Warm & Cool "Street" Light

Here is a small gouache painting that was completed from a high stepped "street" on the extreme west side of Old Town, Dubrovnik. We would probably call these streets... walkways or alleys, but they were designed centuries ago to create maximum shade to provide cool, relief from the extreme heat of Adriatic summers. This creates interesting lighting situations everywhere you look in Old Town. The cool reflected light of the shadows contrasted dramatically with the warm light or hot spots of intense sunlight.

Island Sunset

With this painting, I started to make some changes to my normal working habits. It was still painted on location with gouache, but I started working smaller and also started to use more flat sable brushes. This original is 5" x 7" and I made the decision to work smaller due to the extreme lighting situations that I was encountering. My larger gouache pieces were taking about two hours to complete and within that time frame the light was changing rapidly. I needed to work quicker if I was going to depict the dramatic light that I am drawn to. This is looking west from Lapad just before sunset on the Adriatic Sea.

Old Town Arch

This is a plein air painting of a street scene and arch in Old Town, Dubrovnik. Everything is ancient and built of limestone. The overall "grayness" starts to make your eyes search for color and suddenly I found myself sensitive to the slightest hint of it. A hint of warm light starts to seem almost vibrant and some of the late day shadows were full of great, gray-violets.

This was done in late March before the tourist season really kicked in. One month later and this scene would have been full of people.

Gouache 9 x 12

Versatile Gouache

I have always loved gouache as a painting medium. It is underrated and often misused, strickly as a "poster paint" to be applied in a flat hard edged manner. Illustrators of the 1950's used it extensively and several of these masters (Bernie Fuchs, Harry Anderson) employed it in a very painterly fashion. Early in my career I was attracted to gouache based on the work of the west coast Illustrator, David Grove. He was very innovative with his compositions and fresh application of the medium.

I struggled for years to get the effects that I was searching for in my own experimentation with gouache. I would complete a few unsuccessful studies and then go back to my oils or mixed media. But, I would always return to try again. I am drawn to the color range and consistent matte surface. Above are a few 11x 14 gouache landscapes. The lake scene is re-worked from an earlier version and shows the possibilities of softer, more atmospheric effects.

Open Road

This is a simple scene that I painted with gouache on an 11 x 14 cold press illustration board. It was used as the cover of a new music CD entitled Open Road. Whenever I complete a landscape like this I am reminded that any ordinary scene can be beautiful and fun to paint. Sometimes we search to paint something spectacular or visually inspirational but maybe that is the easy thing to do. It can be more challenging and eye opening to paint mundane subjects or forgettable scenes. This forces us to really see and invites embellishment and invention. I think we can waste a lot of valuable time waiting for inspiration.