2.5.24 Monday - Re-Acquired Paintings 1 and 2 of 10

This week I’ll be sharing two pieces of original artwork per day, pieces I’ve just recently re-acquired from exhibitions, or no longer in direct rotation for some of the more competitive show opportunities I’ve been pursuing.

While the work itself isn’t brand new - what I’ll be offering this week will be a bit of information about how the pieces came about, or other tidbits about each.  All the pieces are, as of this writing (the previous week), available through my website store.

Additionally, if you ever see something on my site yet you cannot find it in the Available Works section of my website, just ask me about it, by replying to one of these emails, using the contact page of my website, or sending me a new email at David@DavidOSmithArtist.com

Today’s pieces:

“Plein Air, Waves and Clouds at Alki, ~3-4pm, Windy, 2.7.23,” watercolor, 30 x 42”, 2023

The day this painting was made remains one of the most spectacular weather days I’ve seen since moving back to seattle two years ago.  I love painting at Alki Beach, as no matter what time of day or season of the year, Alki offers vast expanses of water framed by beaches, boats, wildlife, and ever-dynamic skies.  The wind was blowing furiously, straight at me, whipping up a salt spray from the water.  I was elevated about 10 or 12 feet above the water level of Puget Sound, and the waves were about 4 feet tall, just huge for this body of water.  The sun was behind a rain cloud, lighting it up in a glowing rust hue that had to be seen to be believed.  I loved how faint the distant shorelines became.  The tilted horizon line of this piece was not intentional, but a by-product of the setup I chose, at an angle to the direction of the wind and the concrete sea-wall.  The glare of the sun was so incredibly bright, and the effect on the waves around it was to darken and intensity their violet and aqua-phthalo blue hues.  Multiple times I had to desperately catch and secure my large 30 x 42” painting board (with this painting taped to it), because the wind was so violently strong it threatened to rip it from my hands.  I worked with one hand holding the board down, paintbrush in the other.

“Plein Air, Dock at Kenmore’s Log Boom Park, ~3:30-4:30pm, 3.29.23, Weds,” watercolor, 30 x 42”, 2023

This painting was made during my ongoing assignment to make work depicting the Lakeside School Rowing Team for the Lakeside alumni magazine.  I was about to journey to the end of the dock in this work, when I noticed how amazing the effect of the light was on the receding perspective of the dock itself.  I usually follow my intuition about “what to paint” in any given painting location - I know it when I see it - and this view spoke to me.  I posted up right where I was, having just stepped onto the long dock.  Almost at the same time as I began, or maybe even slightly before, a man stopped to talk to me about the work I was doing.  We hit it off, and ended up spending the entire time I painted (just over an hour) in conversation, about his work (a photographer), about mine, about how great it is to get outside, and other things.  It was really enjoyable for me to be able to share, in real-time, how I make what I do, with someone who was interested, curious, invested.  When I began this work I left space for the white of the paper to represent the glare of the sun on the water.  As I worked, one of the last elements to paint was the shadow of the railing on the dock.  I painted it at a fairly flat angle… then realized, oh no, that angle makes no sense for where the sun is in the rest of my painting!  The sun had moved significantly West (to the right) since I’d begun.  So, damn the consequences, I thought, I’ll wet the paper and try to lift out those incorrectly placed (but correctly observed!) Shadows.  You can see their “ghosts” in the foreground of the dock.  I made up placements for them based on what they might have been previously, with the sun more directly overhead and centered.  At the end of the day, the mottled texture the ghosts leave doesn’t bother me, and the story is amusing to me.