Time for another "The Bob Show"

  I'm looking out my living-room window, choosing colors that I'd use to paint the neighbor's birches, which only now are beginning to lose their leaves.  Yellow oxide?  Some of the umbers?  Another winter fog dilutes the deep greens of the conifers up the block.  I won't be painting any of them.  Does looking through a window still count as plein air?  
  This fog will burn off by early afternoon.  Brilliant yellows from a low-hung sun will light the tree barks beneath a too-cerulean blue sky.  And I won't paint any of them, either.
  An all-white bulk carrier ship, waiting for a berth at the Ruston Way grain terminal, anchored off Point Ruston's Copperline Condos last week.  After a late lunch at the Antique Sandwich Co. on North Pearl Street, I drove the Artmobile down the hill and found a parking spot in front of the new movie house.  I loaded my paints, easel and canvas onto the collapsible stroller that is my sidewalk kit, and wheeled it around to the Waterwalk.  I set up the easel, my work table, loaded up the canvas--and took them all right back to the van.  Forty degrees, and a brisk north wind seemed just too damned plein air for acrylics, and for me. 
  It didn't help that the ship swung end-to-end while I was setting up.  This constant see-saw of my subject between the wind and the tide plaqued me all last winter, when I was painting oils of the container ships idled by the longshore slowdown.  It wasn't until I began framing those pochades for my show at Cafe Brosseau last fall that I realized I had painted some 20 of them.  Photographs taken of me by passing strollers show me bundled up like a Santa pack, with rocks suspended from the paintbox tripod to keep it steady against that wind.
  Tomorrow afternoon I'll be addressing a small audience at a church on Tacoma's South 56th Street where I've hung 33 canvases and panels.  Most are small oils, but I have some larger canvases that I began painting last summer.
  My topic is listed as something about plein air painting as a path to spiritual peace and enlightenment. 
  How about plein air painting as a path to constant challenge and frustration?

Home from the Old Country

  Friend Gary joined me this morning at the Treo's coffee house in Tacoma's Old Town.  Rain whispered on the rooftops.  A flat, gray sheen of water to the north lay beneath a flat, gray sky.  Not a boat was visible from North 30th Street.
  Gary had returned this week from an extended visit to family in Geneva, Switzerland.  He brought with him to our weekly show-and-tell two small notebooks of pen-and-wash sketches.  Each painting was exquisite.  Every one brought an aging, urban landscape to life. 
  Gary is an architect.  His eye and pen captured details that, otherwise unnoted, contribute to an overall statement of sometimes recent and sometimes old construction that reflects Geneva's centuries of established beauty.
  He is no stranger to freehand drawing but relatively new to plein air sketching and watercolor painting.  He works from a small pocketbook that carries his watercolor-paper notebooks, his india-ink drawing pens, brushes and a small tray of watercolor pans. 
  Plein air artists work fast in any clime--but Geneva in winter--despite this month's Indian summer there--dictates rapid sketching, rapid painting.  Despite this enforced haste, Gary has captured Geneva with bold lines and sensitive washes that provide an illusion of detail and completeness.
  I can't wait until he turns his educated eye upon Tacoma!