The Jolly Roger Bar, 12th and Madison. Oil on board, 12 x 16″

As you know, I’ve been painting around Portland, here and there, returning often to sites to note what else is there, what I may have missed, what more is available for turning into paint.

These paintings have a certain “feel” to them — a style that fits with the record of my visits. I work on-site and then tweak and fiddle in the studio. I also find myself making larger, stranger, studio-begot contributions to the sets of pieces.

I have already exposed the Fremont Bridge grouping to A&P; here’s another set of depictions of an entirely different place in Portland.

IOOF Building, SE Alder and 6th St, oil on board, 12 x 16″

At this corner, SE Alder and 6th Street, humans were a large part of the scene. In fact, although the casual observer might not recognize it, it quickly became obvious to me that this is a neighborhood, with people who watch out for the street, some of them renters in nearby apartments, many of them regulars who use the area to hang out, to see what the day will bring, smoke a bit of pot, check in with street friends, have a swig or two from a communal bottle.

The Melody Ballroom, SE Alder and 6th St, oil on board, 12 x 16″

The US Bank Parking Lot, SE Alder and 6th St, oil on board 12 x 16″

As I painted, I got stories of all sorts from the neighbors, ranging from the tale of the fire that caused the apartment house windows to be so ill asorted (US Bank) to the charming Hispanic panhandler who never saw “in the U  S of A a painter on the streets” (Melody Ballroom). The congregation of the Rivers of Life Church peered at the dabblings on the board when I was painting the Eastside Funeral Directors’ Building, while someone who had been rocking at the Melody the night before was asleep out of sight in the corner of the IOOF building. The erstwhile Eastside Funeral Directors’ Building turned Volunteers of America Center once housed a senior day care, but now appears to be a school or halfway house for “troubled” youths, youths whose curiosity about plein air painters was vast and somewhat distracting.

The Eastside Funeral Directors’ Building (now Volunteers of America) SE Alder and 6th, oil on board, 12 x 16

SE 6th Avenue is between two main boulevards in southeast Portland, and large numbers of vehicles, whose inhabitants see nothing in the neighborhood except obstacles to drive around,  use the street as a way to avoid traffic jams on 7th Avenue or Morrison St.

The images above are plein air paintings, oil on board, all 12 x 16″, done at the corner of SE Alder and 6th in Portland Oregon. Below is the studio SE 6th and Alder — the way it evolved in my consciousness:

The Corner of SE 6th and Alder, Portland, Oregon. Oil on canvas, 30 x 30″

The SE 6th and Alder paintings are the result of approximately 14 hours of sitting at the site, watching people and vehicles, interacting with passersby, seeing the sun sliding across the façades of the buildings, and painting these things as they presented themselves on site. Later, in the studio,  SE 6th and Alder  becomes a place where cars are toylike, but the buildings impose themselves almost as human – elegant, funky, and imposing.

In short, these paintings represent experiences that I had in my encounters with this particular environment, on these particular days, in the late summer of 2008. They also represent something of what I am trying to achieve in my painting.

It’s easier to say what I don’t want to do than what I want to do. I don’t want to do beautiful (or at least not “merely” beautiful); I don’t want to faithfully record what I see, in the manner of a camera’s eye. I don’t want to focus on edges or color or shapes or the feel of the oil paint, although I obviously deal with these basics of painting all the time — and I enjoy thinking about them. But they aren’t my focus.

Bloomtime, 12 x 16″, oil on board

What I am striving for is to capture something of my sense of the place, a sense which is limited by my own ability to see and record what I see, to feel and record what I feel, and also limited by what is in front of me, by the environment itself. It’s something of a surreal set of overlapping circles — the objects in front of me, my sense of those objects, the interaction between myself and the changes that happen during my stay on the site — what I want, in short, is to capture a sense of this time, this place, through the limited yet hopefully interesting eyes of this particular human creature, myself. It can’t be done with monocular perspective nor realistic rendering; my eyes don’t see as the camera sees; my senses capture far more and far less and my vision encompasses peculiar bits of the scene, leaving other bits for some other visionary. My encounters add transitory information that has to work itself, however wonkily, into the paintings.

The Fremont Bridge as It Addresses the Land, Oil on canvas, 18 x 36″

However, the waves looked like worms. I painted over my worms

I decided that I needed to meditate on moving water. After cropping the original, I printed out the following picture:

Look the lovely MOVING EDGES:

On a recent outing for another purpose, I found myself taken by the slender, skyward-reaching branches of the small trees I was among. I think it was the gray sky and the light drizzle that did it. It was a chill day, not unlike early spring, and I half remembered a William Carlos Williams poem which I’ve been unable to find. In searching, however, I came across The Botticellian Trees in Selected Poems, and the first part seemed to partially fit the subject:

The alphabet of
the trees

is fading in the
song of the leaves

the crossing
bars of the thin

letters that spelled
winter

and the cold
[...]

Furthermore, the The Birth of Venus by Botticelli which came to mind has, in what I’ve always thought was the show-stealer—the nymph on the right bringing the cape for modesty—a better match for the spirit of curly Grace in those branches and twigs.

So here are more of the meetings of tree and sky I photographed. Do they seem forlorn to you? I admit to a certain wistfulness of the season, though I was thoroughly delighted to be out there.

