2025 Frank Bette Center Recap

Having success in a plein air show is difficult.

Plein air events tend to get me to focus on things I don't always spend a lot of time thinking about. Every time you scope out an area, you ask yourself questions like, "would the local clientele be interested in this?" "Would a picture of this scene connect emotionally with the buyers of art here?" "Do I find this scene interesting enough to spend two hours making a picture of it, and can I compose it in a way that discerning art collectors will be drawn to?" These are all questions that have to be answered in a satisfactory way in order to be successful, every time you go out to paint. Add on top of all that, you won't know you have the right answer to these questions until you show the work to other people and talk to them about it. Now you know why it's so difficult to have success at plein air shows!

So, how do I personally go about it? Well for me, it starts with what I find interesting about the area. The longer you spend in an area, the more you can appreciate the intimate scenes and focus less overall on the big pictures. I have to admit, the most popular scenes are not usually what I go for. Call me quirky, call me scared of being called basic, call it whatever you want. But I take scene selection pretty seriously. I like to find things that I personally find interesting, then work to show others in a clear way why I found it interesting, and hope to make them interested in the same thing. It's almost a magic trick if you can pull it off, but I think I am getting better at it as I go. If I can get myself to go through this process with a popular scene, then that's optimal, but I won't count a place out just because I don't think enough viewers will care about the scene.

I'm on a never-ending quest to find other people who look at the visual world in a similar way that I do, because I feel like those people are going want to own a piece of mine. It's been said that people like to see their values reflected back to them through what they choose to surround themselves with. I hope I can contribute to your life in that way!

Alameda is an interesting city. It is right next to Oakland, yet I feel like they couldn't be less similar for being neighbors like that. Alameda is a quiet well-to-do city that is purposely slower than the rest of the Bay Area. I don't completely mean that figuratively; most of the island has a speed limit of 25 miles per hour. I think this has an effect of making things more calm, quiet and friendly. It's one of my favorite cities in the Bay Area, but as a place to plein air paint, it's not my first choice. This event challenges me in a certain way because I don't have an abundance of beautiful natural parks to lean on. Instead, I focus on what would make an interesting arrangement of man-made elements. It's a fairly maritime area as well, so you can do a lot of nautical scenes or beaches that are almost like estuaries.

We had a slight advantage from scoping out the island a week before, so I had a few places in mind that I wanted to try. One of them being Ballena Point, which is an oddly shaped island that is in the San Francisco bay. It has amazing views of the city of San Francisco, but the view doesn't necessarily work as an engaging painting. This is when you scale down your vision to find something more intimate and hopefully as interesting.

I found this red boat docked in the nearby marina. I thought I was a bit lucky to find a subject that stood out as interesting all on its own, as well as a great unobstructed view of it. Technically speaking, the hardest part of this painting to do was the background buildings and hills. The reason was because it was tough to strike the balance of a background that depicts the feeling of what it is, but doesn't insist on stealing attention from the main subject. This meant I had to compress values and desaturate the colors in order to make them feel like they are way back in space, and also simplify the buildings and trees to the point where they just read as an impression of what they are, but not actually making them realistic portraits of insignificant structures.

This ended up being one of my favorite pieces of the week because of the colors, and all the little details in the boats came together without feeling overworked. I liked doing the reflections too.

"Little Red" 8x10 inches. Gouache on watercolor paper mounted to board.

The next day, Vanessa and I went down together in the evening. The day before, I was going to paint a similar scene, but the scene was directly facing west, so the sun and its reflection of it was making it impossible to stare at the scene, so I went home and decided to try again the next day.

As Vanessa studied the gentle lapping waves of the beach, I ventured a little down the path into the community park. I wanted the effect of the light in my piece, but I needed some shielding from the sunlight since I would have been in the same situation as the day before if not for the trees in front of me.

Knowing that the light in these situations can be fleeting, I knew that I had to work as fast as I could. I blocked this in so fast. It was all about capturing the effect and establishing the major shapes that make up the composition. I didn't really draw anything out in the beginning; instead I worked to get the color and light as I saw it first priority, then after that we went in and carved out the shapes to establish more accurate shapes. To finish the painting, I scumbled in the texture of the trees, which also helped to soften edges and add subtle value variations within it.

I did a ton of editing to the scene. Part of what we do as artists is shape our vision to fit how we want to see the world. That sounds lofty, but what I mean in this situation is that there was a birthday party happening near the benches, and it was about 15 very loud very annoying teenagers distracting me. I tried to channel my annoyance into energy that caused me to work fast, which maybe helped with the speed. There was also someone who left their windsurf sail in front of my scene too. It wouldn't have worked as part of the painting, nor had any idea how long it would stay there, so for things like that, it would be best to leave out of the painting.

The next day was a pretty cloudy and overcast day. On a day like that, I think if you still want something with a lot of interest in it, your best bet is to either find some architecture or flowers. I had my eye on this building on Park Street for a while. It's the original Masonic Temple building (they moved a couple doors down) and it has a bunch of interesting elements about it. I feel that it stands out as a beautiful building on a street that has an abundance of cool architecture.

