Caprock Afternoon

Caprock Afternoon, originally uploaded by Mark Nesmith.

This is a small oil painting of a hot afternoon at Caprock Canyon. I've been doing a few paintings off and on of my trip there last summer (I keep getting distracted with other subjects--Texas just has so many wonderful vistas to paint!) I'm trying to work out capturing the blistering hot sunlight at Caprock in the summer when the incredibly vivid colors of the bluffs start to seem kind of bleached out. If you ever plan trip to Caprock Canyon State Park in the summertime, make sure you pack plenty of water, sunscreen, good walking shoes, and a wide brimmed hat (and the strongest bug spray you can find - the deer flies are notoriously big and love to bite!) Outside of our tent there was very little shade, especially once we started to hike up the mountains. Don't get me wrong, the canyons are beautiful anytime of year, but I think my next trip there will be in the Fall or Spring. Much cooler temperatures, and the cactus will be blooming. This painting is 8" x 10" and is oil on canvas.

What's in a pallet anyway?

I've had a couple of questions about my pallet, brushes, medium, etc., and while I wish I had some amazing story to tell, I'm really a pretty simple guy when it comes to paint.  The picture above is of my setup.  I'm using a plain old piece of glass on top of a set of plastic strorage drawers with wheels from Wal-Mart.  I've always used glass because it's easy to clean even when I leave paint sitting for too long (guilty as charged), and the plastic drawers were a cheap way to get the pallet waste high and have some storage for brushes, paints, and other supplies.  I've been using Utrecht or Daniel Smith paints, although I'm fine with just about any brand as long as they have good pigmentation.  I'd love to try Williamsburg paints but that'll have to wait for my lottery winnings to roll in!  Ha!  As far as colors, I stick pretty much to basics.  Starting in the bottom right hand corner of the photo and moving clockwise there's Titanium White, Naples Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue, Viridian, and Pthalocyanine Green.  I'm thinking of adding a few colors, probably starting with Cobalt Violet, but for oil painting I really prefer to keep it simple and mix any colors I need.  When I need black (or rather something close to black) I mix it from Alizarin Crimson and Pthalocyanine Green. That way I can push it towards the red or green spectrum depending on the needs of a particular painting.  I try to have no more than three colors in a mix (the first two get me in the right hue family, and the third is for tints and shades.)  I pretty much stick to bristle brushes and have an assortment of flats and rounds, although recently I'm using the rounds for most of my work.  My medium is a traditional mixture of damar varnish, stand oil, and turpentine.  I mix up large batches at a time and then fill small squeeze bottles to keep on my work table.  For my first layers of painting I use a 1:1:3 ratio (oil:varnish:turps) and then a fatter 1:1:1 for subsequent work.  After experimenting for many years with different techniques and mediums (including alkyds and acrylics) I've pretty much returned to the materials I used in my first painting classes with at Lamar with Larry Leach (a FANTASTIC painter and teacher and my first real mentor.)  I've still been painting on gesso primed canvas that I tone with acrylic paint, although I'm kind of itching to try some primed birch panels again.  Larry recently told me about Winsor's Artists Oil Painting Medium and I'm planning to check that out as soon as I'm out of my current batches of medium.  That's about it, pretty simple I think, especially considering that I've met painters who keep dozens of colors on their pallet.  For me I tend to find that less is more, and after all these years I've come to believe that painting has more to do with how you see and feel than what you use.

I'd be interested to hear what you all consider to be "must have" items for your paint box.

Texas Sky, Lake Mineral Wells (Crosstimbers Trail)

Texas Sky, Lake Mineral Wells (Crosstimber Trail), originally uploaded by Mark Nesmith.

Here's a lesser known side of vacationing at Lake Mineral Wells State Park. On the North side of the lake, the Crosstimbers Back Country Trails offers hiking, biking, and horse trails that take gentle to moderate slopes through grassy hills and woods.  Some are partially paved but most are gravel/dirt combinations. The area was a training ground for chopper pilots during Vietnam. There's a few small memorials of soldiers who served, and lots of clearings that were used to train the pilots to airlift soldiers in and out of combat. After a day of hiking the rocky and more rugged trails around the lake, my family and I often hike these trails in the evening and watch, awestruck, as the sun begins it's descent and the woods give way to beautiful expanses of Texas sky. This is a 12" x 16" oil on canvas painting, and I have to honestly say that the colors are much more vibrant and beautiful in person.

