Dear Art Lover -

You may have noticed that last week both Thursday and Friday’s emails did not come through. My website had run out of email-sending capacity for the time frame! Today’s email picks up where the last one left off…

Monday, 2.19.24 - 20 years of Art, Illustrated, Part 4 of 5

In today’s newsletter I’m sharing works 28 to 34 of 34 works chosen for a recent grant application, following twenty years of art making, 2003-2023, and a bit about each work:

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply to this email, email me at David@DavidOSmithArtist.com, or use the Contact Page of my website.

It was hard not to see paintings everywhere, on vacation in Yoho and Banff Nnational Parks this past summer.  This piece is of Lake Moraine, which I could barely believe actually looked like this, the color of the water, and the reflections of the misty mountain behind.  This piece was very successful, and I had a lot of incredibly beauty to work with.  It was challenging to make, as the colors and their lightness in the receding atmosphere was very subtle, with only really one chance at each to get it fairly right.  The first step was strategically wetting the paper around the mountaintop clouds, to allow them to bleed into the mist, covering and revealing the rock behind and below.  I worked from top to bottom, crouched on the lake shore, quite a few tourists chatting with me as I worked.  The couple in the distance were there but moved before I could paint them both - I had my girlfriend Amy stand a few paces in front of me (not as far away as they had been) to get the aspect of a girl with a backpack - so the tiny figure in the lower right is based on her.

This piece is the first (and so far, only) 22 x 30 inch watercolor that I made the effort to haul up to a mountaintop to be able to paint in that large scale, on-site, en plein air.  Previously in this trip to Banff with my girlfriend and her family I had found success at the 11 x 15 inch scale, boards which conveniently fit into my backpack.  For this piece, my large 24 x 32 inch heavy portfolio was a bit of a challenge to haul up, and especially to haul down, as I was carrying the drying painting separately, but I am glad I put my body through the necessary distress to do so.  My fantasy is to figure out a system to manage the carriage of 30 x 42 inch boards or even maybe the 40 x 60 inch boards for extended alpine treks.  Pieces like this one and the previous “Lake Moraine” have been very useful in portfolios for applications to National Park residencies, as I can (rightly!) Defend my plain air work in National Parks as “ongoing projects” instead of proposed novelties.  I really enjoyed seeing, at the base of this incredible mountain (Rundle), of all things, a golf course, a completely man-made (and completely silly) landscape dwarfed by the majesty of the mountain.  The top was so faint, so distant in the blue atmosphere, that my treatment of the sky and clouds is visible through its transparency.  As the sun changed its angle, the shadows of the trees on the near side of the peak lengthened and deepened, highlighting the topography.

This plein air watercolor was a bit atypical for my process, as I really wanted to achieve a certain effect, to paint a very specific time of day, and a very specific atmosphere.  Many times (four or five?) I would arrive at Centennial park, exhausted by rushing there from a previous commitment, just to find I was minutes too late to get the correct angle of the sun on the grain silos, the colors already changed, the glare on longer shining on the bull kelp in the water.  While this painting was made over only 3 or 4 visits, I know I must have been to the park with the intent to paint at least eight times over two months.  I began this piece mid-July but didn’t finish it until mid-September.  The grain silos were a bit intimidating, but I didn’t try to go for lethal accuracy, more the broad ideas of their optical effect, and a few outstanding details to allow the viewer to understand the structure as complete and integral.  This piece would inevitably look very different if I approach this view again, as I learned a lot during its creation.  It was, similar to some of the Banff mountaintop pieces, a bit of a physical feat to make, as I was perched in between and over massive seawall rocks between the bike path and the tide, in full hot summer sunlight, and for a few sessions, a mere twenty feet from a rotting seal or sea lion carcass.  Nothing I could do… I tried to reposition myself, but once the painting is begun, I’m more or less locked into the view I begin with.  Eventually my brain would run out of the “this smells bad” signal and I’d forget about it.

The clouds in this piece were spectacular that day.  I was most interested in them, using the whole landscape as an excuse just to focus on and study the clouds, glowing warm in the mid-morning light.  As I worked, I included other aspects, especially the abundance of avian wildlife present that day.  There were two people fishing off the structure in the foreground, as well as an osprey circling overhead.  A ferry appeared in the distance - this view looks directly down one of the routes to Bainbridge.  Clouds like these are reason enough for me to want to paint en plein air.  I am consistently surprised by the variety, beauty, and originality of the atmospheric conditions I see here in Seattle - it seems that every day is something new, something different than anything else I’ve seen before.

This piece is the second plein air watercolor painting I’ve made at this scale, 40 x 60 inches.  I’m not aware of anyone else making plein air watercolor paintings in one go at this scale.  I wasn’t sure it could be done, so I bought these extra-large watercolor papers (too thick to roll, so created and shipped flat - so expensive!) As an experiment, to challenge myself to work at a larger scale than 30 x 42 inches (double the size).  The first piece I made in Spring of 2023, and it felt like too long to wait to make another when I made this one, November 2023.  Just getting the painting to and from anywhere is a challenge - the boards are too large to fit in my car, so I have to be in another vehicle unless I want to just paint the backyard.  The clouds were stunning this morning at Golden Gardens, and when I began, the mountains were visible but still in shadow.  Just as I was about to cover that area of the paper with a light wash - the sun lit them up, so I left the white of the paper for the snow-covered peaks.  Working on the foreground wave patterns, the small dark marks, took the most time of any aspect of this painting.  The sky, mountains, water came together quickly - they had to at this scale to achieve wet-in-wet effects, soft edges - so I took my time to get the scale and shape right for the small dark waves.  I love painting at Golden Gardens.  Since making this piece, my third 40 x 60 inch painting also features a view of the water from the beaches there.  So far, as of this writing, I’ve only made three of these scale plain air watercolor landscapes, and I have one remaining 40 x 60 inch sheet.  Ordering four more is a $600 investment.

This piece is simple, but my enjoyment of making it and presenting it is somewhat sentimental.  There is a certain time of day when the atmosphere is between light and dark, the fog obscuring far shorelines, and adding flares of light around the gradually dimming electric lights and streetlights.  Their reflections on the water is what drew me to paint this scene at this time - from a very familiar viewpoint, looking East on Westlake Avenue across Lake Union.  The far shore is the neighborhood where I grew up, my most familiar streets and buildings and trees.  There is no white gouache in this piece - all the lights are the left white of the paper.  I painted my initial washes very deliberately to leave space for the lights.  A few ducks entered the scene.  The glow of the red traffic light was some of the only strong color, the rest a subtle mix of chromatic grays.  I gave this painting to my parents for Christmas this year - I wanted it to stay with our family.

This piece also became a family Christmas gift, because I knew my mom liked it so much.  Walking around Greenlake Park is one of the most pleasant things you can do in Seattle, especially on a striking morning of glowing clouds and still reflective water.  This painting is very simple, and I thought maybe would become part of a series of views from Greenlake, but so far is the only one.  The walking path at Greenlake is very highly foot-trafficked, so I was drawing a fair amount of attention as I worked on this piece.  I tried to pay special attention to the patterns of the water reflections, as wind barely rippled the surface, allowing plenty of the sky to be reflected as well as the dark of the trees on the far shore.  The light changed significantly while I worked, as the light during the hours from 8 to 9 am towards early winter and late fall changes very rapidly.

Thus concludes the first 34 works demonstrating 20 years of continuous art making.  Next up for Friday, I’ll go over the most recent six works I included for the grant application, all made in 2023.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to reply to this email, email me at David@DavidOSmithArtist.com, or use the Contact Page of my website.

Cheers,

David