We’re in the middle of a mini-heatwave here on the northcoast of California. It was almost 70F/20C today. I was invited to join some other local artists at the beach and off I went this afternoon for a few hours. It was a stunning day. I did two 8×8″ watercolors, kind of limbering up again since I haven’t done any location work since the trip to Wyoming in September. It was fun being out with friends and colleagues and I’ll be going again tomorrow. On Friday it’s supposed to go back to more normal temperatures for this time of year here with highs in the 50s.
Loved the light on this rock topped with some trees.
Getting my paints wetted and ready. I’m using a set of Yarka watercolors.Baker Beach with Trinidad Head in the background.Local artist Steve Porter works on a painting of sunlight coming through the trees on a cliff at one end of the beach.
I’ve spent most of my life in northern coastal California. And love it here. We’re within the sound of the ocean and only a half hour from Redwood National Park.
We went for a drive on Solstice in between storm fronts and found some lovely light, rainbows, Roosevelt elk and crashing waves.
Here’s an “album” of my favorite photos as a holiday gift from me to you, my friends and fans. Thank you for your interest in my goings-on and I hope you have a great 2013!
Roosevelt elk bulls, hanging out together again after the yearly rutRoosevelt elk bulls can weigh up to 900 pounds.Rainbow at Dry Lagoon State Park with Goat Rock in the background.Rainbow over the Pacific Ocean.Storm clouds coming in.Surf’s up.Every winter the ocean breaches the spit between it and Stone Lagoon.Redwood Creek was running full. Usually we can continue down the gravel onto the beach.This vernal pond, backed by red alders, was hosting some hooded merganser ducks.On the way home, we could see the next storm coming in and we got caught in a short spat of heavy hail.
We've had a friend from New Zealand visiting for the past couple of days, which is why this post is a little late. He wanted to see redwoods, but he also got an eyeful of our local Roosevelt elk, including this big bull who was grazing right next to the road in Prairie Creek State Park.
It’s live! My new website is up and running! I built it on a newish application called Sandvox, which I highly recommend. Nice choices for templates, WYSIWYG interface, fast publishing of updates and good communication from the company, which is based in San Francisco. I think that artists who are looking for something beyond the cookie-cutter fine art template sites ought to check out this product. It also looks like they are very receptive to suggestions for improvements and features, so there may be an opportunity to nudge them in the direction of doing things that would make their product even more attractive to artists.
I love the control I now have and, while I do pay for web-hosting, the existence of my site is not dependent on anyone else, a lesson I’ve just learned from my experience with GoDaddy after they cut off my access for 24 hours, which just coincidentally happened to coincide with the Strike Against SOPA. The fine art template sites all seem to charge for their services and besides really disliking their pedestrian template choices, who needs a monthly fee just to have a website?
Sandvox costs $79.99, ok, 80 bucks. I just downloaded the latest upgrade, which was free. You can also download a free trial version to test drive it.
Redwoods in Prairie Creek State Park. When I was a kid I though everyone got to go camping in places like this.
In other news, I recently received this endorsement from Todd Wilkinson, the Editor of Wildlife Art Journal:
“What catches my eye with Susan Fox’s work, inspired by her travels to Mongolia, is her aesthetic, her craving for adventure, her way of naturalistic interpretation that reads, visually, like a beautifully-illustrated field journal. Susan’s paintings in oil speak of exotic people, animals and outposts set in a distant mythical corner of the world—an ancient kingdom synonymous with Genghis Khan, yet today a modern country surprisingly still unexplored by Western artists. Fox may be the only American animal artist who has devoted so much to Mongolia’s mountains, deserts and steppes. And that’s precisely why her work is more than decoration; it sparks conversations.
I salute art that tells stories—that upon each encounter with a painting or sculpture you realize there’s another narrative layer waiting to be explored. This involves something that goes beyond the technical virtuosity of an artist or the way light falls upon a piece; it gets, instead, to the reason why some art possesses soul. Whether she is interpreting traditional Mongolian horse culture, celebrating Argali (bighorn) sheep, or taking us off to the East African savannah (yet another destination on Fox’s map of travel), we know we’ve been on a journey to someplace special. Susan Fox endeavors to set herself apart and it shows.”
My main hobby when I’m not in the studio is gardening. I love old roses and English style borders. It’s also really good exercise.
