April 2011

Above El Capitan VII

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Some may remember late last year I was working on a large painting of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park and posting the work as it developed. (You can scroll back through this weblog and see the posts I made as the painting progressed.) I was close to finished, so stopped working on it for a few weeks and come back with a fresh eye. Well, the weeks turned into months, and I am just now coming back to it.

In the last few days, I have painted all over the canvas, mainly lightening up the distant values as they were too dark. I might lighten them up a bit more once the foreground is complete. I also eliminated some of the clouds as they were over powering the rest of the painting. I also slightly changed and worked on the foreground, with more work to do there. It is getting close to finished. Anybody have suggestions?

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Here is a detail of part of the foreground.

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Milpitas

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Having spent my adolescent years in East Texas, I am always enchanted by the beautiful skies and clouds when I go back to visit. Huge thunderheads, magnificent in their awesome power would bring refreshing, but short bursts of moisture during the summer months. Huge puffy cumulus clouds would fill the sky rolling slowly past in no hurry to get anywhere. In the hot summer sun, an hour or two would show no evidence of the previous downpour.

Here in the San Francisco Bay area, we rarely see such wonder in the skies. Being close to the Pacific, the ‘air’ is usually a non-event. The exception to this is just after a winter storm. Such a day was today. The skies were so beautiful, I rushed about a mile up the hill behind my house, and did a painting.

I painted the entire work in about 90 minutes using a Raphael Kevrin #24, which is an inch wide Mongoose filbert type brush. Hats off to Kevin Courter, one of my favorite local artists, who led me on to Mongoose to achieve a soft touch. You can see more of his wonderful work here.

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Below is a snapshot of the painting on the easel. I used an iPhone to snap all the photos.

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I titled the painting and this blog post Milpitas as you could see the east bay town of Milpitas in the distance right in the notch of the hill.

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