New Painting: Grey Building, Blue Sky

Grey Building, Blue Sky, oil on canvas, 2010, 30 x 40 inches

Living in Southern California, one quickly becomes acclimated to the agreeable climate. We do have weather, and our fair share of air quality issues, but some days are so gorgeous that it literally stuns me when I walk outside. There are often no clouds, the sun is shining, and the sky is blue, so blue that it is hard to describe.

My paintings are inspired by what is around me every day, and this image is no exception. I walk by this building on my way home from work, and I am often struck at how beautiful the grey building looks against the blue, blue sky.

Describing that sky became one of the major problems with this painting. While the composition is admittedly simple, painting this image wasn’t easy – the colors had to be perfect. In the early stages, the colors I mixed were solid, opaque, flat. While this is a common way for me to deal with architecture and solid areas of color, it wasn’t working in this painting. I soon realized that a more complex color palette was necessary to balance the simple composition.

The final colors are built up of thin, transparent layers, using a technique called glazing, which is nearly as old as oil paint itself. Through optical blending, thin transparent layers merge to create a solid color, but a color that has more depth and richness than a flat mixed color. The blue sky was created with several different shades of blue layered over each other until the right brightness and color was reached. The grey building was built up using several colors of grey, and finished with a thin wash of orange, to give the building warmth and to bring it forward from the receding, cool sky.

I am happy with the end result. This painting is my most recent exploration into the "Natural Beauty" of Los Angeles. While more abstract than most of my work, I love the image and hope it has the same freshness that I feel when I see this building on my way home from work.

WeHo@25 Exhibition

I am pleased to announce that I have a painting in "WeHo@25," an art exhibition celebrating creativity in the city of West Hollywood, juried by Howard N. Fox. Please join us for the opening reception:

Thursday, November 4, 6-8pm
8270 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90069

New Painting: Fading To Pink

Fading To Pink, oil on canvas, 2010, 19 x 21 inches

Sometimes I question why we paint what we do. I have often thought that if I truly wanted to be happy as an artist, I would be a color field painter, because that is what it is really about for me – color.

Those that know me well artistically know that drawing isn’t my favorite of things. I don’t get the same satisfaction from drawing that I do from painting. While I recognize the importance of drawing, as it is the most fundamental aspect of art, it has always been more of an arduous process for me. Painting, especially large fields of color, is a more joyful experience.

So why am I not a color field painter? I love color field paintings, and Rothko has been a major influence in my work. But I think that to be a painter is to create problems for yourself that need to be resolved. Before a painting is begun, the canvas is white and perfect. Along with the first brush stroke comes the first problems to be worked out – is the color right? the shapes? the composition?

The silhouettes in this painting were the most difficult problems for me to solve, as it was largely drawing. When I was very young, I taught myself different styles of calligraphy, and that was what I was thinking of when I was painting the trees and vegetation. While I am fluent in Western styles of calligraphy, I was also considering Chinese calligraphy, of which I am not well versed but I appreciate. I am hoping that the similar elegant qualities of line show through with this work.

The inspiration for this painting was a sunset I saw from Mulholland Drive, and this work continues my exploration of the natural beauty in the Los Angeles area. This painting is also reminiscent of works I completed in Costa Rica in 2009, which is when I began to explore silhouettes of vegetation, as a way to make sense of the layers of shapes in the rain forest. While Los Angeles and Costa Rica couldn’t be more different, there is a similar quality of light, and beautiful sunsets abound in both places.

David Hockney at LACMA

Yesterday we saw a brief film at LACMA that chronicled David Hockney’s work in recent years. While Hockney is famously associated with Los Angeles, he is from England, and felt the need to return home. The film was about this journey home, and the work that came out of this period.

The film was a fascinating look at arguably one of the most famous living artists, and one of my personal all-time favorite artists. When he returned to England, and left the warm weather and blue skies of Los Angeles behind, he was inspired by the nuances of weather and landscape that we don’t experience in Los Angeles – foggy, misty mornings, grey skies, and the rolling hills of the countryside. He began a series of landscape paintings, and this turned out to be one of the most prolific times of his career.

