As a relatively new painter, I am still exploring and attempting to find ways to express my artistic ideas and feelings. Watercolor is a great teacher because it is somewhat less forgiving than other media, requiring one to think ahead before commiting paint to paper. On the other hand, it readily provides for spontaneity in the way paint, water, and paper interact to produce unpredictable results.
As far as my journey as an artist is concerned, I like to characterize it in the way a great California watercolorist, Milford Zornes, has remarked: "I'm a painter and I will leave it to others to decide whether what I produce is art".
On our many trips to the pacific northwest, we visit small villages on the coast. This scene at sunset is from a photograph taken in one of these fishing villages.
This painting was done to depict thr colorful canyons of the Southwest. I got a little wild with the sky, but when done, the clouds seemed to suggest the title I gave it, "Cloud Spirit".
We often drive up the California coast just to spend a few days admiring the beautiful scenery. In June, while staying in Cambria, I joined a workshop that was painting at Montana del Oro, a State Park near Morro Bay. I did this painting of the surf crashing on the rocks below the cliffs.
This is the painting I selected for this year's Chistmas card. I try to find something that reminds me of the cold, snowy Christmas season where I grew up in Canada. This scene is from a backpacking trip in the Sierras in which we encountered a lot of snow. One of our group almost landed in the lake after slipping from a traverse of a similar field on this side of the lake. Now that would have been cold!
This painting in near-monotone colors was inspired by our many trips to the British Columbia Coast and in particular, the area around Tofino. The weather is often cloudy which casts a grey look to the ocean scene. In this rendition, I have stylized the trees to capture the wind-swept look they often have.
This painting is my candidate for our Chrismas card this year. It was inspired by a photo by John Marriott in his recently published book Banff and Lake Louise. The title of the painting is "Mt. Rundle, Canadian Rockies".
This painting is another in my Sierra series. All of the scenes are from photos I took while backpacking a few years ago. While I am probably past my backpacking days, the beatuful scenes of the Sierras are vividly imprinted in my mind and with a bit of luck, I will paint them as I remember them.
Every year we spend a week in Sedona and I am always taken by the beauty of the red rock formations. This year, I attempted to capture the vivid colors after a brief winter storm. The result is highly abstacted both in form and color.
My goal in this painting was to exaggerate the colors and to depict the trees in a more abstract way than I usually do. The scene is a melding of a bridge and creek we saw on a trip to New England and the California hills in the background.