Blue, Yellow, Red

Toward the end of this gorgeous summer day Tuko, Cosette and I converged on Opihikao to paint the spectacular view of the coastline with its many outcroppings glowing in the sun behind a row of graceful palm trees lining the road. It is a wonderful place to hang out, on a knoll overlooking the road, covered in soft cushy grass, in front of the 10 acre estate belonging to nice folks named Bernard and Gloria. Bernard kindly took us on a tour of his property which includes many well preserved rock walls dating from Hawaiian village days and lots of abundantly fruiting trees.

It's hard to tell from the photo but it was amusing to notice all three of our painting starts are in different primary colors: mine in blue, Cosette's bright yellow, and Tuko as usual exploring her cadmium red outline technique. I have been studying Cezanne and so am floundering a bit, caught between my habit of painting what I see and the desire to push the compositional elements as the Master would have done.

We were having some beautiful weather down here in Puna, and the days seemed endlessly long and beautiful. With the exception of a couple of afternoons when we got rained out of our current painting spot in Opihikao. Cosette finally joined us after weeks of travelling and not painting, but it started to pour minutes after she got her easel set up.

I spent way too much time painting a banner on a sheet for my longtime friend and model Poni, who is throwing a first birthday lu'au for her first baby. I hope it stops raining tonight.

Some Portraits

I had several portrait commissions last week. I usually try to do portraits only from life since that seems to give an ineffable quality that doesn't come from copying a photograph. Plus it's so much more fun, as copying is such a bore. However, when the subject has a hard time sitting still it can be a real challenge to get all the features situated properly on the head. Also most people can't hold a pleasant expression for the length of time it takes for me to paint them so the portraits can have an uncharacteristically grim demeanor. I used a photo to do the portrait of the two men, Bob and Dana, because of the extra complication of posing the two of them together. The two women were done in single sittings of about two hours, with plenty of breaks.