Lunch at La Valencia

Original Sold

June 2009 I showed my work at the La Jolla Festival of the Arts for the first time. My first long roadtrip, I loaded Joe’s “Mighty Toyota” with the art and the booth equipment and headed south. It was a challenging weekend it RAINED!

The festival organizers with the Torrey Pines Kiwanis seemed to like my work, because 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.

My inspiration was 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 and Chris Palmquist, a wonderful woman who lived in La Jolla at the time. She and I met at my first year at the Sausalito Art Festival. It was a perfect day; we had lobster salad and the staff graciously saw to it that all my crazy photo shoot 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. I got most of it done while Joe and I were on Kauai. I finished it the day before the earthquake an 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 to get 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!

The original painting was auctioned off as a benefit for the festival’s charity benefactor, so no prints were made – only posters. 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 – 22″x30″ – Watercolor on paper