Water and Boats

In Mexico you can still find those charming, old fishing boats, paint long rubbed off, barely seaworthy, sometimes made of real wood, mixed in together with more modern boats.

I saw this unassuming scene in the harbor of the port town of San Blas, in the State of Nayarit, during a plein air painting trip with a friend and fellow artist.

Glad I finally got around to painting it!

Panamerican Games 2011

In just a few days the Panamerican Games 2011 will be inaugurated and athletes from 42 nations will gather in Guadalajara, Mexico, to compete.

People and water are some of my favorite topics, so it seemed obvious that I should paint a swimmer.

Good luck to all competitors and good luck to the people of Guadalajara, who during almost three weeks will have to endure traffic jams on many city streets, because one lane will be set aside for the exclusive use of participants and vehicles that are officially connected with the games.

Puerto Vallarta

Not long ago I participated in a group art show in the Peter Gray Museum in Puerto Vallarta. During our stay at the Friendly Hola Hotel, we saw this gorgeous sunset, typical and very normal for Puerto Vallarta. The scene was so picture book perfect that I hesitated whether I should paint it or not. I guess, I could not resist after all.

This painting is part of my skies series.

Cumulus Clouds

Again, rain, or almost rain, is the topic of this painting, which is part of my skies series.

During the Rainy Season in the Caribbean, beautiful clouds gather every afternoon, the sky gets dark, almost purple and the contrast between the water, the clouds and the sky is gorgeous. Could not resist, even though nature is the better painter.

Blitz

Blitz is German for lightning. I think it is a good word, very fast, very descriptive the way it sounds, the "i" conveying light.

While painting this scene, I tried to see it all happening in slow motion, with sparks illuminating way more than the exact path of the flash, but still with the surprise element of a bolt out of the blue. Or, the purple, in this case.

Blitz is part of my skies series.

Downpour

It feels so good being in a dry place and watching the rain coming down in sheets!

Even though I painted this piece in my studio and from a photograph, it was more like doing a plein air painting, because I have seen and painted such scenes on location so many times. Just this time I didn´t have to pack up in a hurry and run!

"Rain" is part of my skies series.

Rain

Rain is a fascinating topic.

"Night Rain" belongs to my skies series, even though more than half of it´s space is filled with solid matter. The rain cannot be seen, but felt. It is pitch black night and the moisture in the air refracts every droplet where it meets a street light, the asphalt is glistening in front of car´s headlights and contours get blurred by the blinding play of dark and light.

Just as we move fast in the rain, trying to get home dry and safe, merely paying attention to what´s most important, I painted this picture very quickly, with as little detail as possible.

Color Harmony

After a long period of time of painting mostly landscapes, I felt itchy to do some figure again.
This nude was painted from a photo I had kept in my "2 paint folder" since a while. It's composition had attracted me from the very beginning and I am planning to do at least four of that theme and shape, 1 meter square, in the near future.
Olga started out with much stronger colors and a much more pure blue background, however, as the painting progressed, I decided to keep the color harmony much closer, in a middle key of chroma and mainly in cool tones with just enough warm reflected light to explain volume and to keep it interesting.
Given the relatively large area of background, I worked with very wide brushes from the hardware store, which gave the surface an unexpectedly beautiful texture.

Another Seascape

My best client loves seascapes.
This one is not sold yet and I would not mind keeping it for myself. I have been to this beach dozens of times and on every occasion I find a new view that I simply have to paint. I can´t keep up!

Seascapes

A couple of decades ago I was reluctant to paint seascapes. It seemed dangerous ground, not because I did not know how to paint one, but because so many hobby painters love this theme. (Along with reclining nudes and children´s portraits.)
And I did not want to be thrown in with the wrong group.

But no topic should be too intimidating nor too banal for a serious painter. In the end it´s what you make of it and I learned that among buyers, there is a taste for both good and bad interpretations. So, who´s to say?

Painting versus Photography

Even though photography and painting (or sculpting) have a lot in common with respect to the perceptive mind of the artist, I believe each of the two art forms has a different ideal or purpose.
Photographers capture the beauty of one moment in time, even when this moment depicts a subject in motion. A painter, who´s work takes a few hours to do, witnesses the subject matter over a longer period of time, and interprets a personal impression of it. This impression should be charged with the painter´s emotions and will give not only a more or less accurate account of the scene, depending on the style, but also a glimpse of the artist´s character.
For me painting in a realistic way does not mean trying to compete with what a a photographer can do, that would be a waste of time, as the camera can deliver so much more precision.

