Over China Cove
oil on canvas
12" x 24"
Snow days are a lot of work. I'm trying to get some paintings done. A few might be good, but most I'm unsure about.
I went through a stash of plein air paintings from a couple summers ago. In the stack were most of the paintings I did on the way to-and-from California on an epic road trip. I hadn't looked at most of them since returning from the adventure. There were a handful of misses, but I was mostly surprised with how much I liked the paintings. At the time, I don't think I felt as confident with the work because of my lack of familiarity with the subjects I was depicting. Painting the ocean, the desert, and the mountains is tough when you're used to painting thick Indiana woods through thick Indiana air. While many of the paintings I brought back were my first attempts at foreign landscapes and therefore lacking in virtuosity, I'm happy with the "honesty" of the depictions. Unlike many plein air painters, I've never thought of my plein paintings as studies. I've always called on things I learned from painting on location, but have very rarely used works done in the field as studio study materials. This group of work, which I initially gathered up for upcoming exhibits, might be the exception. While I still have a vivid memory of the places I visited, I'm finding some of my current studio paintings benefiting from old plein air works pinned up on the wall. For as many reference photos as I have, I'm pretty horrible at using photographs in my paintings, so I guess I'll plan on milking these recent finds for all their worth in my upcoming pictures of everything west of the Mississippi.
China Cove is a little piece of Point Lobos in California. It's easily one of the funnest places I've painted. The abundance of fog and mist seemed to make the sunny moments unbelievably vivid. I went back a month or so painting the picture above, but to my disappointment, the road had been closed by the wildfires that eventually burnt up lots of the Big Sur area. Giveth and taketh or something like that...
