Last Saturday I was looking out onto the absolutely stunning San Francisco Bay with my absolutely good buddy and fellow artist Paul Bianchini. We were doing what we absolutely like to do best...sketching! The cold summer fog cleared out and we had absolutely warm sunshine on our backs ( I got a sunburn on my neck but who the hell cares, I was sketching!). Today, I got on the road to Concord, Calif. to see my friend and absolutely fabulous artist,
Myrna Wacknov, and sat in on her portrait workshop at Gallery Concord. Being a workshop teacher myself, it is often educational to see how fellow workshop teachers do their thing. The gallery offers workshops by absolutely nationally known watercolor artists like Myrna, and, like her, I am now a member in absolutely good standing with the California Watercolor Association.
Yes, indeed, it's been an absolutely good week, and both of these sketches reflect that fact. Click on them twice to enlarge. They were done on a cheap cold press watercolor sketch pad with an office pencil followed up with a fine tip Sharpie pen, followed up with a water soluble Tombow pen whose dabs of ink can be dissolved with a wet brush to make absolutely lovely, lovely value washes. I once wrote an article for American Artist Magazine about this absolutely wonderful sketching technique and will be conducting a workshop on it this Friday. That will be yet another joyful experience...absolutely, and may I add, for sure!!
Every year, I appear on Sacramento's PBS station to help with their annual live, on-air art auction that raises money for the station. Artists throughout the Northern Calif. region submit art to be juried into the auction. The artists fully donate their paintings and the station keeps all the money made from viewer bids. The viewers call into a phone bank to place their bids as each piece is talked about and auctioned off on live TV. I usually appear with several of the auctioneers as an "art expert" and in from two to four half hour auction sequences to pontificate about the various art pieces. This year there will be an auction sequence called California's Gold. The art from some of the area's top artists (myself included) will be in this section. The name was approved by a very well known PBS host who travels about our state and records it all in a weekly program called California's Gold. He's a big good ole boy original from Tennessee with a winning blue grass twang and an uber southern charm. I was interviewed by him several weeks ago while dabbling at my easel. The interview will be aired to help advertise this year's auction and will also run before my piece goes on air in the California's Gold sequence. Ahh, if I could only have this type of fire power to help sell my art on a weekly, year round basis...and...all the money gets donated to me!