Update: Click on the last image for a larger version.

Among my recent plastic acquisitions is a substantial mirrored sheet. The grandkids like to see their fun house reflections as it is all bendy. It’s an old notion and applied to exhaustion, but I decided to see what the camera would catch reflected in it.

I’m thinking of hauling a smaller version of the sheet around with me.

a more comprehensive view:

another close-up:

Bringing out the edges?

As a ’sharpening’ freak, conditioned by microscopy in my day job, I reflexively ’smart sharpen’ or ‘unsharp mask’ my images. Particularly, as my zoom lens with its very convenient range does not give the sharpest telephoto images.

A first attempt at general sharpening of the above images to accentuate the watery reflections produced an overly garish look. Therefore, I decided to selectively sharpen the mirroring to my heart’s content.

Two decades ago, during the time that I visited exhibitions of Richard Estes’ paintings with their cityscape reflections, I often scrutinized watery reflections of the hilly Long Island Northshore, wondering whether one could manage to capture them in a painterly photorealistic style.

How demanding would it be to portrait reflections as the ones above using oil painting?

The book is Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting by Richard Schmid ($50 USD in soft cover from him; more from Amazon and more in hard cover).

Schmid begins his chapter by saying “Think about edges the way you would think about kissing someone…. Think of edges as exquisite subtleties, as the means to transmit romance, as ways to make your dabs or paint whisper or shout and reach nuances beyond the range of color. Think of them as visual poetry… but especially think of edges as you would the agents of expression in music….pianissimo (very soft), andante (flowing), allegro vivace (fast and lively), maestoso (majestic), fortissimo con sforzando (whamo!).

He’s speaking of edges that create an illusion (emphasis is Schmid’s) of how we ordinarily see, and some of what he says is quite common knowledge — that atmosphere, particularly at a distance, softens and cools elements, and hence edges. And so forth.

But the two aids to seeing edges, he says, are “Squinting and Comparison — [the same] that I [Schmid] described in the … chapter on values. They are essential in working with edges and you must do them together.

So today I was out painting Alla Prima (or plein air, if you are a francophile, or in the rain if you are a realist), and I forgot entirely about edges. But the conditions were just right for comparisons. I thought I’d swing through today’s efforts (remember, I’m a studio fixer-upper of paintings, so these are wet drafts) and think about edges and comparisons — and if that isn’t enough, go on to look at one of Schmid’s examples.

It being October 31, the rains have started, and it was pouring when we left the house. We went down to the river, where Interstate 5 runs along and above it. We sat beneath the interstate to stay out of the rain. Each of these paintings were about an hour’s worth of work: the one above is Hawthorne Bridge, Rainy Day, 12 x 16″, oil on board.

Later that day, in honor of the Trick-or-Treaters, the sun came out.

I moved my easel out into the sun where it was warmer and brighter, and painted for another hour. This isn’t exactly the same scene (duh!) but it’s the same bridge and river and some of the same buildings.

Hawthorne Bridge after Rain, 12 x 16, oil on board

Obviously the rainy one features cool blues; the colors warm up considerably when the sun came out (as did the painter). But the edges changed too. In the earlier painting, the mist in the air blanked out the west hills, behind the city. I smudged them in at the last moment, but they are still without much interest. When the sun came out, the hills were still wet and a bit misty, but the fall colors were oozing through and the hills in the painting become far more alive.

The edges of the hills in the rain painting are faked; the form is just stuck there (I hadn’t had lunch yet). But in the second painting, the edges and the sky intertwine and it’s hard to tell where one starts and the other ends — which was as it was. Here are a couple of close-cropped details of each:

On th other hand, I think I got the edges of the bridge in the rain more “authentically” than the one in the sun, where again, it was at the end of the session.  I needed to make sure the bridge was there, so I slashed a line of paint that doesn’t catch the sun on the edges — I think a change of hue as well as value is required.

This is but a beginning in this venture of edges. I did think about the buildings and how their edges should be painted, but I haven’t sussed out yet quite the degree of sharpness in varying conditions and so I tend to just throw up a line that tells us all that that’s a building edge. But I’m aware of the challenge, so maybe I’ll get to the process in due time.

I will attempt to get at these edges before the paint dries — Schmid warns about the difficulties of mooshing edges after the oil is dry to the touch — but looking at the raw version is illuminating.

Here’s a Richard Schmid — not the one from the book, but something similar:

Schmid’s oils often resemble watercolors — not my style. But his ability to analyze the whys and wherefores of certain processes, and his sense of humor, are well worth feeling a bit inadequate in the face of his work.

And how are your edges doing these days? By the way, I started this post thinking about squinting and comparisons, but the comparisons I made here aren’t what Schmid is speaking of — he means comparing the values and edges at the real site, squinting to make out what the strongest ones are and where they disappear. He also warns against squinting at the canvas. He even has a whole page on the practice of squinting. “Lastly” he says, “it only works marginally when working with photographs. SQuinting at a photo is about the same as squinting at a painting. Everything gets fuzzy. Squinting for values in a photo is sometimes useful, but because of the limited data caught by the camera, the information you can obtain is minimal compared to squinting at the real thing.”

I wanted to show him Steve’s photos!