On the Rocks

On the Rocks, originally uploaded by Mark Nesmith.

One of the things I love the most about traveling in Texas is the wonderful variety of landscapes. Where else can you go from beaches to pine forests to rolling hills and desert canyons without crossing state lines?  Often a single location offers a multitude of landforms. In the last year I've painted lots of pictures of Lake Mineral Wells. Most have focused on the wooded shores with their rhythmic grasses growing out of the water, but there's much more to see at this state park. One side of the lake is a rock climbers dream. There are caves and cliffs to explore that are an easy to moderate climb. My kids have a wonderful time acting like mountain explorers, and for the skilled climbers there are even permanent anchor spots for ropes at the top of the scenic outlook for repelling. There are many hiking trails that explore this side of the lake, and the shoreline of Lake Mineral Wells is dotted with these wonderful boulder outcrops that make perfect resting places when you're tired or just want to relax and contemplate the view. The inspiration for this painting was an early morning hike when the lake was calm and the sky was just starting to take on a soft glow. At one time I was very into square paintings, and every once in awhile I still enjoy returning to this format. This painting measures 12" x 12" and is an oil painting on canvas. If nothing else, I hope my artwork inspires you to look to the wonderful beauty of Texas and consider exploring some of our state parks for your next vacation.

Choppy Day on the Lake

Choppy Day on the Lake, originally uploaded by Mark Nesmith.

This is one of the larger paintings I've been working on lately. It's 18" x 24" and is oil on canvas. I wanted to give the feeling of those light filled, breezy days on the lake with the sounds of the waves lapping against the shore. I've tried to keep the loose, painterly feel of my smaller pieces, and have been resisting the urge to go back and clean up some of the waves. I actually went and bought a couple of larger round, bristle brushes (a 10 and a 12) to help keep me from tightening up on these larger canvases. This was painted in two main sessions, with a little additional time spent evening out a couple of transitions in the water. Kind of funny, I used to paint really large pictures (3 or 4 feet was SMALL back then), but now I'm painting smaller and smaller. When I do approach a little bigger format, I'm really aiming to have the look and feel of my smaller scale paintings. Go figure!

Summer at Caprock Canyon State Park

Caprock Bluff, originally uploaded by Mark Nesmith.

Here's one of my recent paintings of Caprock Canyon. This one is 12" by 12" square, and is oil paint on canvas.  It's a view from one of the hot, summer days I spent camping there last summer with my friend Jon. For most of our time there the skies were clear and empty, so there was literally no escape from the sun other than our tent!

This was painted fairly quickly so the brush work is very loose. I tried to let the brush strokes themselves take the form of the rock formations. There's already so much color in the canyons that I've restrained myself from embellishing too much, trying to concentrate instead on capturing the hot, dry atmosphere.

Making the Case for Fine Art in the Classroom

This summer I'm serving as the Arts Integration Specialist for a Thriving Minds summer camp in Dallas.  It's a wonderful program where core content curriculum (math, language arts, science, and social studies) and fine arts disciplines (including dance, theater, music, visual art and more) are integrated by combining a teacher from each discipline together to team-teach a single class.  The content teacher has the class solo for the first couple of hours, then a fine arts teacher joins the class and they team-teach the same content from a fine arts perspective, and then the students have a studio time at the end of the day to just focus on the arts process.  I went to a few days of training this past week, and Tuesday and Wednesday I'll be helping to train other teachers before camp starts next week.  This whole process has got me really thinking about the value of arts education and how to get that across to the parents, teachers, and adminstrators I work with.  I came across this summary as part of a report on the Katy ISD website and thought it was worth passing along.

The following are findings reported in Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning  (Fiske, 1999) that should be noted by every parent, teacher, and administrator:

• The arts reach students not normally reached, in ways and methods not normally used.  (This leads to better student attendance and lower dropout rates.)
• It changes the learning environment to one of discovery.  (This often re-ignites the love of learning in students tired of just being fed facts.)
• Students connect with each other better.  (This often results in fewer fights, greater understanding of diversity, and greater peer support.)
• The arts provide challenges to students of all levels.  (Each student can find his/her own level from basic to gifted.)
• Students learn to become sustained, self-directed learners.  (The student does not just become an outlet for stored facts from direct instruction, but seeks to extend instruction to higher levels of proficiency.)
• The study of the fine arts positively impacts the learning of students of lower socioeconomic status as much or more than those of a higher socioeconomic status.  (Twenty-one percent of students of low socioeconomic status who had studied music scored higher in math versus just eleven percent of those who had not. By the senior year, these figures grew to 33 percent and 16 percent, respectively, suggesting a cumulative value to music education.)

