New Mexico

Since Arthur's computer is in the shop I decided to put some photos on this blog of our recent trip to New Mexico. We painted a lot of chamisa, a wild flower that were in bloom and flourish a lot along dry riverbeds. Here's Arthur with Roger Montoya, a painter and friend who lives in New Mexico.

Funny thing is that I swam today in Kona and noticed that the chamisa also looked a lot like the coral beds in A Bay.

Roughin it up

The clients really really like the photo of my triptych in Mary Philpott's book, Hawai'i, A Sense of Place. In particular they like the antique look of the paintings. What is hard to explain is that that look was a complete accident at the time and is very difficult to duplicate. So what I did today was take the whole canvas off the stretcher bars, soak it in a sinkful of water, crumple it up and beat it with a mallet. It still didn't get that pattern of cracks in it, but it does look a bit less shiny and new. All that soaking made it shrink a bit so now that it is restretched it has an uneven edge of canvas that I painted with the foundation terra cotta color, which I think is pretty cool....

Legend of the Mo'o sisters

As usual with my big commissions of late I have been poring over my books on the Nabis (Bonnard and his group) and the Symbolists (Gauguin and his followers) for inspiration. The Nabi painters did a lot of very decorative work in Paris in the early 1900s but their work is more dabby and free than one thinks of as Art Nouveau. So here I am trying to adapt this European take on Japanese art for a Polynesian legend, quite a strange train of influence. This painting is for prints which will be hung over a kitchen bar area in time share units, and so it should hold up to scrutiny at close quarters. I tend to feel my way through these projects not really knowing exactly what I am doing, so it's not an automatic guarantee that the brushwork will be much to look at but hopefully the overall feeling will be nostalgic and evocative.






Here is Alaina deHavilland's poster for a coffee festival this Saturday over at the Four Seasons in Ka'upulehu, north Kona, which I'll be attending with Tuko as token artists displaying our work and hopefully drumming up some interest in the gallery.

my commission

I always thought it would be fun to document a painting in progress, maybe hourly, and make an animation showing it all coming together. Now actually of course on YouTube you can find thousands of way more interesting visuals. But anyway here, in the spirit of that idea, is an updated photo of my current canvas, acrylics on linen.

(This is for some timeshare units in Waikoloa)

Gail a'paintin

I stayed overnight Wednesday at the gallery so I could meet with a model Thursday morning. She is a fine Hawaiian beauty named Alona and she agreed to model for my Mo'o figures in my current commission. Mo'o are the Hawaiian lizard creatures in legends and can be fierce, but these particular mo'o took the form of beautiful women living happily in a brackish pond in north Kona (South Kohala, really). Pele heard how beautiful they were, and of course sent lava down to destroy their world and turn them into rocks, where they remain to this day. Alona and I met at some beautiful brackish ponds in Keaukaha, Hilo's balmy oceanfront neighborhood.

Coincidentally the Hilo plein air group was meeting in the same place -- Leleiwi Beach Park -- and so I did my usual painting alongside Gail. I remembered to get a picture of Gail but forgot to get one of me and my version right next to her. Maybe I'll add it later.....

Our new show: "Beyond the Big Island"

We had a very pleasant opening celebration for our new show which features paintings that we have done in places other than Hawai'i Island. This is admittedly an odd premise for a show but it works for us since we normally just display work that has to do with our home island. Cosette is showing some of her many paintings of Tuscany and Umbria, while Gail conjured up some pastels of Venice and paintings of Fiji and Jamaica. Tuko has some scenes of Hana, Maui and the moon (where else?), Esther shows us the landscape of her imagination, and I have a hodgepodge of my New Mexico paintings, O'ahu, Maui and Kaua'i.

I was too busy shmoozing and drinking Mimosas from our champagne fountain (generously lent by Michael David, who also donated the champagne, OJ and grenadine) to take photos, so here are a few of the images I put in the show.

Sketches for a new painting

I have a kind of fun assignment, from the same designer who plastered prints of my paintings in gigantic form all over the Sheraton Keauhou. This time she wants a large new painting to make into prints for some time share units, expressing the special legend of the location, on the Kona coast. There are ponds there at the place called Kahuipua'a which of course means something about a group of pigs. Two mo'o sisters (lizard beings) lived there and were famous for their beauty. Pele got wind of this and sent a flow of lava right through their pond and turned them into rocks! So I thought I would concentrate on their beauty and happiness before all the devastation. These are my sketches:

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.

More Pink (less pink....)

I am supposed to ship this painting off tomorrow morning. Wouldn't you know it, I got somewhat inspired to make big changes in it at the last moment this afternoon. Since I used lots of liquin I am pretty sure it will be dry enough to wrap up. I hope the folks at Queen's Hospital like it!!

Painting in Pink

My client in Honolulu thought the Diamond Head painting for Queen's Hospital didn't have enough flowering trees in it, that the trees I did have were too scary and skeletal, and also wished to diminish Diamond Head which she thought is too "touristy." So being a stubborn cuss I decided to just stretch a new canvas rather than making so many changes in what I considered to be a decent effort in itself.

So then I struggled with composing a whole new set of imagined trees, which in a way is a much bigger challenge than basing the studio work on a previously done plein air study or photos. Here it is in its latest state which I have already been told is too pink, which I can see.... but it does seem to have a Renoirish feeling about it.

This Week's Project

I spent a season on O'ahu way back in 1999, when my friends the Kloningers had a guestroom available for me in Kahala. That year the shower trees put on an exceptional show of flowering and I spent day after day at Kapiolani Park trying to capture the beauty in an impressionist style. I did several versions, at different times of day, of the view from street level right in front of the Colony Surf.

This year I got a belated benefit from all that effort, when Fran Obayashi of Obayashi Design Group contacted me for a large version of one of the paintings for a new admitting room at Queen's Hospital. The challenge is to do something that will lend tranquillity to a place that could be stressful for new patients. Here's my progress so far, plus two of the original plein air prototypes.