Shade or Shadow?

When I teach color theory, I always explain to the students, that in art there is an important difference between shade and shadow.
When light falls on an object, it illuminates the side that is facing the light. The other sides of the object, which are not pointing towards the source of this light, are in shade.
The object will, in turn, cast a shadow onto the surface which is underneath or behind it.
The change between an area in light and an area in shade can be soft and gradual if the object is rounded (like the forehead), or abrupt if it has corners or pronounced plane changes (like the violin).
Cast shadows have sharp edges close to the object that casts the shadow (like the cast shadow of the bow on the violinist´s arm) and softer edges the farther away from the light source the shadow gets (like in the case of the cast shadow of the arm and violin on the red curtain).
The handling of the brush strokes, using soft and hard edges, has to be according to that principle in order to give a realistic impression.

Ethnic Series

I am working on a series of ethnic Mexican scenes for a possible exhibition in my native Austria a year from now. Europeans seem to be very interested in the folklore of this country.
Due to its diversity in indigenous cultures, Mexico is extremely rich in native crafts and folk art: textiles, pottery, basket weaving, masks, jewelery, embroidery, wood carvings, rugs, hand painted decorative items, hammocks, toys, mouth blown glass - you name it, they have it.
This woman is a Huichol Indian. The Huicholes traditionally live in the Sierra Madre Occidental, where the States of Durango, Zacatecas, Nayarit and Jalisco meet. They were the only indigenous tribes that were not defeated by the Spaniards during the conquest and they continued to live in relative isolation until very recently. In the last ten years, more and more Huichol people have come to the cities to offer their beautiful and very popular yarn paintings, jewelery and other decorative items, which they cover with intricate designs in colorful beads. Their work has been shown in museums in the United States and other countries and they are now internationally famous.

Skin

Painting skin is fascinating.
I was lucky enough to have my eyes opened by the great Spanish painter and teacher Sebastian Capella, who carried forward the legacy of Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. Sorolla brought skin alive through the use of color.
Like any other surface, skin can have many colors, depending on the quality of the primary light source (warm sun, cool stage light, etc.) and whether there is any reflected light bouncing off nearby colorful objects.
We are used to seeing color in everything, but when asked to reproduce what we see, the left side of our brain tells us a different story: Certain things are supposed to be a certain color. Skies are blue and skin is skin color, for example. Not for me, thank goodness.

Abstraction vs. Realism

There is no right or wrong in art. Both representational and non representational art can be good or bad. Good art, at least for me, is one which creates a response in the viewer which is similar to the artists own initial impression or intent in relation to the subject matter.
Even though I paint representationally, I am always using a certain degree of abstraction. Nature is three dimensional and my canvas has only two dimensions, so, by definition, I need to abstract. How much I want to stick to what I see or how far I want to simplify is up to me and they way I feel that day. Sometimes I enjoy playing around with both abstraction and figure in a painting. It is just a matter of shapes and colors put together in a harmonious way.

Purple

The modern aniline violet was discovered by accident in the XIXth century. A British student who was working on a remedy against malaria, tried to produce a synthetic substitute for quinine. He invented a beautiful purple instead.

In México, in the area around Tehuantepec on the Pacific coast, purple was made for centuries from an excretion of the púrpura, a sea snail. When squeezed, the animal produces a liquid which can be used to dye thread. The curious thing is that the thread first turns white, then changes its color to green, followed by yellow before it finally becomes purple.
A similar mollusk from the Mediterranean was used in the Middle East to produce another shade of violet. The difference was that its excretion had to be mixed with urine and lime in order to fix the color.

Red

Red pigments have an interesting history.
Up to the XIIIth century few people knew that the most beautiful reds were made from an insect which lives primarily on the nopal cactus in America and in the bark of a tree in Asia. The fact that the intense crimson red, used for cloth as well as for paint, was obtained by squishing thousands of bugs, was kept a secret for obvious reasons - it was not very appetizing. The name crimson, carmesí in Spanish, Karmesinrot in German and carmine in English, has its roots in the persian word "kermes"- the name for the bug.
The facts about another ancient source of red are not much better, at least not for the health of those who produced it: Vermillion was made by mixing mercury and sulfur, both highly toxic.
As was Lead- or Minium red: It was obtained by heating toxic lead white.
Apart from their repulsive or toxic ingredients, none of these reds were permanent.
What a relief that today´s artists don´t have to deal with any of that!