About the Artist

back in time...

I find it amazing and I'm a bit in awe of the group of artists commonly referred to as "Early California Impressionists." The work they produced is incredible, especially when you consider that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries transportation in southern California was still evolving and metropolitan areas just didn't exist. Case in point, to get from the former little pueblo of Los Angeles to Laguna Beach one would have ridden the newly built rails south to a station called El Toro, stayed the night at the hotel and then the next day boarded a buckboard for the coast. All the while toting your paints, solvents, canvases, easel, and luggage. At the very least you could say that many of these artists were driven.
And, I understand that drive. Nearly twenty years ago I became aware of something I hadn't felt before, the need, the urge to create. To make something, something that would fill a hole that my "9 to 5" couldn't. My first response was to go to an art store and purchase watercolor paints and paper and paint something. My initial efforts were miserable, so I went to work at learning; I bought books and took art classes (thank you, Joy Krull). I joined art organizations and painted with other artists, gleaning as much as possible from these associations. And more recently, I've been studying the works of the masters of California Impressionism. Oh, and I paint. Paint. Paint. Paint.
It's an interesting thing that I hear quite often, mostly from onlookers while I'm painting en plein air, that they "haven't the talent" to do what I'm doing. I usually take issue with them and their statement because I feel quite strongly that good paintings come in large part from study and work, and to a lesser degree, talent. For me, talent is the application and interpretation of the aforementioned work and study; that is, taking the principles of art and using them in an instinctual and personal way to create a painting.
Edgar Payne noted in his book Composition of Outdoor Painting that artists learn the principles of art from the artists before them; that all artists work under the same basic principles. And that innovative work is born from the principles being molded by the individual artist's creative force.
It was much this way for the early American and California Impressionists. They took a page or two from the groundbreaking French Impressionists of the late 1800's and combined that with Realism and other schools of art to develop a style uniquely American. And much of the California artists' work took a different path from the mainstream American work when pioneering artists focused on capturing the unique colors, light and landscape of the west coast. For me, when you combine this American plein air style with the artists that became part of early California history, you have a story that is incredibly fascinating. And this story has held my imagination for many years now and continues to drive my brush over the canvas. Even though the landscape has changed considerably in the last one hundred years, I look at what is before me in much the same way as the Early California Impressionists did, trying to convey the beauty of the land and the color of the local people with oil, brush and light.