It was fascinating to see Hockney go through periods of rejecting technology, and then embracing it. He has, throughout his career, used photography as a medium in various forms, but when he began this series of landscapes, he had rejected photography, stating that he was tired of looking through a hole at the world – that painting captures something that photography cannot.

While I agree with these sentiments, photography soon became important to him once again, as he embarked on the largest painting of his career, to be installed at the Royal Academy in London. This massive landscape painting was composed of fifty individual canvases, the total composition measuring 15 x 40 feet, and the only way he could see this large painting during various stages of completion was through the use of photography and technology on his computer.

After the film, we had the rare experience of being addressed by Mr. Hockney himself, which was a welcome surprise. Hockney received a standing ovation from the crowd, and proceeded to tell us what he was working on since the film, which documented the period of 2004-2007. Interestingly, technology has once again come to the forefront of his art, as he is enjoying drawing with a new medium – his iPad. We had the unique experience of seeing what Hockney was working on today, via his iPad, presented by him and in his own words. He has recently become fascinated by the process of drawing on his iPad, as the drawing can be documented, and then played back, so one can see the process from beginning to end.

It was inspiring to see that Hockney, who is 70+ years old, remains curious. His process is continually evolving, and he is continually making work. It was wonderful to see that he is embracing new technologies, in ways that I have been hesitant to do, as I am an oil painter, and oil painting largely predates current technology by hundreds of years. I learned from him that one can embrace new technology and remain true to self and one’s art. And one can always stay curious.

Downtown Los Angeles

It is almost as if an apocalyptic event happened in downtown, not so long ago, but it’s over now, and people are finally coming out of hiding to greet the sun. The street population is thin, but the infrastructure is there--wide sidewalks, stately buildings, and a steep one-block trolley ride--all signs of a once-bustling downtown. One can imagine the Los Angeles of the ‘20s and ‘30s, like many American cities of the time, as a vibrant place filled with energy.

But Los Angeles is not any American city. In fact, I have never been to another city like Los Angeles. With the arrival of the automobile, and the expansive spider-web of freeways that followed, the region has become a vast metropolis built on the low-density model. Skyscrapers do dot the landscape, but they share it with single-family homes with yards and pools, shopping malls and strip malls. Even the Santa Monica Mountains bisect Los Angeles. This construction of freeways and tract housing left downtown nearly abandoned.

Downtown is being reborn, and it is once again a vital and growing part of the city. Downtown is now one of the most important cultural centers in Los Angeles, home to the MOCA, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and a booming gallery district. In 2004, Galley Row was born.

Art Walk, an event in downtown that happens every month, brings thousands of Los Angelenos to Downtown, so many people that the pedestrian scene almost feels like New York. It is an exciting event, and the artistic energy is almost palpable. As the low-density model becomes less popular, and more people and artists move into the newly converted loft spaces, downtown may once again be the beating heart of this vast landscape.

Photos: Porch Garden

Photos: Artwalk, Downtown LA, 5/10

Photos: A Day at the Beach

We headed to the beach over the weekend. We were headed to Malibu, but the traffic was a bit heavy so we stopped off at Santa Monica.

It was a bit chilly and cloudy, as you can see from the photos, so we headed over to a local watering hole in Venice.The sun finally came out, and life was good. We made some new friends in Venice, and before we knew it, we ended up at a drum circle on Venice Beach, and I thought, this is what a day at the beach is all about.

Photos: Hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains

Yesterday I went took part in a guided hike in the Santa Monica Mountains. The hike was sponsored by the National Park Service, and the goal was to find local wildflowers in bloom. While the guided hike turned out to be more for hardcore botany enthusiasts, it was great to get outdoors, and we learned some things along the way.

The photo above is one of my new favorite local plants. This is a yucca plant, which comes in many different forms. It is closely related to the agave and the lily, and actually is not a part of the cactus family. These plants grow long flower stalks, and after they bloom, the original plant dies.
These photos are from the Mishe Mokwa Trail, which is close to Mailbu. The drive alone was beautiful, as we drove all the way through Malibu along the ocean, and then turned inland to the mountains. It was pretty amazing that we were only an hour outside of Los Angeles.
The vistas were incredible. We were about 2,000 feet above sea level.

