The Wind Blows Where it Wishes

3rd day on the road, 7th painting completed, 1st one this day

The wind was blowing lightly onshore this morning but the fog was moving slowly out to sea on a seemingly different program altogether.

You never know what, or who, will blow in with the wind.

Besides fog, here’s what else the wind blew past me while I worked on this one on the side of the road:

A chain smoking man in a cowboy hat in a white ford 350 and a good several-song dose of country music.

A couple in a rusty blue minivan who appeared to be looking for something in the bushes right beside me, pulling out all sorts of random roadside detritus including but not limited to one busted chair and a pair of ladies jeans that they nearly kept but finally decided not to.

An old friend from Humboldt who spotted me at work and stopped for a quick minute to say hi.

A road-walking 20 something guy with a backpack who feigned interest in the art while scouting my bags for food (or whatever else he was looking for) and finally left with my Cliff Bar.

A grown man on a bmx bike asking directions to the next market north of us.

This is one of my favorite things about working on location: none of that ever happens in the home studio. Well, not very often anyway. 

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Fading West

2nd day on the road, 6th painting completed, 4th one of the day

I wasn’t planning to paint here at all, though I did stop and check it out the day before. This day I was planning to head south from my previous location, but the afternoon fog crept in and made a mockery of my plan as it so often will. Recalling this tightly arranged scenic cove complete with a eucalyptus foreground I thought this was a location that would hold up even in a fairly dense fog, and it was true. Had a really fun time painting this one without pressure of capturing a specific place, just a feeling of being there is all that I wanted here. Plus the burger and salad at the little hotel/restaurant behind me was delightful, and I don’t often think of salads in those terms. Of course after 4 paintings in one day, I reckon a stale peanut butter and jelly woulda been delightful too, but still, it was really good. 

There really wasn’t much
Of anything there at all
It was just another roadside stop
A place to rest before moving along
But somehow it seems
That we’ve left something behind
In the foggy haze
We’ll spend the rest of this trip
Wondering what it was
And wishing we’d not forgotten it

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No Vegetarian Options

2nd day on the road, 5th painting completed, 3rd one of the day

There’s a chunk of reef out here that I’ve always enjoyed pulling over for and watching when passing through this area. I’ve never seen it look truly rideable, but I wouldn’t put it past some nut to give it a go on the right day. Heaving peaks onto dry rock reef. Mindsurfing was never so fun.

It’s not just the water that’s compelling here either, it’s also the landscape leading up to it. The rolling hills lead down to rocky canyons with micro pocket beaches The open space of these tall grassy (ticks!) meadows is part of the California coast experience that just makes you happy to be alive. The sky is bigger. Your body is smaller. .

Sea lion locals stare you down the moment you peak over the grass into their private cove. They seem always on edge, even as they bask in the sun. A reminder of the food chain at work in these waters. No vegetarian options. 

Crashing like a stock market spooked by a bear
Waiting for the right moment to ambush the fat sea lions
And swallow their retirement pensions whole
There are no vegetarian options
In this wicked game

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Nothing is Easy

1st day on the road, 2nd painting completed

I pulled off the highway here on my first day down the coast. The light was of the flat midday sort where the shadows are still hiding underneath their rocks staying cool in the heat of the sun, waiting till things cool off to come out again in the afternoon. I wanted to paint here but the light was not working for me yet. That said, the color of the water up the coast with the distant haze of the morning marine layer hovering was interesting enough so I settled on a quick small one, figuring it would be easy to just paint real quick and move on.

2 hours later, what am I doing? And what is this tiny little brush doing in my hand? I can’t stand tiny brushes. My eyes are too blurry and my hand too wobbly to play around with them. But still, here I am, noodling around with all these little rocks trying to really illustrate the scene rather than just the simple goal of getting the feeling of that midday vibe. Good grief. I’ve painted 16×20’s faster than this little 6×8.

Oh well.

Nothing is easy.

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The Usual Difficulties

First day on this road trip, first painting completed.

I’ve driven past this dirt road for years, knowing that it was there, but a bit wary of taking my giant van down it’s length, not wanting to get stuck in a situation where I’d need to reverse a mile of dirt road with no turnaround.

But it offers a such a great glimpse of a rather lost-in-time stretch of coast that I keep thinking one day I’ll should borrow someone’s truck and just go daytrip the thing. Why I haven’t done so yet is beyond me, but on this trip south I figured I’d take just a peek after scouting on the maps for a good turnaround for the van and seeing what looked like one only a half mile in.

It turned out to be a great spot with a real good view from a little knoll above the turnout. The morning light was crispy and lent a sense of urgency to the piece that I rather enjoy seeing in it now, though at the time I felt a bit frantic.

Now that I’ve gotten a glimpse of this zone firsthand, perhaps I’ll be fired up to make the actual trip happen to go explore the length of it.

But alas, such is California’s coast that so often we peer down on these amazing zones with fun looking surf from cliffs high above, yet with no way to access them beyond risking life and limb, and possibly even getting hurt as well.

