09/07/2014
It may look like a wave, but if you rotate this piece counter-clockwise it represents the real time wind conditions off the Pacific coast at the time the painting was being created. Check out earth.nullschool.net if you want to see what I’m talking about.
August 20, 2014
I painted this one years ago
From a weathered photograph
It was a Christmas gift
From a daughter
To her father
She was a young child
When the photo was taken
From the Old Trinidad Pier
Of her dad and his crew
On his boat down below
She said they ate good
Really, really good that year
I imagined them eating
Juicy butter-dripping crab
For every meal
She just laughed
After the lean years
Of cornbread and beans
This was the year
Their ship finally came in
They didn’t eat crab
They ate whatever they wanted
Wherever they wanted
And you might be thinking
Of a working-class family
That just came into extra money
And you might not be wrong
But I’ll ask you right now
To think of this young child
Enjoying her family’s joy
And remembering it
After all these years
After the photo is faded
Tattered
Torn around the edges
Asking an artist
To give that sweet memory
Back to her father
Now
Tell me again
When did their ship come in?
06/11/2014
Painted on site with the rising tide sending large amounts of saltwater all over my back and palette as I worked. There may not be blood, sweat, or tears in this one, but there is certainly a good dose of Pacific Ocean saltwater, and that’s almost the same thing from a salinity perspective…
June 1, 2014
And it will be what it will be
05/30/2014
Recent Live Art piece from the Save the Waves fundraiser in SF a few weeks back. I’m really stoked how this one turned out. I went with a simple image of a wave about to break into a breakwall, an enigmatic comment on our role in shaping the shoreline, creating and destroying surf breaks along the way. I figured it would be relevant to the cause. Not sure if any of that came across at all, but still I was stoked to be a part of their event and raise a few dollars for them along the way.
05/06/2014
Painted live at the San Diego Surf Film Festival, 2014. Throughout the 4 day event, contributing filmmakers were asked to trace a print of their hands on this 36″ x 36″ canvas. On the final day, I incorporated their hands into this finished piece.
November 25, 2011
If you spend any time at all in this town, do yourself a favor and find a different mode of transportation than a rusty old van. Parking is nuts to non-existent and navigating the unfamiliar streets in a vehicle that can’t hop curbs, cut over embankments and weave through crowds of pedestrians really hinders one’s getting around here. A bike however, opens the world. A borrowed bike with a friend or two to follow around is even better. They’ll know all the fun zigs and zags.
I recall this morning clearly, even though it was quite a few years ago. My old college roommate was living in town here and had the day off work when I rolled through so we
grabbed the bikes and hit the trails, roads, paths, walkways, dirt hills, etc., on the way across town for morning surf checks and coffee accumulations. This was before the age of cell phone cameras, so I brought a camera with me in case anything caught my eye. The borrowed bike I rode was a bit unruly for one-handed use on the crowded bike path that follows the shore here, so once we procured the coffee and rode on, things got difficult. I’d managed to get this far without incident, but no further. Fortunately the landing was soft, the camera intact, and somehow, against all odds the coffee remained unspilled. After brushing off and taking inventory I snapped a photo, and later painted this.
December 30, 2010
I’ve been told lately
That I didn’t paint this one quite right
Or it must be somewhere else
That our local jetty doesn’t look like this
That it’s all busted up
And full of holes
Where the ocean pours in
And leaves salt in every wound
But I painted this a long time ago
From photos and memories
Made even earlier
We never had 4 wheel drives
And the sand road wasn’t so well packed yet
So we walked along the edge of the seawall
Unbroken
From the carpark to the rusted chain
Our first view
Was this
Looking at it now
It’s easy to forget
That there was a time
A time and half a time before
When the path that we walked
Wasn’t falling apart
And once in awhile
A painting like this
Let’s us stop
And remember
December 22, 2009
The first art teacher I ever had used to always tell us that all art is a lie. I never really understood what he meant by that, but it sounded pretty neat and quite teacherly.
Generally, I gravitate toward truth-telling with my art and most inaccuracies in my paintings are accidents of omission. I’m just not one to paint every single blade of grass and individual leaves on every tree.
