Parking Lot

You never know where a painting can be found. A melody may be right under you foot. You start tapping. It appears. Here the gouache game played in C major. Looking for the rhythm in the landscape and capturing its sound in paint is indeed a great part of the pleasure of painting. Light flickers as the earth turns. Shadows leap over sidewalk curbs, palms turn their yellow fronds outward. Everything in transition. Moments broken by captured strokes. Hours vanish. In the end you are standing in an empty parking lot. Rapturous and undone.

Believe the Gypsy

The old squeeze box routine is timeless. This little paper dragon can spin tales of sorrow and tales of joy. It has a life of its own. It breathes. I never tire of playing with the character. He always stirs me up. I feel the reeds singing. The melancholy spirit we all share. So sad and so humane.

Mission Capistrano

The January sun rolls over and down through the terra cotta damp portico. Someone moves through the shadow. The sound of boots echo. California is held in the walls of the mission. The eyes quicken, colors collide. Above blue skies forever. The Spanish loved it here.

The Conservatory

It sits like a great cocoon. The pupal waiting to emerge into botanical butterflies. Glass plume house of sun and breathing plants. Here the misery lies. The artist captivated by green houses since a child, spell bound by this leviathan of glass house architecture, races to capture its charm and in two hours as the gates close, fails at his attempt. The balance of nature askew, the trees irresolute, the mountain shade uncertain, the luminous vision of glass and nature crumbling. I walk away unhappy. This the price of urgency and impatience exasperated by the rapid wane of winter light. To be contunued...

The Wandering Child

A refugee from the broken tent. Violated. Left alone. She had an uncanny ability to see. Dreams and visions played within her. She grew into adulthood. She got married. He was from an island in the Mediterranean. She remembered sleeping in coffin on her wedding night. There were children. She tried to be present. She was called away again and again. I saw her when she was a child. This watercolor is a memory.

Pinata

to swing with all your might

into the unknown night

the sweet blind pursuit of dangling prize

stars bursting children laughing

to walk on air your feet dancing

the paper moon erupting

meteor and sugar trails

confetti falling from the sky

swing away with all your might

the waiting cloud burst of your dreams

Hanauma Bay

The sun and rain played havoc with my first painting on the Hawaiian shore. I could not find more than ten minutes in the bright sun before fifteen minutes of rain would pour down. This went on back and forth for some four hours. I ran in and out of a cave in the rocks behind me carrying my easel with the canvas. The wind was howling. It was a hell of a day of painting It wasn't suppose to be like this. So this gouache is the end result. A formless rendering of Hanauma Bay. Ambivalent in light and value. It would set the tone for some ten more gouaches in Hawaii that would follow. All of them very flat in perspective and color. But I like them. They capture something that only the island could deliver. My own intentions denied by the circumstance of the world around me. Inherently Hawaiian.

The Shadow of the Oak

Its hard to paint really. To connect with something outside yourself in a meaningful way. To believe in the action that you are taking. Its hard to know what to do. Yes there are known paths to things. Techniques. Laws of science. Rules of thumb. There is a method to everything. But here along this trail under the old oak I forget. I am lost again. The only way out IS to paint. So I set out looking for the dark undertones. I lay in washes as dark as I dare with pure watercolor. I let it dry. I do it again. So often and particularly in the winter time with its low riding light time simply passes too swiftly. I am late. Opaque gouache pigments enter. There is a strong sense of urgency. The paint is stiff and dries on contact. You have to live with what you put down so you don't think. Don't even look at what you are doing. You just let the strokes fly as fast as the hand and wrist will allow. The sun has set. The greens have turned violet. Too dark to even see. You come home and lift the paper to the light. And there it is.

Huntington On the Edge of Paradise

The road rises gently up the grassy knoll. Palm trees sway in the rising breeze. Figures walk the outer road. The desert garden is in full bloom. Its a riot. Aloe trees firing red rockets into the blue sky. Agave candy cane ribbons blue tequila longings swarm the ground. My eyes can't see through the smoke of color. Its a blizzard of cactus broom sticks twisted and spinning like animated sounds in a mushroom dream. Paint it. Let it take you down with its overwhelming confusion of perfect design.

The Pier in Winter

Santa Monica Pier. The last refuge in the great western migration. Here you smell the dream. It's a dazzling golden roller coaster beneath the spinning wheel of fortune. Coney Island now so far away. Dark haired mass of grinning happiness crowd the scene. There are some dissenters along the boardwalk, so beware. Nevertheless the fiddler plays, the Chinese juggler totters, the painted trinket makers with their "sleight of hand" dazzling the congregants. At the end of all this I roll out my cart of dreams. The bright light of the the last afternoon burning down upon the mass. Waves crash beneath me. There is a buzzing in my ear. Carnival sounds. The smell of popcorn and creosote. A man with a painted mustache rambles on about Dufy. I like Dufy. Its four thirty, the sun is doing a quick winter exit. The fisherman have given up. I had barely found my footing on the slippery pier as the last rays of light fall on the western edge of the North American Continent. The suspension of disbelief bought for a quarter.

Waikiki

The pleasure of the beach is not often found nose to the grind of color on paper. But the pursuit of this image was a delirious romp on the paradisal edge. Conte crayon, watercolor and gouache all in play. The details were found and rendered then lost again. The fact of things sometimes argues with the rule of emotion. A picture trying to emerge can seem less vital than the sensation experienced by its creation. Here a clear image would seem wholly appropriate. The motif classic. Yet there surged over and over again a need to penetrate into the shadows and exfoliate the outer shell to try and render the ecstatic joy of being there. I think of the sojourning souls who dove deep into the ocean of the abstract long ago in search of expression.