My favorite part of this painting is actually the rough parts in the bottom quarter of the painting. There is a feeling of movement and human energy that gets implied here, and I think it works better to capture the feeling of the scene more than if I had actually tried to paint every detail. It's definitely a concept I will explore more in the future.

The Croll's building was one that also stood out to me as I was looking for more places to paint. I went in with a direct painting style because I didn't have a ton of time left in the day to paint this one. The result was some awkward perspective issues that I wasn't totally able to shake off. Still, there are some things I like about it, such as the top level arched windows near the roof of the building. I am looking forward to a future attempt at tackling this building.

The next day was our designated "off-island" day. Every other day, we were expected to paint on Alameda Island, but on Thursday we were allowed to paint anywere in the surrounding counties, minus Sonoma. I chose Sausalito for a number of reasons. One, it's a beautiful city. Sure, it's overrun by tourists, but for a reason. Not only is the architecture and the environment itself beautiful, but it has excellent views of San Francisco, Alcatraz, Angel Island, the East Bay, Mt. Tam, and southern Marin. There's a really nice, really popular shoreline walk that you can find these views on. As long as you don't mind onlookers, it's a nice place to set up and paint. You are a few feet from stepping into the San Francisco Bay here.

It is a relatively simple scene to paint so it went by pretty fast. The most challenging aspect of this scene was to show the rich detail of the city at that scale and distance. You have to compress the values as well as paint things fairly loosely in order to imply the detail, making it read better. Having that dark mid-ground shape really helps. I had fun playing up the color of the water too.

From there, it was a short drive over the 101 to Marin Headlands. I had it in my mind that I wanted to paint the Golden Gate Bridge from Marin, so I went down to Kirby Cove to paint these next couple of scenes. It was a bit of a hike down to the beach, but it's a great place to go. The cove has a bit of a natural wind shelter, so even when the rest of the park has fierce wind, you can find a workable conditions down here as long as you don't mind a long trek back up to your car that you have to park at the top the hill.

I've been developing a slight tweak to my method of working in gouache. I start with large simple shapes, like always. I then add a second layer of saturated color, with the anticipation that the subsequent layers will mix with what is already there. This makes it so that the color stays cleaner for longer in the process.

It's always funny when someone compliments what you're working on WAYYY before you feel like they should. Personally I feel that the block-in process is not nearly the prettiest part of the process, and yet it doesn't matter to people who I think just find it novel to come across a plein air painter during their adventures. There were a group of campers (you can also camp at Kirby Cove) who were walking a beach, and I had barely started, and one of them goes "oh that's beauuuutiful" about 10 minutes in. I never know how to respond to that beyond a thank you, but to me that signals an interest in someone who just out there living his best life, or something like that.

I had a feeling that I would want to stay down here and paint until sundown, so I am really glad that I brought an extra panel with me. As the evening went on, the fog started to overtake the hills across the bridge. There was enough light still coming through underneath the fog.

This one took a different approach than the others. I started with thick wet-on-wet washes to set the dark background up for the light shapes going on top of it. I pretty much went in without a drawing, which is not something I would really recommend for novice painters, but I have enough practice with drawing in tone to be able to confidently pull it off.

In order to get the feeling of strong light on the parts where the light hits, I put some saturated color as a base layer where I plan on layering lighter colors over it.

It was a really nice peaceful time sitting at the beach nearly alone with this simple task in front of me. One of the best parts of plein air painting is the state of mind it puts you into. It's a mixture of serenity and intensity. It's you, your painting, and your eyes vs the scene in front of you. You are making calculations and decisions in your mind as the environment keeps sending you information. If you can really tap into the interaction, it can be really fun and fulfilling.

At this point all that was left to do was frame up everything and get it ready to display in the South Shore Mall, which is the usual venue for the outdoor show.

I did do a free gouache demo for attendees of the event. It went well, but painting in front of people and talking through your process at the same time means that the quality of one or the other is going to suffer a bit. I think the most important thing to do is encourage people to ask questions and be engaged with what you're doing. Even if the painting isn't your greatest, at least they can walk away learning something.

If you're interested in seeing who took home the awards, you can check it out here:

https://www.frankbettecenter.org/19th-annual-plein-air-paintout

It was great to see old plein air circuit friends, as well as meeting new ones. One of my highlights was meeting Danny Folkman, a fellow gouache painter whose work I had been following for about a year now. He's the young new hotshot that's in the process of taking the gouache world by storm! He has a fresh approach and interesting points of view in his paintings.

Nathaniel Bice was another cool person I met. He's also a gouache artist who has a unique colorful style and deliberate brushwork. He lives in SF so I'm sure we'll run into each other at more plein air events.

I have all of my paintings from this event available. For the next week, if you buy them from my website, I'll send it framed. And this is no BS false scarcity ploy: I literally need the frames for the next plein air show in Sausalito. So if you're interested in one and don't want to have to get an extra frame for it, make sure to order very soon!