Tea Lemon

Ah, life is good. I breathe. So here to commemorate this turning point, is a lemon, from amongst those I used to make hot lemon and honey. I saved this one out, thinking it would be a good subject, because it looks lumpy and odd. Not the market-perfect ones I prefer not to paint.

Chicken Soup Onion-SOLD

An 8 day cold, and counting. Incredible! I suppose I'm making up for lost time, since I don't remember having a cold in at least a decade if not longer. The flu, yes. But not this tsunami of mucous. Sorry if that's too much information, but I just can't get over it; pun intended.

Anyway, yesterday was a bit of a reprieve; I felt hugely better and tackled this onion, one of several I used to make myself some chicken soup. Today, well, sort of like the previous week. So no painting for tomorrow.

View Over the Vernal Pools - NFS (Private Collection)

This painting was done at the Santa Rosa Plateau on Tuesday, this time looking south over one of the Vernal Pools, as they are called. Every winter and spring when rain falls, depressions in the earth there fill with water, providing an environment for all manner of water creatures to come to life after remaining dormant through the dry months. These include everything from microscopic organisms all the way to tiny little shrimp and most miraculously to me tadpoles, which of course will mature into loud and sonorous frogs.

Breezy Santa Rosa Morning - SOLD

I just got back from a glorious day painting at the Santa Rosa Plateau, (see blog posting 9/30/2009). It was very cool & breezy, with big puffy grey and white clouds flying across the sky, making for a constantly changing mosaic of light and shadow moving over the landscape. We arrived pretty early and found just a couple of people there ahead of us. The spring flowers are just starting to open, and the bird song punctuating the silence made for a near perfect morning. This view is looking west I think, back up the trail from the "Vernal Pools" which are immediately to my left as I painted this scene. This is really still a wild landscape, however groomed these small dirt trails are. There are signs of coyote on the trail every few feet, not to mention tarantula and snake holes, and at this time of year, hundreds of short, furry caterpillars criss-crossing the trail trying to get to one side or the other; we couldn't decide which.

Indian Canyon Afternoon

Here is a second painting I did while visiting Andreas Canyon, south of Palm Springs. I painted this looking back  toward the canyon from another palm grove at the same site. It was shady and cool from the vantage point I had, and it was just heavenly to sit there quietly and listen to the breeze through the palm fronds. The quiet of the desert is totally unique.
I'm off to the Santa Rosa Plateau tomorrow to paint spring flowers, and vernal pools, and maybe some cows.

Andreas Canyon - Morning

Ok, I want you all to know that I have felt guilty for not posting these last almost 3 weeks on the "Judith Cameron - A Painting a Day" blog, (which name btw, I have since frequently regretted choosing: why not "A Painting a Week", or "A Painting When I Can Manage It", or "A Painting Now and Then"?). It's just that "life" seems to intervene, and I don't mean Life with a capital L, the big life of real crisis, or challenge, or change, but the little life of chores, and moods, and distractions, and the inertia of all of that. Being retired with no schedule has left me with no discipline at all, (though I had barely enough to get by before). So, at the risk of being a bit too confessional about all this, and without hopefully putting too much of a burden on either of us, I am vowing to jump back in with a renewed sense of purpose.

So, here is a painting I painted when I accompanied my husband to Palm Springs, the last week of March. He attended a week long photo workshop, and I did a few paintings. The first full day there I met with a friend and we drove south of Palm Springs to Indian Canyons. These are beautiful canyons filled with natural groves of fan palms, and it's truly gorgeous. This first one we did in Andreas Canyon which is the easiest to access. This view is of the trail head leading to a one mile loop through the groves.

Agua Caliente Noon

I finally got around to finishing the last large painting I did when I was in Baja. This one was painted from the same spot where I painted the estuary; I just turned to paint what was in the opposite direction: basically an empty lot with weeds and the back of some sort of storage building I think. It was fun to try and turn something infinitely mundane into something else entirely.

Baja Morning

Here is another larger sized painting that I did the last painting day we had in Baja. We stayed near Agua Caliente which lies south of Ensenada right where a point of land - Punta Banda - extends west into the pacific containing and creating somewhat the Bahia Todos Los Santos, (or the bay which Ensenada overlooks). A striking part of the geography here is a long spit of land creating a tidal estuary, fully 5 miles long and affording beautiful wetlands effects as the tide ebbs and flows. We arrived about 8:30 am just as the tide was beginning to flow back in. This is a view I painted looking almost due East, with the beautiful green hillsides of the point backlit by the morning sun.

Punta Banda Avenue-(Private Collection)

Here is a second painting I did in Baja. It's a larger one than I normally post here, 11x14 inches. I painted all of these with the idea that I wanted to give them to my hosts for the week in thanks for all their hospitality, and they did ask to keep this one. The weather was crazy this day too. It dawned sunny and cool, a perfect day to paint. We drove all around the small little village of ex-pat cottages but came back to this view of a long gravel street which is just outside the house I was staying in. So, we started off painting a bright sunny street with lengthening shadows and puffy white clouds in the sky. Then came very dark clouds from the south, like a big dark blue blanket which ultimately covered the whole sky, blotting out the sun, eliminating the wonderful bright colors and the shadows. So, I finally gave up and began to turn the painting I started into one that would be more subdued and subtle. No shadows, no bright colors, but a rich dark blue sky with forbidding clouds. But no, just when I've changed everything, the clouds disperse, (this takes almost an hour), and we are back to bright sunny day, beautiful cast shadows and puffy white clouds. This is a typical occurrence for a plein air painter, but one we sort of just take in stride, because it's so wonderful to be there watching it all happen.

Ensenada Bay

I spent last week visiting my friend's family in Baja, near Agua Caliente, south of Ensenada.

Baja at this time of year is as green as Hawaii, with weather just as changeable, though without the mild temperatures. We had to paint indoors our first day there as it alternately rained and blew like a gale, making the temperature feel like it was in the 30's. So, here is the first of the 5 or 6 paintings I did when down there. This is a view of Ensenda Bay from the living room window of the beautiful home where I was staying.