A napkin sketch that goes around the world...

 

A napkin sketch created for Art Gensler for use in an event held at CCA this week, the sketch was created by hand, and then scanned for digital use in printing on napkins...

Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day!, a photo by douglaswittnebel on Flickr.

3.14159

Visions and introspections and palpable spaces...

Just a simple text posting, inspirational writing from a fellow artist, Christopher Benson.

"...What inspired me at the time was how antithetical to illustration Diebenkorn’s pictures were. His innovation of blending abstraction and figuration in the most mundane domestic subjects is so well known, and now so clichéd as a stylistic device, that it’s easy to overlook how dramatically that sort of approach changed the way we look at and experience paintings. 
This was a revolution that the Impressionists had started a century earlier, but Diebenkorn’s later efinement of many of their same principles — by then also affected by the pure expressive abstraction of New York school painters like deKooning — is an outstanding realization of the potential of this  kind of art. His images, taken from clearly regional Californian places, transcend the constraints of the local (and any specific emotions he might have felt about his own locale) and record a vision both introspective and universal.
His earnestly un-romanticized, yet aesthetically beautiful surfaces and compositions describe one narrow world with great specificity while maintaining a remoteness and neutrality onto which anybody anywhere might plausibly project their own experience. Perhaps that was not his intention, but it is nonetheless what he accomplished in his figurative work..."

...earlier landscape view painting layered sereis, set into moss garden mid springtime...

OAK OAHU view

A simple color sketch created during the waiting time at the Oakland airport, looking from the Southwest gates, and viewing the planes preparing to fly to the islands of Hawaii...

freshly painted house and water tower in mendocino...

water tower structures in mendocino, california...

Cape Mendocino was discovered by a Spanish explorer in the year 1542 , 300 years later the first permanent non-Spanish settlers settled in the Big River area.

When the town of Mendocino was settled and developed, two and three storied water towers were built and tied to windmills for power to store and provide  sources of fresh water. They operated on a gravity system. Many of the old water towers remain, with a wonderful sense of strength and power on the landscape surrounded by the Pacific Ocean...

after orisom...

Mission San Jose was founded on June 11, 1797 by Father Fermin Francisco de Lasuen on a site which was part of a natural highway by way of the Livermore Valley to the San Joaquin Valley. It is the fourteenth of the 21 Spanish Missions in Alta California. The site chosen for the only mission on the east side of San Francisco Bay had been inhabited for countless generations by the Ohlone Indians. Their village at this site was known as Orisom...or Oroysom...

adding color to the courtyard

The view of the courtyard of the Mission Santa Barbara takes on a new look and atmosphere with the addition of color..."The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space. Maxfield Parrish "

Mission Santa Barbara

The Santa Barbara Mission was founded in 1786, and the main church building completed in 1820. The 1925 earthquake destroyed the mission buildings and the complex was rebuilt and finally restored in 1953...

wall mural sketch landscape

trying something new and old this week for an event at the office...a large wall mural drawing of a landscape view...a sustainable territory just west of the medulla oblongata...

Some other views of Japan

Another sampling of some sketches from early years in Japan, revealing the wonderful spaces and details that you find during the exploration of the the country and the city of Tokyo and Nikko. The lower image shows a collection of outdoor fishing ponds where you can find an assortment of fisherman spending their hours casting and catching fish...