And it’s an art form, too, interesting partly because it adds the dimension of time. And also impermanence.
The orchestration of bloom through the seasons is fun and an on-going challenge.
I started this garden almost five years ago and there have already been a lot of changes.
What you’ll see here, with the exception of ‘Ispahan’, is the front “yard”, where most of the roses are. We killed off the grass in the middle a couple of years ago and put our vegetable garden there instead. The rose borders are coming along, but some plants are going to be moved this fall having already gotten too big for their allotted space. It’s hard to tell how a plant will do. Some never do well and some totally overdo it. The David Austin English roses are known to sometimes become vigorous climbers in California, but stay sedate shrubs elsewhere.
So here is an album of the front garden with photos I took day before yesterday, mostly the roses, but also a few other favorites.
Rosa mundi- a sport of Rosa gallica, ancientRosa gallica- The Apothecary Rose and the Red Rose of Lancaster, ancientRosa alba semi-plena- the White Rose of York, very oldLilac 'Sensation'"Leaping Salmon', large-flowered climber, 1960s; the closest to a hybrid tea rose you'll find in my garden'Ispahan'-which has formed a HUGE bush; damask rose from Iran'Golden Celebration'- David Austin English Rose Hardy geranium 'Splish Splash', which is happily self-seeding around the gardenDuchesse de Montebello- gallica from France, pre-1826'Crown Princess Margareta'- David Austin English Rose'Citrus Splash'- Jackson and Perkins'Abraham Darby'- David Austin English RoseThe vegetable beds- peas, beans, radishes, tomatoes, scallions, shallots so farBed with Charles Austin (David Austin English Rose) California poppies, orange wallflower, varigated maple, Citrus Splash rose, sisyrinchium striatum, backed by acanthus mollis
Coming up soon is North Coast Open Studios the weekend of June 12-13 and, the following weekend, June 19-20, the Marin Art Festival. I’ll have framed paintings, prints and cards at both events, plus a variety of small, unframed affordable original oil paintings. I’ve been doing new ones in between working on larger paintings and it’s a nice way to take a break from the more complex pieces.
I generally do these in two sittings, plus maybe one more short one for final tweaking and try to keep them fairly loose and simple.
Rooster 8x10" oilChipmunk 5x7" oilThree Tule Elk, Point Reyes 8x10" oil
Coming up: a new on-going series on how to improve your paintings, based on all the mistakes and false starts I’ve made over the fifteen years I’ve been painting in oil. So it will be a looong series. ;0)
Over time, I think most painters end up with preferences for size, ranging from true miniatures that may only be an inch by an inch to, well, big, really big. Like ten feet high.
I’ve tended to stay in a middle range, which happens to be what has NOT been selling during the recession. But before the meltdown, I had decided to start doing art festivals and I needed a large body of work. Most of the paintings are 12×16″ to 18×24″.
Then I joined the Lost Coast Daily Painters and found myself needing to have a small (5×7″ to 8×10″) painting to post every week. It was hard at first to work that small, but I got used to it and started to see some definite advantages:
One, they are more affordable for people.
Two, many buyers and collectors don’t have room anymore for work that is much bigger and it encourages them to take a chance on a new artist. That would be me.
Three, small works seem to be considered appropriate for gift-giving, so that expands the market a little.
Four, for me as an artist, I’ve found that it’s a good way to study various painting problems, like capturing light effects, without investing time and materials in a larger piece that might not pan out.
Five, they force me to focus on one idea and to keep it simple.
Here are three recent small works:
Arcata Bottoms Stormlight oil on canvasboard 8x8"
I wanted to capture the light effect of dark clouds and sunny areas. Working in a square format was fun, too.
Black Bear, Grand Tetons oil on canvasboard 16x8"
I’ve struggled with how to paint this kind of light effect- foreground shade and background sun. It’s a push and pull process. I think this works pretty well.
Reticulated Giraffe, Samburu oil on canvasboard 8x10"
Once again, I’m studying how to do a light effect- the high key shadows and reflected light on the head of the giraffe. I also ended up with a postive/negative shape relationship that I like. The color of the giraffe and the sky form a complementary color relationship, too.
What has evolved over the past year is an interesting split that is working well for me. I’m doing a lot of smaller pieces like the ones above (I plan to have 30 or so available at the Marin Art Festival). And then I’m painting larger, major pieces that can require a lot of preliminary work. With luck, you’ll see the latest one next week.
