Elabana Falls

Here are two versions. One done on site at Elabana Falls in Queensland, Australia. The other is based on this initial sketch, but done much larger in my studio. The plein air version is about 5" x 10". The studio version is 9" x 18". This is a way I like to work, basing larger pieces on on-site sketches, not photographs.

A Few More from the Archives

These are a few watercolors I did while in Thailand a while back. This was part of my "make the colors sing" efforts.

Some Oldies But Goodies

My day job has kept me from doing some new work. But I have been reorganizing some of my past work. I came across these paintings I did in Spain in 2002. It's sometimes interesting to see what I was doing in the recent past. These do bring back nice memories. The painting at the Museo Nacional in Barcelona was declared finished when the sprinklers turned on!

Three Paintings of Ladakh

Here are three paintings done over the past month of Ladakh. Ladakh is part of the Indian state of Kashmir, part of the skinny northern part of India between Tibet and Pakistan. My wife and I trekked there in 2004. These are based on photos I took while there, but all of the photos, especially the foregrounds have been altered for compositional reasons. The top image is a chorten at the Lamayuru Monastery. The middle is another view of Lamayuru. The third painting is a view of part of the Palace of Leh, the capital of Ladakh. Last week the Leh valley was devastated by floods, which is very unusual since Ladakh averages 1-3" of rain a year.

Watercolor West Exhibition

I'm pleased to announce that I just received my acceptance into the 42nd Annual Exhibition of Watercolor West for my painting entitled "Blue Mosque". Watercolor West distinguishes itself from other watercolor societies by mandating that all work must be in transparent watercolor and not in other water media.

The profile of this mosque in Istanbul was so strong that I limited my palette to mostly cobalt blue and permanent orange, two of my most often used colors. The mosque isn't really blue either:).

National Watercolor Society 90th Annual Exhibition

I am very pleased to learn that my painting, Fountain, Sonoma Plaza, was accepted into the 90th Annual Exhibition of the National Watercolor Society. This is indeed an honor. The NWS show attracts submissions by some of the finest watercolorists in the country.

The show opens October 30 at the NWS headquarters in San Pedro, CA.

This painting is a studio painting based on a plein air painting I did during the Sonoma Plein Air event in 2009, which fortunately sold. I'm always attracted by fountains and water. The presence of these two elements plus the Ghirardelli Building looming in the background sold me.

Canale Grande

I was recently asked if the painting on the Epperson invitation was mine. In fact it is.

It's a painting I did a few months ago based on a photo I took from a vaporetto while leaving Venice. We were heading to the train station very early one morning and the light was magical.

I haven't worked from a photo in many, many years. So this was an experiment to see if I could ignore a lot of the extraneous information and make a painting that isn't too stiff, a common problem with painting from photos. One thing I did was I used a black and white print. This allowed me to create my own color palette and it was fuzzy enough that I couldn't rely on it for much information aside from some values.

So working from the photo was okay this time. Otherwise this image would never have been painted: the viewpoint is essentially impossible, since it was from a moving vaporetto, and the quality of light only lasted about another 15 minutes.