Looking forward to going back soon!

New Painting: Runyon Canyon Sentinel

Runyon Canyon Sentinel, oil on canvas, 2009, 22 x 22 inches

I first visited Runyon Canyon shortly after moving to LA. It is an incredible resource, an easy hiking trail centrally located in Hollywood. Within a few minutes of hiking on the trails, you can see amazing views of the downtown skyline, and the ocean to the west. On clear days you can see all the way to Long Beach. It is really breathtaking, and intensely beautiful.

It was in Runyon Canyon that I first got a sense of what the natural environment is like in this area. It is dry, with little rain. We are entering the rainy season now, and it is raining as I write this—-a welcomed interruption here. The lush plants in Los Angeles are watered, and palm trees, found in the wild only near abundant water sources, are no exception.

When I was hiking in Runyon Canyon, I saw this palm tree, and it immediately struck me; I knew I had to paint it. My paintings are about my observations, and my associated experiences and thoughts. This palm tree has layers and layers of dead leaves, suggesting that it has been here, watching over the entrance of Runyon Canyon, for a long time. It is a sentinel, testifying to the history of Los Angeles, and to our future. Like innumerable others, this palm tree has become deeply rooted in the new, natural environment.

Behind the palm tree, a narrow cloud delineates the course of the jet that preceded it. Both elements contribute to this depiction of natural beauty.

New Painting: Sunset from Mulholland Drive

Sunset from Mulholland Drive, oil on canvas, 2009, 19 x 14 inches

Mulholland Drive is a road in Los Angeles that loosely follows the ridgeline of the Hollywood Hills and the Santa Monica Mountains. Famous for having some of the most exclusive homes in the world, Mulholland Drive is also surprisingly accessible. The road was created as a scenic byway, and there are scenic view points perched along the road. The east stretch of Mulholland Drive reveals sweeping views of downtown LA, while the western stretch displays vistas of the San Fernando Valley.

My friend Lisa was in town from Boston the night of this sunset, and we witnessed the sun go down over the Valley. There is a quality of light in LA--Magic Hour--that is stunning and unique to the area. It never ceases to bring a smile to my face.

New painting: "West Hollywood"

West Hollywood, oil on canvas, 2009, 30 x 24 inches

This painting, the first in the Natural Beauty series, has been completed for a few weeks, and I finally had the chance to photograph it. This view is from Santa Monica Blvd, near our apartment. To see this painting in its earlier stages, click here and here.

Afternoon Walk

Today I decided to put my worries away for awhile and go for a walk down Santa Monica Blvd. The weather was great, and after painting in the morning, I needed to get out of the house. I moved to Los Angeles from Boston in June, and this is my first fall here. It is still somewhat shocking to be in a place where the seasons don't really change. But I'm not complaining - it was a gorgeous day.
Gotta love it!
Heading west on Santa Monica Blvd. out of West Hollywood, you will eventually reach Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills is filled with orderly streets, many of them lined with palms. I have to admit, even though the palm trees are not native to the Los Angeles basin, they are attractive. They suggest a tropical place, and while this area used to be more of a desert, it has become an oasis of sorts, albeit a contrived and bit unnatural one. This idea of the natural vs. the unnatural is the basis of my current paintings, Natural Beauty.
Beverly Hills is a bit ostentatious. Other wealthy areas in Los Angeles would not have a large sign advertising their neighborhood, but in Beverly Hills, anything goes. There were many tourists taking photos of this sign, as there always is, and today, I was one of them. It was kind of fun.
I ended up on Rodeo Drive. I had never been there before, and while I will likely never shop there, it seemed like a good final destination. My favorite part of the area was this naked woman statue that watches over Rodeo Drive without eyes. This small street does have a bit of a village feel, and it was fun to walk around the area.

By the time I made it back to my apartment in West Hollywood, I felt like I had walked a hundred miles, and I was tired. But I enjoyed my walk in the sun.

Five Canvases

Yesterday I built five canvases. I went to the art store in the morning and purchased the materials, and what was once a pile of stretcher bars and fabric is now five painting supports. New canvases are so exciting because they are filled with so much potential.