As promised, here’s a look at Point Reyes National Seashore on a fabulously beautiful day.
Pierce Ranch buildings at the northern tip of the park
Unlike most national parks, people still live and work within its boundaries. There are over a dozen dairy and cattle ranches dating back to 1852 still in operation, plus an oyster farm. Back in the mid-20th century, developers wanted to turn the whole area into a new city. After a long battle, that was defeated and now this incredible part of west Marin County is preserved for everyone to enjoy. Including around 450 tule elk, which is what brought us to the park yesterday. They had been extirpated from the area by 1860. Nearly a century later, they were re-introduced. They are smaller than the better-known Roosevelt elk, whose southern-most range stops about 300 miles north in Humboldt County.
tule elk grazingTule elk; what a backdrop! The Pacific OceanTule elk; part of a herd of about sixty
When it comes to wildlife, one never knows what to expect. We had great luck and saw four different herds, all from the road. I didn’t have my long lens, so these images were taken with the 28-300. You can see that the elk weren’t very far away. Below are more images of other parts of the park.
Looking north; elk are to the leftNative Douglas iris; it was blooming in big clumps all through the parkNear the lighthouse at the southern-most point, looking north along beachDrake's Bay, to the east of previous image, looking south towards San Francisco
Yes, THAT Drake. Sir Francis Drake made a landfall here in 1579. He stayed here about five weeks, hauling the Golden Hinde onto the beach to careen her, which means pulling her out of the water and leaning her on her side to clean the hull of barnacles and seaweed. He and his crew encountered local Miwok indians who supplied them with boiled fish and meal ground from wild roots.
Another of the old ranches; on our way out of the park
Point Reyes, as you can imagine, is a magnet for local and visiting plein air painters. Now that I’ve been able to reconnoiter, we’ll plan a future trip so we can stay in the area and have time for me to paint, too. There are a lot of small resort motels, a private campground in Olema and vintage hotels, B&Bs and good restaurants in Point Reyes Station. We had lunch at the Pine Diner. Cobb Salad to die for.
Lost Coast Daily Painters in having a big, Big, BIG holiday sale this Saturday night during Arts Alive in Old Town, Eureka, California. This may be your last chance to get one of our paintings listed in the Buy It Now section of the blog. I’ll be there with the other artists at Kathy O’Leary’s studio upstairs at 208 C St. from 5-9pm. We’re even offering free gift wrapping and can handle shipping if you find that special gift of art for someone who lives out of the area.
Here’s a selection of what I’ll have available. Almost everything will be $50-$95. They are all original oil paintings.
It took a little while to get there after it opened, but we finally visited the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park this past Sunday. I, like many people, was sorry to see the old building go, but the new one is fantastic. The living roof is worth the price of admission. The Planetarium now is now state of the art with three digital projectors. The original African Hall was preserved, along with this long-time resident….
The albino alligator
Here’s some of my favorite images from the day-
The entranceLooking past the "swamp" to the enclosed food courtLooking down to the west end of the buildingThe living roof, covered with California native plantsHow the roof started; cocoa fiber planting trays laid out side-by-side
The downstairs is a large and very well-done aquarium.
California coast kelp forest fish tank
I’m a mammal person and don’t really know my fish that well. I’ve identified the ones I know. You’ll have to use teh googles for the others.
The big salt water tankButterfly fish speciesTriggerfish speciesLagoon triggerfishUpside down jellyfish (no, really, that's their common name)Small saltwater tankMoray eel and fairy shrimp; symbiosis in action
There’s an old Dean Martin song that someone wrote some new words for. It goes like this: “When the eel in the reef has your heel in its teeth, that’s a moray.”
And finally, we walked through the botanical garden across the street before we went to the Academy and “met” this guy:
Become a fan by visiting my public page on Facebook!
We’re in the middle of a mini-heatwave here on the northcoast of California. It was almost 70F/20C today. I was invited to join some other local artists at the beach and off I went this afternoon for a few hours. It was a stunning day. I did two 8×8″ watercolors, kind of limbering up again since I haven’t done any location work since the trip to Wyoming in September. It was fun being out with friends and colleagues and I’ll be going again tomorrow. On Friday it’s supposed to go back to more normal temperatures for this time of year here with highs in the 50s.
Loved the light on this rock topped with some trees.
Susan Fox, American Artist 