Light & Nature

 About two years ago I bought a Nikon D3400 camera and I’ve been enjoying learning how to use it. I really enjoy photography and find that since I started taking photos I observe the world around me a little differently. 

Two subjects I love to capture in photography are nature and light. Here are some of my photos capturing light interacting with nature (click any image for a larger view):

I call this one Stained Glass

This is Mushroom #1

This is Mushroom #5

Dandilions #2

Long Shadows #1 (Irondequoit Bay)

Morning Glory 

To see more of my photography just visit my photography and fine art site where I also sell prints of my photography and select fine art pieces. Just click this link and that site will open in a separate browser window:

martinjamison.zenfolio.com

My First Photography Post

One of the many plants I have in my yard is Milkweed. It grows wild in my garden but I don’t mind that as it has a wonderful scent and also happens to be a favorite of Monarch Butterflies. 

The Monarch Butterfly lays her very tiny eggs on the underside of the leaves and when the caterpillar hatches out (after about 3 to 8 days) it feeds on the leaves. 

It does not take very long for the baby caterpillar to grow to full size (about 2 weeks) after which it forms a chrysalis. Anywhere from 8 to 15 days later the Monarch Butterfly emerges from the chrysalis and continues the cycle.

This summer I found a Monarch Butterfly egg on a Milkweed leaf and I documented its development from egg to mature butterfly in a series of photographs I call Monarch:

A tiny Monarch Butterfly egg.

The baby caterpillar.

The full-grown caterpillar.

The chrysalis.

The mature Monarch Butterfly.

All photos are © Martin Jamison 2020

Along the Yellow Brick Road IV

Click any image for a larger view.

This is The Cowardly Lion, the final character portrait in my series of Oz paintings. 

Bert Lahr gave us an indelible portrayal of the Cowardly Lion in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz. His vocalization alone is likely imprinted in the minds of everyone who has seen the film. 

Pencil drawing progress for the Cowardly Lion portrait.

As with the earlier three portraits, I first did a pencil drawing of the face on an 8"x10" canvas. I did rough measurements from the reference photo using my pencil and thumb (you know, the way we do when drawing from a live figure) to make sure that I drew the facial features in proper proportion to each other and in proper position on the face. I also worked to make the three adult character’s faces roughly the same size (Dorothy’s features are smaller, she being younger). I did tilt the lion’s face a little more than it is in the reference photo and I used a second reference photo with a slightly different pose for some features and for color reference. I finished the painting with water soluble oils.

Having completed the portraits of all four characters, I went back to the first portrait in this series to make a few adjustments. I wanted to add some more detail to Dorothy’s hair, adjust the color in her skin tone, and add a blue sky to match the other three paintings.

The updated painting of Dorothy.

All four competed portraits.

This was a fun series to paint. Each of the 4 characters brings a smile to my face. I caught myself actually chuckling at times as I was painting them. I hope they help to brighten your day a little as well.

Along the Yellow Brick Road III

Click the image for a larger view.

Here is my third character portrait from the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz.

Jack Haley did such a wonderful job with the role of the Tin Woodman (or Tin Man as I like to call him). Haley, like Ray Bolger who played Scarecrow, started out on the vaudville circuit. He moved into comedy shorts and then to musical feature films. Haley took over the role of the Tin Man from Buddy Ebsen, who had to back out of the part due to his allergic reaction to the silver makeup. 

I was anticipating my own difficulties with Tin Man’s silver color and metallic texture but I actually had quite a lot of fun painting this character. As with the portraits of Dorothy and Scarecrow, I painted Tin Man on an 8"x10" canvas using water soluble oil paints. 

My sketch of Tin Man drawn directly 

to canvas just prior to painting.

With regard to the paints, I did find a drawback to the water-soluble oils while working on this portrait. As soon as I had finished the painting, I wanted to photograph it. I took it outside to a spot where I like the natural lighting, set up all my photographic equipment and the portrait and began to take a couple of photos. Suddenly, it started raining...hard. The character Tin Man doesn’t do so well in the rain and neither do wet water-soluble oils; the paints started running and separating. The painting was literally ruined. I kept my cool, carefully soaked up the water and melting paint with a paper towel and painted it again using what was left of the original as the starting point. In a few hours the painting was restored. That was a hard lesson learned. It should be noted that these paints were still wet when the painting was exposed to the rain. If I had given the paint a chance to dry sufficiently (even by a few days) the rain would not have been an issue. Water-soluble paints become permanent when dry just like regular oil paints.