Before you can apply oil paint to a canvas, you must cover the canvas with three layers of gesso. The solvents used in oil painting, as well as the oil itself, will eventually leach through the canvas and damage it without the protective gesso layer. “Gesso” is the Italian word for “chalk”, and traditionally, gesso was a mixture of chalk and rabbit-skin glue. This mixture is fairly brittle, and is suitable for wood or masonite. Modern gesso has an acrylic polymer base. This is much more flexible, and can be used on canvas.

So here are five canvases, drying on my porch, fifteen coats of gesso later.

My Obituary

I am taking a professional development class for artists here in Los Angeles, and our assignment for this week was to write our own obituary.  The goal of this exercise was to think about what we want to accomplish in our lives – what are our goals, and what do we want to be remembered for.  This was more difficult that I had anticipated – it wasn’t easy to think about what I want to accomplish, but ultimately, the exercise was rewarding.  It was effective in helping me flesh out what I really want to do with my art career, something artists often don’t think about.  If you had to write your own obituary, what would it say?  The text of my obituary is below:

BRADLEY HANKEY 1979 – 2067

Visual artist Bradley Hankey died in his Los Angeles home on April 21 at age 88. Hankey was born in Oregon, and moved to Boston to attend Massachusetts College of Art, where he graduated with a BFA in 2007. Hankey moved to Los Angeles in 2009, and graduated from UCLA with a MFA in 2013.

Hankey’s early work was influenced by Surrealism and artists such as Hopper, Hockney, Itten, and De Chirico. Places were also critical to his work, and his paintings were often inspired by his surroundings and travels. The “Natural Beauty” series of paintings, begun shortly after moving to Los Angeles, comments on the natural and the artificial environments of the area. These are among his best known works.

After graduate school, Hankey briefly taught at several area schools in Los Angeles, and was a frequent guest speaker at art schools around the country. His lectures often revolved around the importance of color theory and critical thinking in painting, as well as keeping traditional painting techniques alive. Hankey’s books are widely read. While his works often bordered on the abstract, he considered himself an observational painter, and championed this style of painting throughout his career.

Hankey’s works are shown in galleries in Los Angeles, New York, and Hanoi. His paintings have been collected globally, and he has shown in Museums in the United States, Vietnam, Costa Rica, and Tanzania. A retrospective of more than 100 paintings was mounted in 2035 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., as well as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Painting in West Hollywood: Day 4

Today was a great painting day in West Hollywood. After a couple of days of cooler temperatures, the heat was back today. I love the heat, but I have made a mental note to choose a shadier location for the next painting.

The painting is filling in with color, and almost all of the original white space is gone. One of the joys of my job is discovering the intense color in the every-day world around us, and this location is no exception. In order to bring color harmony to this painting, I mixed a large amount of a purple-gray color. I then mixed almost all of my others colors with purple-gray, especially the background colors in the hillside. Some of the foreground colors are mixed full-strength, without purple-gray, to bring those colors forward create a sense of atmospheric perspective.

I am excited about this painting, and glad that it is coming to fruition. I had been looking at this scene nearly everyday; when I walk home from the gym, I wait here for the “walk” sign to cross the street, and day after day, I could see this painting. It became an obvious choice for my first plein-air painting in LA.

A few people stopped to chat today. One woman commented, “That’s great, I love that you are doing this.” Another guy: “This seems like a civilized way to spend the afternoon.” I enjoy interacting with the public, and this is one of the major reasons I have taken to the street with my work. I am looking forward to getting back out there tomorrow.

New word: Pyrocumulus

As the now-infamous Station Fire continues to burn outside Los Angeles, a new word has entered the local vocabulary: pyrocumulus. This word defines the awesome cloud formations resulting from the intense heat and smoke of large fires. The mushroom cloud from the Station Fire has been looming over Los Angeles for more than two weeks now, and often it is the only cloud in the sky. It is awesome and beautiful, a fact that many Los Angelenos are torn about. It is hard to admit that something resulting from intense destruction could be beautiful, but we all took pictures in awe of the eerie pyrocumulus clouds, that rise from the ground instead of from above.

