebauds' beach figures capture some of that fun and color that I associate with the beach.  Wayne is 94 years old born in 1920! 

Here is finished work 24 x 36 inches, oil on canvas. 

"Day in July"

On view at Cavalier Gallery on Nantucket Island.

I really love painting a group of people gathered together. There are few reasons that a group of people get half undressed and pose for free for a painter other than to sit by the ocean.  

drawing from drawing

Girl with drink at the beach

Woman walking on beach study

Currently I have been taking drawings from the past summer with figures at the beach.  In drawing I can work out the composition and add details from life.  I have always enjoyed drawing.  Drawing is the foundation of painting. Making many lines, marks and smudges to make one big picture.  Whether you use a paintbrush or a pencil drawing is crucial. Like in music each note adds to the piece and it builds slowly to create form and volume.  I like going over and over again changing and correcting trying to make the space real and pleasing.  

Drawing takes time.  It sits you down and you are forced to look at things and study them.  In a way it is a form of meditation.  Some times it takes a lot of energy to look at things.  Really study them.  We don't want to slow down enough to do the looking.  Drawing helps me slow down and really be amazed at what is around me.  Reality is so strange and wonderful yet easy to take for granted.  As I look at people moving in space and try to discribe that space and those bodies in it I become more a part of what is around me.  More connected to what I am looking at. Most of the time the scene is very complicated and  I am forced to simplify.   Below is a small study of a girl at a beach and then an empty beach in Maine. 

Canvas vs. Panel

Summer Marsh

38 x38

Oil on canvas

I often debate with myself what surface I prefere to paint on.  Sometimes it is nice to switch things up.  If I have been working on panel it can be nice to move over to canvas.  The give that canvas has can be nice in the early stages when mapping the image out.  The play and bounce of the canvas becomes its own language.  The force that the brush playes back is a conversation that feels different than panel.  It is also nice to hit a new canvas and hear the drum sound.  When painting with turniptine the canvas absorbs the terps better than the panel would.  The hard panel has a directness were each mark is free from the texture of the canvas or linen and is easier to read and give the illusion of space in an emediate way that canvas doesn't do.  Sometimes when getting up close to a canvas the materials stop the mind from the trick of photographic illusion. 

With the painting above I used a palette knife in the clouds in the sky.   I really enjoy painting the sky and like John Constable will make studies for larger works.

Sea Lawn

24x36

Oil on panel

This painting is painted with more layers using liquin as a glaze.  With panel I find that I tend to paint with a little less impasto.  It I do use impasto it is with the whites and I employ less paint with the darks such as brown and green. 

Usually the panels are first painted with an orange or thin red oxide.  This way the white really jumps out and the values can be established.  To me in landscape painting the values are the first thing as with drawing.  The color comes next never before the value.  After this the sky was keyed in.  All the other values are compared with the sky. 

Below are some skies painted by John Constable. I often also make sky studies for reference using them in later paintings.

Below are a few paintings on panel that the skies were borrowed from smaller sketches of the sky that were done plien air. 

128 South

36x48

Oil on panel

Sky over Land

36x60

Oil on panel

Hay Bales

24x24

Oil on panel

The sky above looks from the image as if there is too much cerulean blue.  In truth there is more ultramarine but the photograph doesn't reflect this.  My studies of sky's first began  in Orvieto, Italy; a medieval hilltop village in Umbria.

Below is s photograph I took there of the sky moving above the ochre tufa of the buildings.

Favorites at The Addison Gallery of American Art

When in the studio I like to put up a few paintings on the church bench to see how paintings relate.   Here I have a few evening paintings of various sizes.  It is a good practice to hang up a finished painting and live with them for a little while.  Some times it can be helpful to hang the painting upside down a see if the painting has any problems that stand out.  After looking at the work for so long it is hard to see the painting with a fresh 

perspective.   

     Today I took a trip to the Addison Gallery of American Art and saw a few of my favorite artists which is always an inspiration.  Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness and Sarah Surplee all amazed me with their handling of paint.  