I think that's pretty compelling evidence, but even more compelling to me is being in that classroom and seeing the light bulb turn on for a kid who's been struggling with some content.  In today's multi-media age of embedded videos, photo sharing, and sound bites, I think a gounding in the arts may be more important than ever.

Along the Beach, Galveston, TX

Along the Beach, originally uploaded by Mark Nesmith.

This is a view along the beach at Galveston State Park. I have spent many wonderful vacations with my family in Galveston, and my wife and I wound up spending part of our short honeymoon there. Painting the beach can be quite a bit of relief from all the greens that tend to dominate the landscape in Texas, especially in Southeast Texas where the abundance of Pine trees offer little change in foliage throughout the year. I'm always interested in depth in the landscape, and I've tried to use subtle shifts from the warmer yellow and orange tints in the foreground to cooler pinks towards the waves to increase the space of the otherwise short expanse of sand. The grasses in the foreground help with that alot, and the overall loose handling of paint is my attempt at relating the light filled, breezy atmosphere of the Gulf Coast. Alot of people bad mouth Texas beaches, but I have always loved the look of the Gulf Coast.

Clouds over Galveston

Clouds over Galveston 300, originally uploaded by Mark Nesmith.

This week was supposed to be a vacation week for me. My wife and I had planned to take our kids down to my brother's home near Winnie, TX. My wife just graduated with her Bachelor's Degree from UNT (yeah Tammy!), and my family was going to have kind of a get together for her. We were planning to end up in Galveston for a few days at the beach with the kids. But as often happens, plans changed. I accepted a position with Thriving Minds to serve as the Arts Integration Specialist for one of their summer camps, and I had to attend training in the middle of the week. I also wound up with a couple of shows to perform with one of my bands, so my wife took the kids and went on vacation without me. I've spent part of my time at the easel having myself a virtual Galveston vacation. Growing up in Beaumont, the Gulf Coast beaches were one of our main vacation spots.  I usually made several trips a year to Crystal Beach, Sea Rim State Park (wiped out by recent storms), and Galveston. I have lots of reference photos and sketches from my many beach vacations, and the images are always in the back of my mind. The salty air and the sounds of the waves lapping against the shore are something I've really missed since living in Dallas. Standing on the beach truly gives you a sense of infinity, watching the land disappear and the horizon so far off in the distance. It kind of makes you understand how early explorers might have thought the world was flat and you could fall right off the edge if you sailed far enough.

Time Waits for No Artist

Well, summer's finally here and now that I have a little breathing room in my schedule I've realized that it's been a few months since I've updated this blog.  Between my full-time job teaching art, my often not-so-part-time job as a musician, and my busy family life, something had to give.  So rather than giving up time making art and playing music, I gave up my regular postings to my blog.  However, I've come to see that I really missed it and enjoyed the connection to the other artists I've met, so I'm rededicating myself to posting at least a few times a week.  I've written before about the juggling act we all face as artists in today's busy world, and there's plenty of excuses we can offer that seem perfectly valid, but the truth is that time keeps marching on.  No more excuses, just do it, or as we like to say down here in Texas, git 'er done!

The Looking Glass

The Looking Glass, originally uploaded by Mark Nesmith.

We've had a freak ice storm here in North Texas, so I thought I'd fantasize about warmer days at the Lake! This is my daily painting of Lake Mineral Wells. Landscape artists are always looking for connections, and reflections in the water are a perfect way to connect the sky to the land and momentarily disrupt the horizon. This provides an overall unifying element, with the horizon only being there for variety. I often work small bits of the colors of the sky in the ground elements of my paintings for this reason, whether in pools of water or as highlights on grasses or trees. This is an 8" x 10" oil on canvas. I've never worked this small on a consistent basis before I started this series, but I'm finding it to be rather liberating and enjoyable.