This was no different. So inviting, so close, but so far away. Just the usual difficulties… 

Nothing changes much
Beneath these colder mountains

Times move on
As do
The lives
That call it home

But here it will always lie

We pass through
And marvel
At the
Heights

And the cost
Of a good sandwich

If only we knew
How to get back down to sea level
Without sliding down

That slippery slope

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No Turning Back

I’d tried to get to this place, Rubicon point, located in D.L. Bliss State Park for two days in a row only to be denied by a full parking lot. On the first day, I was with my whole family and we looked at a map and decided to walk in on the Rubicon Trail. My six year old is a bundle of energy when she wants to be. When she’s walking uphill in the heat of a Tahoe summer day, well, that’s just not really her thing. We climbed the trail higher and higher, (odd because we were trying to get down to the water, not up) until we finally reached what seemed to be the peak, and then continued down the trail for a fair bit as well. My wife came around a bend with a view and saw just how far we still had to descend to the water (and hence climb back out later with our youngest melting into a puddle of hot complaints) and she wisely made the call. We would go no further. We would turn back, and I’d have to try again another day.

As for painting this one when I finally made it here, this is the only piece of the trip that had that feeling of ease about it while working. The water and rocks before me were just so perfect and defined that it had that feeling that it was ready to paint itself if I could just get out of the way.

Later when I went to title the piece I was thinking of a variation on the word bliss, but it felt so obvious that I just wasn’t ready to roll with it too easily. I figured I’d look up the word Rubicon and see what came of it and learned of the phrase “crossing the Rubicon” to be synonymous with passing a point of no return, named so after Julias Caesar crossing the river Rubicon in Rome with his troops which was an irrevocable declaration of civil war against Rome itself. If he’d had my wife along for counsel, oh how the world as we know it would be a different place today. Ever thankful to her wisdom that we avoided our own civil war that day and chose to live in peace instead.

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The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

The bold get up early and seize the day. They also seize all of the parking spots on the southwest shore of Tahoe by 9 in the morning on hot summer days. Earlier this day I was rather bold myself, rising before 6am and seizing a primo spot just about the falls in the previous painting. I was done by 10am or so, thinking I would have plenty of time to get in to the beach lot at D L Bliss State Park for another painting before connecting with my family later in the afternoon at Meeks Bay.

That may have been bold of me, but it was also very mistaken. The bolder ones had already arrived and for the second day in a row I was denied access to Bliss. Meekly I headed up the coast to our campground and found a spot in the shade to paint this consolation piece, looking back at the shore where I’d spend the next day wallowing in the shallows with a camera hunting for tubes among the boatwakes on my own handmade artificial sandbars. But that’s another story…

In my defeat, my eyes cast downward and for the only time on this trip my painting’s composition contained no sky, instead focused solely on the rocks and water before me. In fact, since the other 9 sold so quickly I decided to hang on to this one for my family. Maybe one of my grandkids will inherit it one day.

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Heaven’s Fourth Foundation

How’s that cryptic title? Don’t worry I’m not starting some sort of religious new age cult or anything. I just have a tradition with my coastal paintings of not naming locations in the titles, but often providing obscure wordplay cues to the locations. I do this partly because as a surfer, no matter how much the internet gives all of our secrets to the masses, it is still taboo to name many of the places I paint in public forums such as this. The other reason is that I still need to be able to recall which painting someone is asking about when they inquire about a piece by it’s title and if I have dozens of paintings called “Afternoon Light on the Coast” well that won’t really help much will it? The wordplay references just serve to jog my memory as to which is what when I need to recall them later.

What’s all that got to do with this title?Well, perhaps it was just the overwhelming beauty of the place that gave a feeling of heaven on earth here, or maybe it was the elevation- being over a mile high in the sky. But either way as I named these pieces a somewhat biblical​ theme emerged. This is one of the most iconic bay views in all of Tahoe, sharing its name with the precious stone listed as the fourth stone in the foundation of the New Heaven in the Book of Revelation. Cryptic? Yes, but it serves its purpose all the same.

Sidenote: If I were to die today, I’d far rather go out with this view in my mind than the stone it’s named after in my hand. No doubt about that.

It should also be noted if we’re going to speak of nearness to heaven that this is the only painting of my trip that had water from the skies fall upon it while painting. The big round dollops fell steadily, but sparsely for only a few minutes, making only the subtlest of splashes and drips in the underpaint stage. But it was dicey for a minute there.

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Eden Revisited

Just after I had things blocked in on this one with a crisp afternoon light, a thunderhead developed to the south and within minutes the whole sky went gray. Had to make a choice, follow the changing conditions, or just wing it and make stuff up. Sometimes clouds bring out colors that sunlight washes out in the landscape. I wasn’t feeling it this time, so this became effectively a studio piece painted on location*, but no longer referencing much of the scene before me other than it’s most basic architecture, just operating on memory and instinct.

This is also the only piece from the trip that includes any human figures. It’s not that I intentionally avoid figures, I just don’t focus on them much. In this case, it was their interaction with the lake that carried the whole story here so there you have it. Humanity introduced in a pristine setting. Eden revisited.