I had never seen Sarah Surplee's paintings and felt as if I had stumbled across a soul mate.  This highway was Rt 495 in Massachusetts were I have painted myself.  It is wonderful and humbling to find other artists that have worked in the same vein. 

Here is a photograph of a tree by David Armstrong that reminded me of paintings of trees that I have done. 

Old Lyme

This summer I took a trip to the old Lyme are colony and the Florence Griswold House.   I wish that there was some places like this that still survive.  Rome and board was only a dollar day!  These communities helped artist development as they went out and painted together.  Childe Hassam and Willard Metcalf were two of my favorites from the group.  "May Night" by Metcalf is a haunting picture.  I love nocturnes and am always surprised when I see them as if the American Impressionist were not "allowed" to paint so dark. 

Willard Metcalf painted 26 paintings there   In one year.  The subtle harmonies are reminiscent of my favorite Tonalist painters George Inness and James McNeil Whistler.

I was in Old Lyme showing a few Central Park paintings at the Old Lyme Art Association.  This was one of the first in the country.  Incorporated in 1914 but artists began showing at the Library in 1902. 

Below are a few panels from the Florence 

Griswold House.  My Aunt Bonnie MacAdam used to work here before she went to the Hood museum in Hanover. NH. 

Traveling Artist Studio

Artist Dash

Florence Griswold House

Door Painting

I had a few paintings showing at the Art association next door.  

Central Park Terrace

38x34

Oil on panel

MFA Boston

This past fall I took a trip to the MFA with the family.  

We mainly went to see the Goya exhibit, but there is always the temptation to try and take in more than we can handel. They Goya paintings were sad and made me feel as if they were half in a dream and half in a nightmare. 

This painting by Sargent is always a favorite. After seeing it I always hope to do some paintings of musicians.

The Winslow Homers in Boston are also really beautiful. The way the ocean is painted is amazing and memorizing.  You can really feel the movement of the sea as the waves are coming in. I get tired just looking at this fishman and his catch with no land in site. 

The suggestion is always more powerful to me then the spelled out every blade of grass kind of thing.  

Although I think of Albrecht Dürer's watercolor "Great Peice of Turf," might balance that aesthetic.  

This painting has always impressed me.  The love and care that went into studying a few square feet of earth is admirable. I think of Anne Dillard and her writings and observations in "A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek".  She takes us under the earth and loves every part of it and analyzes each part.  She even goes so far as to imagine sculpturing a tree with all its roots!  How much material wood it take to recreate.  A birch tree or a red wood for that matter.  It could take one person a lifetime. 

Andrew Wyeth has the same attention in his studies of nature.  I compare the two here.  

I also really enjoyed the Jamie Wyeth exhibit that they had there.  For me Andrew Wyeth is one of the more interesting characters.  

This painting stikes me as so vast.  He is like a space junkie.  David Hockney used the phrase to cat agonize himself and I see it fitting for Wyeth as well.  Our brains can't really fathom space.  When it comes to a field, the Grand Canyon or the Milky Way and beyond.  It all depends on the size to of the viewer.  If you are an ant the tuft of grass is your world or yard.  The field Weyth painted is your world.  Cezanne was Abel to paint the air that is closer to us and the air that is further away.  The artist here takes nothing for granted.  Jamie's paintings seem a little more illustrative at times like his grandfathers.  This is fine with me.  I love a good story.  

Silver screen

Olive Kitteridge

Living on the north Shore of Massachusetts

Here is a painting that was used in the HBO movie Olive Kitteridge.  I have not seen it, but know it was shot on the North Shore.

Summer Marsh

Oil on canvas

24x36

Living on the North Shore of Massachusetts I was reminded of thd landscape of England.  Some of the open fields and salt marshes reminded me of Sudbury in Suffolk.  There I could see great distances.  Inland there were so many trees.  Out on the coast I am able to see the horizon and watch the effects of light as it comes down over greate distances. This painting was started from a smaller study that was done near thd Parker River in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

The family all got out and stretched while I painted for an hour. My family is so patient. Later I took the small painting back to the studio to make "Summer Marsh."  I hope to see the movie.  Sometimes I feel as if I like a movie just because of the locations or the sets.