1 July 26
Local Color
A while back I picked up a copy of the book Local Color: Seeing Place Through Watercolor, by Point Reyes artist Mimi Robinson. The book describes a practice for developing observational skills in landscape art. Robinson’s idea is to paint in watercolor a swatch chart of the key colors seen at a locality. These color palettes can be simply be a visual record of place, or serve as a starting point for a subsequent painting.
Or perhaps they can be used in photography? One of the things I have become sensitive to after years of practice in mixing watercolors is how inaccurate photographs can be in illustrating the colors of the lightfield at a scene. Sometimes this is a result of colors being out of gamut, but more often this is because the photograph’s color rendering is emphasizing the wrong combination of hues with respect to what catches one’s eye. A usual workflow in art is to take a photograph of a scene to use as a reference for a painting. I’m imagining the opposite workflow — paint a local color palette while at the scene, and then use that palette as a guide to color grading the photograph in editing.
A common practice in editing a photograph is to adjust the colors of the image until it is aesthetically pleasing. But if this is done at some remove from when the photograph was taken, it is easy to forget what the scene felt like visually. The paradox is that the photograph itself does not supply enough information to interpret the color relationships during the editing.
At left is a page from my nature journal from yesterday, where I am starting to explore this concept. At this time of year in our neighborhood, the dominant colors are the intense cobalt blue of the sky, and the yellow greens of the urban forest canopy, primarily sycamores.
29 June 26
Backyard Bougainvillea
This sketch is of a small portion of the bougainvillea that is growing on the wall of the garage that borders our backyard. Right next to it is a desert willow that is also in flower; the bougainvillea flowers out-saturate the desert willow ones, though they are about the same hue.
27 June 26
Urban Tree Sketching
Perhaps I should focus my weekend urban sketches on trees in the urban environment. This sketch is of a couple of trees on the west side of A Street in Davis, drawn from near the Senior Center.
25 June 26
Sister States
There is a story on the front page of yesterday’s Davis Enterprise with the headline “Catalonia, UC sign agreement on research”. The first sentence of the story reads “In 1986 the Spanish region of Catalonia and the state of California fostered the first agreement between the regions as sister states, recognizing the long relationships of culture, geography and climate that exist between the two regions”.
The story describes a memorandum of understanding between University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and the Catalan Institute of Water Research (Institut Català de Recerca de l’Aigua) to collaborate on research on sustainable water resource management. The president of the government of Catalonia, Salvador Illa, visited California in May and came to the UC ANR offices in Davis to sign the agreement, which incidentally is where Pica used to work.
I’ve known about the sister state relationship for a while now, and as a Californian this story makes me feel validated to be delving a bit into Catalan culture from afar. Coming in August we will be taking a trip to the region and I will learn much more in person.
It is not too widely known but many of the 18th century Spanish explorers and settlers of California were Catalan. Some of these people include Gaspar de Portolá (from Os de Balaguer — my junior high school was named after him) , Father Junipero Serra (from Mallorca), Juan Crespi (also from Mallorca), Pedro Fages (the first European to climb Mt. Diablo, born in Guissona in Lleida Province), and Pedro Font (drew one of the first maps of San Francisco Bay, born in Girona).
21 June 26
The Day In Its Color
While browsing in the public library several days ago I ran across a photography book from 2012 entitled The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey Through a Vanishing America by Eric Sandweiss, a historian at Indiana University. This book describes a remarkable collection of photographs taken between 1938 and 1969 by an amateur photographer named Charles Cushman. The title of the book comes from a line in a poem by Wallace Stevens; the collection consists of 14,500 Kodachrome slides of Cushman’s travels across the United States and a bit abroad. Cushman was a businessman with a lot of opportunity to travel, and he meticulously documented his journeys with his Contax II A rangefinder camera loaded with Kodachrome. This was a time period when most professional and much amateur photography was done in black and white, and color documentary photography was pretty rare then. As such, the collection provides an unusual glimpse in full color of the vernacular landscape of the United States at mid-century. Cushman showed little or no interest in fine art photography, but he had a good eye for composition.