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Fit for a King

Named for the stretch of coast nearby, King’s beach, it’s easy to see why a place this beautiful would belong to a King. That said, he’s lost some territory this year as the heavier than normal snowfall melting into the lake has the water level several feet higher than normal and this beach, like many others found itself nearly completely underwater. I found the only patch of sand I could to work from and even then I stood in ankle deep water getting a fairly proper chill on an otherwise hot day. The entire session was peppered with confusion of beachgoers arriving to their annual beach day on the northern shore of Tahoe only to find there was no… beach. But the water, oh my, the water. High tide on Tahoe is pretty awesome all the same. I’m sure the King is pretty stoked on his view as well.

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West of Heaven

I was undoubtedly the highest I’ve ever been while painting this one. Wait. not like that. I mean the highest elevation- 9,123 feet above sea level to be exact. Heavenly is the name of the ski resort here on the California/Nevada border and we arrived to the first day of the summer gondola running visitors up the hill for an expansive view of the entire Sea of Tahoe. From somewhere around the point where that central tree breaks the view of Tahoe’s shore in the foreground and sweeping all the way to the left then right into the far distance where the shore again disappears behind the tree on the far right, that is the entire East Coast of California in one painting.

Painting on this public observation deck was full of distractions with a higher than normal dose of confusing questions from the admiring public like: “do you do this on your own, or do you sell these?”…. um….?

Anyway, within these distractions an 8 year old girl wandered by who spoke no discernable english and watched enthralled, to the growing impatience of her younger brother. At times her mother had to pull her back as she wanted to put her face so close to the action I was worried I’d accidently paint a rainbow on her cheek and get busted for running an unauthorized facepainting scheme to profit from the tourist traffic. After several minutes of her being allowed by her family to indulge her fascination, she uttered the first english word to her family that I heard. Very clearly and unmistakably she said “Impressionism”. I thought that was pretty cool, even though the only impression I was giving through the painting at that stage was that of a snow-blinded elephant washing it’s back with river mud. Still, though, I strive to carry on in a long and deep tradition of California Impressionist artists, so it was great to hear the word uttered from the mouth of such a young person who clearly knows more about what I do than I would have at her age.

By the way, my entire Tahoe series is sold out (say what? That happened fast!), but I will be showing them all at my gallery before shipping them off. Stay tuned.

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In the Beginning

Arriving to Tahoe for the first time we approached from the south after traversing Echo Summit. The exposed granite boulders of the Pie Shop (what they call that hill in the mid upper right) in the distance gave just a hint of the aroma of the delicious feast of Earth’s wonder that was to come in the following days. The bits of snow still clinging to the shaded hill in the 80 degree heat was now a distant echo of the long dark and cold winter months that blanketed this area with more snow than recent memory could recall. And the fallen tree a reminder that life is never easy.. and even more so here in this place, in spite of its indescribable beauty.

Did I mention the mosquitoes? Talk about blood, sweat, and tears. Well not so much tears but those little bloodsuckers forced me to put on the only jacket I had on hand, a full on hooded puffy warm and toasty jacket. The hood was great to keep those buggers off my neck, but oh my, I think I may have sweated out an organ or two inside that little sauna.

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A Strong Inclination

This is the first painting I did in Tahoe. It was a real puzzle for me trying to sort out the values in the painting with that blinding white snow on the surrounding ridges. I kept feeling like everything should be lighter because of the distance, then I’d lose the contrast that would make that flat white snow appear so bright. I never really did figure it out, but had a ton of fun staring at that water all the same.

The town on the distant shore beneath the snowy peaks is called Incline Village, though that has less to do with the title than the allure of that ice cold water on a hot day, giving one a strong inclination to jump in, no matter how much the shock to one’s system the cold would bring.

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I’m Going In!

Close to the water’s edge and just around that boulder point known as Bonsai Rocks. By the time I was done with this one, staring so closely into that crystalline water while sweating in the sun, there was no holding back. 

I’m going in!

Wow, Tahoe. You’re cold. That hurt.

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SDSFF 2017 Skip Frye Tribute: The Glider

This year the San Diego Surf Film Festival hosted a heartfelt tribute night to San Diego’s Skip Frye, who has been building beautiful boards and outsurfing everyone for over 50 years. The hall was packed with legends of the surfing world there to honor Skip with the SDSFF Lifetime Achievement Award. As each speaker stood to speak about Skip they would mention what an honor it was to honor such an inspiring individual. If they could have read the mind of the painter standing in the back of the hall busy crafting this visual tribute to Skip based on an old Ron Stoner photograph, they would have seen that there was nobody in the room that felt more unworthy of the honor of being there than him. Of all the amazing artists in San Diego, this fuzzy kid from Humboldt rolls down and is asked to perform his trade for the audience to admire, heckle, mock, or cheer (all of which happened in spades). Beyond stoked. This one was for Skip.

 

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Geometries of Love

Not plein air, but quickly painted in a public setting from a blurry overcast bootlegged photo, so not exactly a studio painting either…

This was done as a gift for the family that opened their home to me during my recent stay in San Diego. They spend their anniversaries down here every year, and though it isn’t technically within my usual range, figured it would be an appropriate gesture nonetheless.

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