There’s an ancient text that repeats the theme that all men are like grass, referring to the brevity and fleeting nature of our lives on the face of the earth.
More often than not, I treat humans in the landscape as the blades of grass that they are, fleeting, ephemeral, just passing through for a moment before they move on.
Sometimes it lends to an eerie silent vibe in my paintings of places that should be full of human activity, but showing no trace of it except those features we’ve built into a more
semi-permanent state on the landscape itself- roads, benches, stairs, paths, etc.
This is one of those spooky ones.
That said, I’m not sure which is the bigger lie here: the complete lack of human beings on a glorious sun-filled afternoon here… or the sandbar creating ruler edged perfect waves from that outside rock all the way to the sand 200 yards later.
Neither of those ever happen.
Hence the title: Surf Check Daydream indeed.
December 21, 2009
My favorite story about this one isn’t my story at all. It’s something a Patagonia employee said the first time they saw this piece in the back of my van in their HQ parking lot in Ventura, California. It went something like this:
“This is heavy, no way, check it out, when you look to the right it’s what’s already happened, the wave has gone by, that’s the past, you don’t want to live there. But then when you look to the left that’s future, what’s to come, something to look forward to, but that’s not where you want to live either. When you look at the center that’s the present moment, that’s where you want to be.”
I’ve always remembered that, even though I’ve forgotten his name and have lost all touch with the fellow who uttered that wisdom off the cuff like only a barefoot surfer in a parking lot in southern California could muster…
November 15, 2008
This is one of the first paintings I painted of this location. I’d go on to paint many more over the years, but none quite as refined as this one painted over ten years ago. It was
painted at home in the quietness of my studio.
This is as good a time as any to point out what I love about painting on location in “plein air” instead of in the studio- real stuff happens out there. You never know what you’ll see when you post up for a few hours in a single spot and simply observe the world around you.
The last time I recall painting here on location with a friend, as we stood at our easels on the side of the frontage road above the train tracks we heard some yelling down below, just to the south. Some folks across the inlet were yelling at a hobo lady to get off the tracks. A train could be heard in the distance and after a string of fatalities on these
very tracks, nobody was eager to see another one.
As might be expected, hobo ladies don’t like to be yelled at any more than you or I would, even when we’re doing something foolish, so she did what any self-respecting
hobo lady might do and promptly flipped the bird to all. To the shouting crowd, to the painters on the cliff, and to the oncoming train.
You could hear the train straining to come to a stop, whistle blowing, tension rising with each passing second revealing the momentous impossibility of this train stopping in time. It appeared a certain suicide by desperate defiance was about to unfold.
At the last possible second the hobo lady stepped off the tracks, and of all the times to slip and fall on one’s rear end, this was not the best of them. The train just missed her
head and finally came to a stop 50 yards down the line.
To her credit, even though she fell, she never dropped the bird. Take that, world. She quickly regained composure and sauntered off into the bushes as the conductor got
out and walked the line, likely looking for her lifeless body, which would not be found today, thank you very much.
Just another afternoon on the coast route.
August 5, 2005
While painting this one from behind a rusty barbwire fence running along the overgrowth by the riverbank, I had an odd thought of what would happen if a cow came charging down the little path I was on. I sorta game-planned how I would step back into a little clearing behind my easel to let it pass, then dismissed the thought as the product of too much coffee working on the ol’ brain. About halfway into the painting I heard some rustling in the brush up a little ways, and sure enough, COWZA! I stepped back as the bovine stomped its way happily down the trail, out to the road, and off down the lane. I went and knocked on what appeared to be the farm house door to let them know of the great escape. They just shrugged and said it happens all the time, them cows are all branded anyway, she’ll be brought back soon enough. OK, back to painting then. Interesting times.