The fires and the resulting pyrocumulus clouds triggers thoughts about the common paradise/apocalypse dichotomy associated with Los Angeles. As a new resident, I find this dichotomy fascinating. Gregory Rodriguez wrote a compelling piece exploring this idea in the LA Times recently. An excerpt from the article:

“Here's what the pyrocumulus cloud tells me: We should stop thinking of Los Angeles in such hopelessly schizophrenic, contradictory, "pitched back and forth" terms. That's because the theological notions of paradise and apocalypse are not so much opposed as deeply intertwined....

Far from being the victory of hell in L.A. over heaven in L.A., they reminded me that in a very real way, we can't have one without the other. The cloud is just what it looked like: two sides of the same coin; the one defines the other. Heaven, hell. Ugly, beautiful. Apocalypse, paradise. Los Angeles.”

Susan Orlean also recently wrote about the Los Angeles heaven/hell dichotomy for The New Yorker. In her article, she writes, “this week, hell won out.” She wrote her article at a time when multiple fires were burning out of control. At the time of this writing, the only active fire is the Station Fire, and its 160,000 burning acres are 62% contained.

I have only been in Los Angeles a short time, and already, my thoughts about my personal environment are changing. The foreign is becoming domestic; the strange is becoming normal; the unnatural is becoming natural; the ugly is becoming beautiful. Los Angeles.

Painting on location in West Hollywood

I painted outside today for the first time in Los Angeles. I prefer to work from life, rather than from photographs or other source material. I have always painted outdoors while on residency, but I haven't painted often in public places in the States. It was so much fun, and many people stopped to talk while I was working. One tourist even took photos of me drawing, which I thought was funny. I had thought that it would be too hot to paint outside in LA during the summer, but we have been having a relatively mild summer. The normally bright blue sky was a little hazy today, because of the fires that are raging outside the city.

This image shows my easel set up on Santa Monica Blvd. near my apartment. The preparatory drawing I'm working on begins with the left margin of the photo, and ends before the orange and green sign. The large blank space on the right of the canvas is the cream-colored building across the street. Interestingly, the establishment with the orange and green sign is Barney's Beanery, a restaurant and bar, and a favorite of old Hollywood with celebrity patrons such as Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Errol Flynn.

This painting is part of my "Natural Beauty" series about Los Angeles, which is in full swing. I love it here, and I am excited to continue work on this series.

The Getty Center, Los Angeles

Upon arrival to the Getty's parking stucture, you board a tram that travels up a steep hillside to reach the the Getty Center atop the summit of a ridge. According to Getty literature, this tram ride is designed to give visitors the feeling of “being elevated out of their day-to-day experience.” When you exit the tram, you really feel like you have been transported beyond the mundane.

The grounds and gardens compete in beauty with the collections. To be fair, I only had time really to view a small number of works in the museums, because there was much to see outdoors as well. All white marble and natural stone, rising above the surrounding hillsides, the complex gives you the sensation of floating. The buildings have a modern aesthetic, but they also feel very old at the same time, almost ancient, as if the structures could also be centuries-old ruins.

It was a typically sunny day in Los Angeles, and very hot. The bright blue skies contrasted with the pale stone of the complex. On clear days the views are astounding, and stretch all the way to the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island, with downtown in the other direction.
We are in the middle of fire season, and right now the hills in the Angeles National Forest, from Acton to Altadena, are on fire. The mushroom cloud of smoke rises above Los Angeles.
We took a one-hour guided tour inside the museum, and we looked carefully at four different works, within the theme of classical art. The pieces we viewed included Joseph Nollekens' "Three Goddesses", and our tour guide's knowledge of classical history and the background of the works was both engaging and enlightening. She brought the narrative and the sculptures framed by it to life.

The Getty remains free for visitors, but there is a $15 fee per carload. The grounds house four main pavilions that contain the museum's collections, several gardens and sculpture gardens, as well as the Getty Research Institute and the Conservation Institute/Foundation. There is so much to see and do while there; multiple visits are required. I am looking forward to going back.