Category Archives: Landscape Painting

The Warmest Day of Winter

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The Warmest Day of Winter • Joe Forkan 2010 Oil on canvas 12″ x 12″

The demands of perceptual based painting are very different from the demands of more open-ended studio work. Large figurative paintings like those in The Lebowski Cycle can be in progress for years, and undergo significant revisions, but perceptually based paintings are more direct expressions, and the entire process of painting them is compressed into a very short period of time.

Trying to capture the specifics of an experience of a place, or of the presence of a person in one session forces you to really focus on what you want to capture in the painting, to make quick decisions and to jettison extraneous information.

Regardless of the quality of the finished work, I always remember a place that I have painted much more vividly having painted it than if I had just spent the day there as an onlooker. Interpretation demands engagement in a different way. Painting is a way of knowing.

Landscape painting also offers a counterpoint to the more solitary nature of studio painting. Yesterday, after spending all morning painting in the studio, the warm weather encouraged an afternoon run down to Newport Beach to paint at Crystal Cove. It seemed a shame to spend such an amazing day inside painting three figures in the interior of a bowling alley.

New Spurgeon Paintings

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Bush Street Summer Day (triptych) • Joe Forkan 2009 Oil on panel 14.25″ x 8.5″

Here are a couple of new paintings from the Spurgeon series. These are views from my studio in downtown Santa Ana. I’m finishing up some work for an upcoming show of landscape and cityscape paintings.

I’ll post more information on that soon.

Spurgeon Tower 11:45 winter • Joe Forkan 2010 Oil on panel 10″ x 10″

Big Sur

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Big Sur, Noon looking North • Joe Forkan 2009 oil on panel 13" x 8"

Big Sur, Noon looking North • Joe Forkan 2009 oil on panel 13″ x 8″

In late October, I had the opportunity to take a painting trip to Big Sur with Andrew Dickson and Eric Merrell, two Southern California artists also interested in landscape painting. It was four solid days of painting, camped less than 50 yards from the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Big sur joe forkan

Big Sur, Midday Fog • Joe Forkan 2009 oil on panel 15.5″ x 8″

It’s interesting to paint with other artists, seeing how they approach the same subject – technically, formally, and also in terms of how they see. Each of us was using the interpretation of the landscape to explore something different.

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Rough Surf, Big Sur • Joe Forkan 2009 Oil on panel 15 x 7.5

Film critic Roger Ebert once wrote, “it’s not what the film is about, it’s how it’s about what it’s about.” I think that is also a fairly concise way of speaking about the challenges of perceptually based painting. The subject can often be confused with the content, and the intent of the painting (the conversation one is having about the subject, about perception and process – the act of painting). I actually find painting in beautiful places to be more difficult, as the tension and balance between picture and painting (between what and how), can be more difficult to maintain.

Europe 2009

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Chateau Blonay, Switzerland • Joe Forkan 2009 Oil on panel, 10 x 10

I took a painting trip to Europe this summer. These paintings are two of several that I finished on site while there. Chateau Blonay was painted over the course of many days from the balcony of a friend’s place in Blonay, outside Vevey, Switzerland. The weather and light change very quickly in this area as it sits in the Alps just above Lake Geneva. You have to be very patient, and constantly ready to flee the rain while working.

Outside Siena was painted in an olive grove looking across a valley in Tuscany. This painting was more direct and painted in a single session. The variations in light and color were remarkable. The colors in Italy were much warmer, and very different from the cooler light in the Alps. It was interesting to watch the shifts while taking the train from Switzerland south to Italy.

Outside Sienna • Joe Forkan 2009 Oil on panel, 10 x10

Outside Siena • Joe Forkan 2009 Oil on panel, 10" x 10"

There are about 20 more small paintings in the studio that I began in Switzerland and Italy that I am still reworking .

Spurgeon Tower 2009

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Spurgeon Tower III • Joe Forkan 2008 oil on panel 10" x 10"

Spurgeon Tower III • Joe Forkan 2009 oil on panel 10″ x 10″

The Spurgeon Paintings are an ongoing series I began after moving to California in 2002 to begin teaching at California State University Fullerton. I had rented a studio in the Spurgeon building in downtown Santa Ana, and was continuing a series of large-scale figurative paintings that I had been working on previous to the move. I had been very absorbed in the study of color theory while earning my MFA at the University of Delaware, and was really pushing color in my figurative paintings, working from life as well as from photos.

My new studio had four large windows looking out over downtown Santa Ana, and I enjoyed the California light immensely, and its dynamics were very different from both Delaware and Arizona, where I had also lived. Throughout the day, the play of light across the buildings kept pulling my eyes away from my work, out the window to the shifting masses of color until I finally just turned my easel towards the windows and started a series of what were initially meant to be simple color studies.

Spurgeon 1:00pm • Joe Forkan 2003 oil on panel 14" x 10"

Spurgeon 1:00pm • Joe Forkan 2003 oil on panel 14″ x 10″

The studies became a series of over 60 paintings and drawings of the same view, composed and negotiated according to formal considerations, the shapes of color, the play of light, time of day and time of year.

I hadn’t really meant to start painting landscapes or cityscapes. But I became very engaged in the process of seeing and painting as clearly as I could not so much what I was seeing, but how I was seeing it.

Painting from life presents opportunities and challenges that are much different than those of other approaches. Working from life, across time, is very different than the false clarity and exaggerated specifics of a single ‘photographic’ moment. It’s an attempt to more closely engage the constant, shifting nature of experience, the passage of time, and unpredictability of memory.

I tend to work with repeated themes and multiple images, making it easier to track variation, invention, and the arc of time within the painting process.

The recurring buildings in the Spurgeon paintings act like armatures upon which I can build images exploring the passage of time through the day and throughout the year, and the subtle, dynamics of light and color .

Paint is a particularly good medium to explore these ideas. How far must you take an image in order for it to gain coherence? How far can you push it and have the coherence hold, or expand? I’m always looking for that place in an image that can trigger a moment of recognition, of the experiential, of something seen and lived, made richer if not clearer, by having been run through the conflicted filters of experience, memory, and the imprecise language of painting.