Description
June 2009 I showed my work at the La Jolla Festival of the Arts for the first time. The longest roadtrip to date, I loaded Joe’s “Mighty Toyota” with the art and the booth equipment and headed south. Though it was a challenging weekend (it RAINED!), the festival organizers with the Torrey Pines Kiwanis seemed to like my work, as a couple months later they asked me to be one of three artists to present ideas for the next year’s poster art. Holy cow! Was I excited! This meant another trip down to La Jolla to hunt for painting subject ideas.
This was my first inspiration: to have lunch on the balcony of the La Valencia Hotel, overlooking the ocean. I had to come up with something that said “La Jolla” within the realm of what I paint, which is intimacy in some form. I flew down for the day and had lunch with Ronn Rohe, the festival chairman Chris Palmquist, a wonderful woman I’ve met through my showing my art. It was a perfect day; we had lobster salad and the staff graciously saw to it that all my crazy requests were attended to.
Don Ludwig, the 2010 Chairman and his committee helped me improve upon the composition, and after a few rounds of changes (including replacing the actual wine bottle label with my brother Matt’s pinot noir label) I got painting. Most of it was done while Joe and I were on Kauai in February. I finished it the day before the earthquake in Chile spawned a tsunami that was headed for the Hawaiian Islands. What a trip!
This painting put me through quite a bit – starting with flying down there for the day for the photo, to all the Photoshop revisions, I drew it three times and painted it nearly twice. (I started over after having done two thirds of it!) My hope is that the poster makes people think of being on vacation, taking the time to appreciate the abundant goodness that life can offer.
February 2010
