Post-Posting from the america trip

Well, I have noticed that some images will not show any longer. That is due to an insufficient apple device called Ipad with its insufficient Apps...

I will try to recover those images and post them again, from a real computer this time.

I found a few sketches from Saint augustine and Charleston I havent posted before so, here they are.

Long Branch Creek outside Charleston

The Cathedral-Basilica in St. Augustine

Dolomites , Italy

Here are a few recent sketches from the Dolomites in Italy. I spent a week in Canazei and borrowed a snowboard and a backpack for the painting gear, got a skipass that allowed me to explore this natural heritage.

Fort Lauderdale (no Everglades)

The last three days we spent in Key West, probably the biggest disappointment on this trip...
My expectations and mental image of the island were completely crushed in our first day. It's a tourist trap with all it's components, sky high prices for crap (hotel, food etc), cheap t-shirts with sex-jokes, a train on wheels, adultstores, mass-produced art in the galleries, you name it!
So we cancelled the fourth night at our hotel (would have cancelled more if we didn't have to pay for it).

When doing some more thorough research on the web we realized we had already passed through the Everglades. I think I had a different image of what the Everglades would look like...
And if we wanted to see the Everglades again we would have had to backtrack our path quiet a bit.

So instead we decided to head to Fort Lauderdale where we met the only swede who has ever blown up an american battleship!
It's true.
As a part of an artificial reef-program the old battleship was blown up outside of Pensacola. Today it serves as shelter for fish and attraction for sport-divers. The discovery channel made a show about the sinking so you can probably find it on YouTube.

Fort Lauderdale seems really nice so we decided to stay here tonight. I saw some galleries when we drove through the city so I hope to see some good paintings tomorrow.
I haven't had many good opportunities to paint lately which is very frustrating but I sincerely hope to do wip out the brushes soon.

- Posted by Gustav

Location:Fort Lauderdale

Florida

Due to a lot of traveling lately I have had very little time to paint. But tomorrow we are heading to the Everglades in Florida and I've been longing to go there for some time now. So by tomorrow I sure hope to have some new sketches to post!






- Posted by Gustav

Location:Florida

Happy New Year!

I apologize for not posting in a while but I have had very little or no access to the information superhighway until reaching civilization today.
We have been driving a few miles, from L.A through the Nevada desert to SinCity and then to Grand Canyon for a couple of days before heading to Santa Fe and today we arrived in Albuquerque! (long sentence there..)

Here follows a few recent sketches



Nevada desert approx. 5x10 cm




Nevada desert II approx. 7x7cm


And for a landscape painter few places are as majestic to paint as the
Grand Canyon.
Not only was it grand it was also the coldest conditions I have ever painted in
(-12 Fahrenheit = -24 Celsius).
I wasn't sure if the paint was going to stick to the canvas when I set out the first morning. So please don't judge me to hard on the drawing. My only goal was to capture a few color notes, then I will use, I going to say it!, PHOTOGRAFS!, for drawing reference. :)
The night before I made a small copy of an american painter, Clyde Aspevig, to help me figure out some values in distant landscape, see below.



Color-sketch-copy after Clyde Aspevig

Then here are two colorsketches from Grand Canyon




South Rim approx. 12x30 cm




By Matherpoint approx. 10x15 cm

Until next post, Happy New Year!!

Location:Nevada & Grand Canyon

Carmel

So since my last entry we have been around winecountry in Napa and Healdsburg visiting a few galleries and my friend, Alexander Harris again.
Then we directed our wheels south and visited another old friend from Florence Academy, Nate Taylor, in Santa Cruz.
We stayed one night with Nate, his girlfriend Grace and 2 year old train-iac Quinn, catching up, inspecting Nates studio space, his little garden, drank wine, ate pizza and played chess.



Nate Taylor at his house in Santa Cruz


Then another few hours south we finally had a little breakthrough in the weather!
We spent a few days in Carmel, a small town just south of Monterey, where we stayed for Christmas.
It reminds me a lot of Båstad in Sweden. A small town with a big sport event, golf instead of tennis this time.
Carmel had a strong artist colony going in the early 1900s. And there are still a few local artists around and now there are tons of galleries too.
I was running around the galleries for a day and a half and still missed a few good ones. (some of them were closed for the holidays).
I found two local artists I liked a lot, one plein air landscape painter,Jesse Powell and a sculptor Richard Macdonald.(google them to find their websites)
Today we drove down to Santa Barbara, driving in the wettest weather ever through the Big Sur...
At times it felt like we just drove through clouds, of all the amazing scenery along that part of highway 1 we saw only a fraction...(still beautiful though)


Rainy day in Big Sur




Here's a sketch from Stewarts Cove, Carmel approx 20x25 cm


So we spent Christmas in Carmel and Hilda gave me these books, great reading material for an artist :)

Frustration...

Today we drove from Calistoga in Napa valley to visit my friend Alexander Harris in Healdsburg. We meant to stay for lunch and then drive down to Santa Cruz but when we realized it was going to be a long drive and with really bad weather we decided to stay the night.
We got to see the gallery that Alex and his father has, now under reconstruction, and tonight we are going to check out Tron at the cinema here.
I'm coming to a point where Im understanding the weather is not going to get much better, after all its winter in California. So I have to come up with something to make this work. So far I have had the chance to visit some really good galleries but I havent had many chances to paint which is really frustrating.