Last week was my last hurrah before my summer season in my day-job as owner of a pool service business in a resort area of vacation-rentals and second homes. Sigh, I am paying for it this week, burning the midnight oil making up for the time I invested in painting last week. But I do not for one minute regret it, because it is always such a joy to paint with like-minded enthusiasts. At the end of the workshop we took a group photo, and I asked Bob if I could hold his hand. His excitement was such an inspiration to the group, having started plein air painting only recently in his 80-year life.
Our workshop was sponsored by the Seaside Institute, in Seaside, FL, facilitated by Casey Johnston. Our biggest challenge was finding parking during that week of Memorial Day. The institute brought Kathie Odom in from Tennessee to lead our workshop. Kathie shows her paintings at Redbird Gallery in Seaside.
Kathie underpaints her plein air paintings with a wash of yellow ochre, viridian green, and transparent iron oxide (a rust color). If not fully mixed, the wash will be more of one color than another in any given area. She doesn’t necessarily cover the entire canvas, instead usually making some sort of a off-center starburst pattern. Then she takes a paper towel and rubs off the juiciness, so the wash is relatively dry. She uses a dark brownish mixture similar to raw umber to paint-draw the scene she has chosen onto the canvas, and she uses a cotton swab dipped in solvent to lift off the areas that she wants nearly white, the recently applied color wash coming off fairly cleanly. From that point, she proceeds on to the unexplainable magic of plein air painting, applying darks first and lights afterwards. At the end she randomly applies extra twigs and flicks of color which help create the what she calls “vibration of color”.
In every workshop I take, it seems like there is a bottleneck in my brain between what I’ve just heard the instructor say, and what I am able to do with my hand when I paint. It guess it takes a while for new information to get from the left brain to the right side. The bright yellow-green umbrellas of the Great Southern Cafe caught my eye from the amphitheater stage where we were set up behind the Seaside Post Office. 
Challenged by the lower part of the scene being hidden by the parked cars of Memorial Day vacationers, I dashed in a few shadows to break up the foreground, and returned the before class the next morning to finish up. I decided to leave the foreground as it was, and just sharpened up a few details and called it done. Buddy shot a photo of me concentrating on Kathie’s demonstration.
The next day’s scene was our view from a pavilion overlooking the beach in front of the Shrimp Shack there at Seaside. Working with the greenish-yellow wash behind my sky was not as disconcerting as I thought it would be. I’ve used washes before, using transparent iron oxide alone or mixed with ultramarine blue, and also I’ve used cerulean blue for my drawings, sometimes washing some areas. But usually I’ve toned my canvas with an acrylic wash so that it is completely dry before I start oil painting. That has allowed me to scrape off color to expose the wash, but Kathie’s technique of washing with oil paint permits lifting off color to expose the white canvas, or scraping it to expose the wash, which to me is the best of both worlds.
We painted upstairs at the Seaside Assembly Hall that afternoon, thankfully indoors while a fantastic lightning storm blew through the town. Kathie taught techniques that she uses. Below are two classroom exercises from two afternoons that week.
 |
 |
My pool service business did not slow down just because I was taking this workshop, so one afternoon I hardly painted at all, spending most of the allotted time on the phone, managing a difficult relationship between a property owner, his friend who was responsible for the property, and the contractor repairing a pool heater with wires chewed by rats. It is nearly impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t seen it, how hard it is to figure out which wires the rats may have just chomped on, out of the spaghetti of wires inside an appliance.
I met the owner of Redbird Gallery in Seaside that afternoon, and we talked for a bit. Tricia shows some of Kathie’s works there. I chose that gallery to paint but barely got the paint-drawing done. Buddy got a good shot of my easel.
On Thursday we painted in Grayton Beach State Park. I decided to paint on a larger size canvas, 12×24, more than 3 times bigger than my usual 8×10. I spent almost the entire time mixing more paint, since my practice with smaller paintings was to mix just a little. A small mixture doesn’t go very far when painting a bigger painting! I went back to the park at 6:30 the next morning to finish my painting, thinking the park opened at sunrise, only to find that it doesn’t open until 8:00. Below is my unfinished painting of the scene from the parking lot near the nature trail.
|
|
|
Frustrated, I started driving back to Seaside on Scenic Highway 30A and stopped at the bridge where I painted the view of Western Lake from the roadside. This view of the “umbrella trees” is probably the most photographed scene in all of South Walton County, where the slash pines bordering the backside of the lake form an umbrella. It perfectly fits the 12×24 canvas I used. I will be making limited edition prints of this painting, some on stretched canvas. Message me if you are interested.