September 2, 2003
After two straight days of rain and a not so inspiring view from inside the tent, I broke down and attempted to paint on this masonite panel even though it was still drizzling. Luckily it never became a downpour. The thought of painting in the rain has resonated with me ever since though…
She cooks an extra portion of every meal
Delivers it to the kids
Whose father is sick and maybe dying
And whose mother travels with him
To doctors far away
Because nothing can be done
Here
She leaves their dinner on the porch
And feels their fear and pain
Seeping up through the floorboards
She’s trying to paint in the rain
The storm is upon us
The paints drip and run
Their colors are true
But we’ll never be done
Though we cannot see clearly
The vision is plain
We wish we could do more
Than just paint in the rain
He asks the waitress what she’d recommend
He’s an artist passing through
Looking for something in this town
Anything to catch his eye
She looks at the table
At the tacos and beers
At the floor below
Her own worn out shoes
And explains to him that
There really isn’t anything interesting
Here
He plants his easel across the corner
And paints the taqueria in her name
It’s just after lunch under a desert sun
But he’s trying to paint in the rain
To make things better
To right the wrongs
To speak the truth
To sing the songs
But the words fall flat
The notes ring in vain
And this song is nothing
But paint in the rain
October 1, 2002
One of the last plein air paintings I did before my first daughter was born. When she came along we bought a house and painting was put on hold for several years while frantic nest-building ensued. That was nuts. Two weeks before she was born we were walking to the gas station down the street for the restroom. My wife had taken to cooking on a campstove on the back porch. We managed to get one room finished along with a functional toilet/shower, and stove by the time she was born. Then it was a race to finish the rest of the house and floors before she started crawling. We stayed one milestone ahead of her and managed to pull off a nice little remodel, but it would be another ten years before I’d start painting outside again.
But yeah, distant memories now… I’d forgotten about this painting entirely until a collector recently notified me it was up for sale on craigslist. Once I saw it, I immediately remembered the day I painted it, scouting around for hours being all kinds of particular about the view not being what I wanted. I probably passed up 35 great paintings before settling on this one. I’m pretty sure my thinking at that point was just to not go home empty-handed. I don’t recall what came of the painting- who bought it, or if I gave it away or what, but I was pretty stoked to see it once again. When my collector friend bought it and brought it over to my studio for some touchup, varnish, and re-framing it was a little like being reunited with a long lost child that had gone off into the world and lived a life of its own now back to say hello to Dad once again before heading out on another chapter. I wasn’t so sure of it back then, but now after all these years I reckon it turned out alright after all.
August 1, 2002
After this piece I came to the conclusion that the nearly unbearable intensity of the color of California poppies in bright sunshine may just be one of nature’s cruelest tricks ever hoisted upon unsuspecting plein air painters. It’s just not fair, really.
June 1, 2002
This was the first full studio landscape I completed after spending about 2 years pretty much exclusively painting outdoors. The outdoor approach ended up completely altering my approach to painting in general. Most of the studio landscape work I’ve done in more recent years that folks know me best for wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t spent those couple years outdoors relearning how to see nature.
December 20, 2001
This one goes way back…
I first became interested in painting outdoors after seeing work from some of the early California Impressionists at a show in Los Angeles.
I’d been painting for a solid ten years already, a dedicated artist since the age of 16. But those California Impressionists did something with their art that I couldn’t do at the time- make you feel the place. I’d already been painting different spots from memory here and there, but their lifelike renditions tapped into my experiences of being on the coast in a whole different way. I spent the next couple of years painting exclusively outdoors from life.
This was maybe my 7th plein air painting I’d ever done. During this brief time we lived in the heart of the concrete sprawl of Southern California and it was a 45 minute drive to the base of this canyon. But I’d return here time after time to paint because (aside from the mountain bikers) there were no signs of modern civilization up here. It was like returning to the Old California that the masters had painted so well, and along the way, I fell in love.
-Entry on March 5, 2015
December 10, 2001
This is from way up the canyon, to the top of the ridge from where it starts. If I painted the scene behind my back you’d be looking at the 5 freeway or the toll road or something near Irvine and a bunch of strip malls and houses. But hiking up here from the trailhead a few miles down at the coast you don’t see or hear any of that. It’s just rabbits and snakes and birds and the very occasional group of brightly colored cussing angry spandex clad men in a hurry on their wheelie toys. Aside from them, it’s a full sanctuary back there.
