End 2018, Next 2019

I'm finishing up 2018 and have a plan for 2019. My goal for 2018 was to study California Scene Watercolorists from the 1930's to 1950's, paint faster, and paint larger. For the most part it was successful. I'm now more accustomed to painting a half sheet rather than a quarter sheet of watercolor paper and my speed has doubled. I've read about four dozen books on watercolor with half of those involving the California Scene artists. This is the end of the third year of my watercolor effort and I was more driven this year than the previous two. At this point I needed to decide whether I should continue with watercolor or take up a new activity. After much thought, I decided to continue with watercolor painting.

From all the books I read this year, there are about a half dozen that have some interesting techniques that I need to develop and that will be one of my goals for 2019. It is hard to make a change in style and technique but I need to push myself to go to next level. That also requires making some mistakes and not so great paintings in the process. I can tell you that plein air painting is not easy for me and that is something I need to work on. In a similar vein I would like to be able someday to demonstrate my watercolor painting which requires even more speed since I might be confined to an hour's time. So that's the additional goals; plein air painting, learn how to demo, and learn new techniques. As for actual demonstrations, I'll target 2020.

Some of the side effects of painting larger and faster in 2018 is that I ended up with a lot of paintings and have more big frames/mats. I painted a painting a week, so that's 52 paintings. When I participated in the annual November Placer Arts Studio Tour, I had 120 paintings framed and hanging. Because of my location and historic "Camp" fire in California on the Veteran's Day weekend of my tour show, the smoke was so bad it was deemed hazardous to go outside. About a dozen people came to my location specifically for watercolor despite the smoke. Lucky for me they were dedicated friends and I sold some paintings. I also received some commission work from my friends. At at the rate I'm painting it would be insane to frame the next 50 paintings and then have 170 stored. I will not have enough wall space to hang them for a show. So I will remove old paintings from the frames and replace with new ones. I have decide which 50 tor 60 paintings are no longer worthy, another goal for 2019.