Charles Cushman was an alum of Indiana University, and several years before he died in 1972 he arranged to have his photography collection together with his thorough notes (he recorded the subject and exposure details for every slide he took) donated to the archives at the university. There they sat until 1999 when an archivist unearthed them and realized their value to documentary history. The library got funding to digitize the collection, and all 14,500 slides are available to browse online. Cushman moved to San Francisco in 1953, and I have found it fun to search in the collection for slides of places I know in California.
19 June 26
Out of Gamut
Today Ryan Moulton posted a good article about the colors your screen cannot show you and where to find them in the real world. Computer screens mix colors from red, green, and blue primaries but there are many colors the eye can discern on the color chromaticity diagram that fall outside the triangle defined by the three primaries. Mostly these are greens and cyans.
Moulton provides a guide to where to find these colors in the outdoors. Looking up at the leaves in a deciduous forest glowing in sunlight is one place. The light passing repeatedly through the leaves has the red and blue wavelengths filtered out leaving a pure spectral green at a wavelength of around 550 nm.
Another place is sunlight through depths of pure water. Water rapidly absorbs reds, and if sunlight passes through a few meters of water the color shifts outside of any screen gamut. These colors can be seen from shore when the light reflects off of light sand on the bottom, or from underwater.
Birds and butterflies famously can have intense iridescent colors thanks to the structure of their feathers and wing scales which can have elements that have the same length scale as wavelengths of visible light. Examples of these include peacock tail feathers and butterflies in the genus Morpho.
One needn’t visit nature to find colors that cannot be displayed on a screen. Green traffic lights have a color that falls mostly outside of displayable gamuts. This color has been chosen so as to provide the biggest discernment from red for viewers who are red-green colorblind. Traffic lights nowadays use LEDs which can have quite pure spectral colors.
(Thanks to MetaFilter for the link to the article.)
15 June 26
Drawing Signs
One of my favorite photographers is Walker Evans, who was a master at photographing the American vernacular landscape. We were fortunate enough to see an exhibition of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art eight-and-a-half years ago. There is a collection of his work published in 1998 that is entitled simply Signs and consists of 50 photographs he took of signage across America.
Signs are important in forming the character of an urban landscape. I was reminded of that a couple days ago when I read through The American Dream? and enjoyed all the illustrations of signage along Route 66 sketched in pen and wash. I decided I needed to sketch more signs, so yesterday I drew the building shown here at left. This hair salon is on G Street in Davis, on the opposite side of the street from the Davis Food Co-op.
13 June 26
Russell and A
Here’s my sketch today of the house at Russell Boulevard and A Street in Davis looking across from Russell. This is right across the street from campus; in the lower right corner of the sketch one can see light towers on a campus playing field. The house belongs to the Chi Omega woman’s fraternity.
Pica has a good collection of graphic memoirs on our bookshelves, and looking for something to read there late this morning I found a copy of The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66, by Shing Yin Khor. A lovely little book chronicling a road trip the author took in April 2016. I was heartened to see the technique the author uses for their illustrations which is similar to the way I’m sketching now. There are three layers in their illustrations — an underdrawing in blue colored pencil, black ink line work. and watercolor washes. I’m finding I really like having an underdrawing before putting in the ink line work.
7 June 26
For Lease
Here is yesterday’s urban sketch. This is the northernmost corner of the retail mall on G Street north of the Davis Food Co-op. Three of the nine spaces in this mall are vacant, though it does contain a good bike store and our favorite local bakery.
3 June 26
Buglets On The March
Pica this morning spotted about sixty or so small creatures in formation on the wall of our garden shed. When she moved her hand towards them, they would retreat away a few millimeters. We at first thought these were spiders but looking closely at the photographs they have six legs, not eight. Their body length is about 2 millimeters long.
I ran this photograph through a number of visual identification apps without a great deal of luck, but did come up with some possibilities. They appear to be early instar nymphs of some sort of bug, possibly Rediviidae (assassin bugs) or Rophalidae (e.g. boxelder bugs). Insects are tough to identify, immature insects even tougher.