Cannon Beach

We spent last weekend at a friend’s fabulous beach house in Cannon Beach Oregon. This is the view from the front patio.

This is a really remarkable house, btw. The view is amazing and the house was built to have a zero energy footprint. There’s more information about this incredible house → HERE ← , if you’re interested. Beware the link is to a pdf file.

I spent most of the weekend painting and drawing. After 2 weeks of cold miserable rain, the skies were clear, the sun shined bright and it was warm. It was also a full moon.

There’s a hidden path down to a beach that’s secluded from the main beach except at low tide. I spent one day drawing and painting there and almost got stranded by the incoming tide.

I had to put in a telephone pole drawing.

Delicata Squash

6″ x 8″ oil on canvas

Leave it to me to make a harmless little squash look like a Halloween fiend. I didn’t intend it but this seems to have a dark slightly macabre feel to it. It’s me not the squash.

I’ll have to speak to my therapist about this.

I went a week or so without painting and I felt a little rusty on this. I always think, as I set up the still life, “this time I’m just going to crank out a fast one. I think I ought to be able to do one of these in 5 or 6 brush strokes. It probably took me 3 hours to get it to this point.

Tagged

I’ve been tagged by my friend Sue. I’ve been tagged before and I don’t think I know 7 others to tag who haven’t already been tagged multiple times so I’ll just list seven things people don’t know about me. Here are 7 unusual jobs I’ve had.

1. tuning a waterfall – As a landscaper I once had the job of tuning a waterfall – moving rocks around in a stream to make different sounds as the water flowed around them.

2. drawbridge tender – For a couple of summers, while in college I was the drawbridge operator for 2 small railroad drawbridges near Philadelphia PA

3. pull wire for computer cash register – another summer job was to travel around the country wiring department stores for computer cash registers when they were first being introduced (I’m dating myself with that one, eh?) They would lock us in the stores over night and let us out in the morning.

4. artist assistant – I worked for one of my art instructors, helping to construct complex canvases for his work

5. apprentice handmade papermaker – after college I apprenticed with Douglass Morse Howell (the father of modern hand made paper)

6. apprentice machinist – I dropped out of college after my freshman year and started an apprenticeship as a machinist. I finished my first year but it was a primary factor in my going back to college.

7. door to door window salesman – This was when I was trying to make a living as a painter an my wife became pregnant with our first child. I made exactly 0 sales.

Mt St Helens revisited

5″ x 8″ Pen, watercolor and gouache

I reworked this sketch of Mt St Helens with gouache as an experiment. In oil painting, I miss being able to make the kinds of marks I make with a pen so I’ve been playing a bit with gouache to see if I can use it like oil paint while still preserving my ability to make lines.

I like the result although I think the colors are a little heavy. I wish I could be this loose while doing plein air oils.

The mountain has been erupting for some time now and steam clouds were being emitted from the crater all day.

Crown Point Plein Air

8″ x 6″ oil on canvas

This was painted from the Portland Women’s State Scenic Viewpoint in the Columbia River National Scenic area. I joined a local Plein Air painting group for this paint out. When we arrived it was completely fogged in and I set up my easel pointing in the direction I thought I might see Crown Point. It cleared long enough to paint this (about an hour and a half) and was almost completely fogged in again when I finished.

I’m still pretty awkward painting plein air and not really getting out enough.

Burnside Bridge and Steele Bridge – oil

7″ x 15″ oil on canvas

This was done in the studio from sketches and photo resources. There are more subtleties in the scene that I’d like to have caught without getting any tighter. I may do another one working just from this painting.

There are actually 2 drawbridges in this scene. The Burnside Bridge, in front with the turret type things on it and behind it the counter weight towers of the Steele Bridge.

In my college days I worked a couple of summers as a drawbridge tender, raising and lowering the bridge. The ones I worked on were much smaller and obscure little railroad bridges but spending all that time on the bridges and in the rail yard may have something to do with my love of industrial sites, from an aesthetic perspective.

Camouflaged Oil Can

I hadn’t thought, when I set this up, that it would be so difficult to distinquish reflective the stainless steele vessel from the patterned background. It was a fun challenge to make the can visible.

Pen and Ink from the Bread and Ink Cafe on SE Hawthorne Blvd Portland

Sketched during dinner at the Bread and Ink Cafe on SE Hawthorne Blvd

Pen and Ink in 31/2″ x 5 sketchbook

I sketched this over dinner at a restaurant in one of Portland’s more bohemian neighborhoods. Although it’s not cheap to live there, the Hawthorne area seems to have resisted the temptation to gentrify and remains pretty funky. I used to take my daughter (now 20 years old) to dance classes at the Do Jump Theater and I would sit in the Baghdad Theater Pub and sketch while I waited for her. That was at least ten years ago. This reminded me of those days.

I dig telephone poles.