I’m sure you don’t need a clue to guess the character I plan to paint as the last subject of this series but let’s just say he can probably cough up quite a furball. 

Along the Yellow Brick Road II

Click the image for a larger view.

Here is my second character portrait from the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz. 

Ray Bolger played the part of Scarecrow so exceptionally. His movements made you believe he was made of nothing more than clothes stuffed with straw. His facial expressions are priceless. This expression is one of my favorites; he looks so bright eyed, full of optimism and excitement and ready for adventure. Scarecrow is probably my favorite of Dorothy’s three companions.

Like my Dorothy portrait, I drew Scarecrow with pencil – freehand – directly onto the 8"x10" canvas. I then finished the painting in water soluble oils. One nice thing about painting Scarecrow on canvas is that I could give his face that canvas-like texture just by using a dry-brush technique in select areas.

The next character I’d like to paint has a big heart.

Along the Yellow Brick Road

Click this image for a larger view.

I’ve begun a series of paintings featuring the lead characters from the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. The first character up is Dorothy, played by actress Judy Garland. 

I drew a pencil sketch of Dorothy directly onto the 8"x10" canvas. I finished the painting using water soluble oils. As I began painting over my line drawing, I noticed some very subtle adjustments that I needed to make. It’s surprising how the slightest detail can so dramatically alter a face (especially the face of a young woman) and can mean the difference between capturing a likeness or missing the mark. 

This is a personal project which grew out of my purchase of four, 8"x10" canvases from Hobby Lobby. They were on sale and (though I typically like to work at larger sizes) I bought them because I’m a sucker for sales. 

Then I thought, “OK now what in the world am I going to do with these?” A series seemed like a nice idea and as I considered a variety of subjects, the Wizard of Oz seemed like the most fun. 

The 1939 production is such a wonderful film with the lead characters brought to life so masterfully by such talented actors as Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr — not to mention all of the other fine actors and actresses who helped make this a family favorite that has stood the test of time. I do not believe even modern film producers could have made this movie any better.

I plan, God willing, to paint all four of the lead characters. I am currently working on painting number two. 

“Which character,” you ask? That’s going to be my surprise. But here’s a hint — he’s a fun guy to have hanging around.

ESOP the Ant

Not long ago my current employer asked me to create a character to represent their ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). Playing off of the acronym ESOP, I put together several fun character sketches based on Aesop’s Fables. Of those, the character which I was asked to develop further was Esop the Ant.

Here is my original marker sketch of Esop.
Click any image for a larger view.

I work in a very demanding environment. It is not uncommon for me to be working simultaneously on several complex and time-consuming projects all with tight deadlines, only to have someone come up to me and say, “We need such-and-such and we need it in an hour.” I know that I will certainly be asked to show Esop in different poses and from different angles and (9 times out of 10) my turnaround time will need to be immediate. In those situations, the well constructed vector file is my friend. Vector files are flexible, allow for easier revisions than other formats and are scalable to any size. 

If you have ever played the game Cooties, by Hasbro, then you can understand the method by which I wanted to build Esop. I created multiple versions of his head, showing it from different angles and with different facial expressions. I did the same for his body and limbs. Again, click any image below to see a larger version.

Early on I provided several color variations 

of Esop. Dark blue was the chosen color.

With a complete set of Esop parts, I – or any of my colleagues, regardless of their illustration abilities – can quickly and easily assemble Esop into any number of poses, shown from several angles, with different facial expressions. 

Granted, since we use Esop in communications relating to our employee stock ownership plan, we hope to never have to show Incredulous Esop, or Worried Esop and certainly not Angry Esop (I didn’t even bother to make Sad Esop). Still, it is nice to have those options available and to be able to show Esop with a wide range of emotions.

May Esop’s face always have a smile!

A Man Called Marlowe

Click on any image to see a larger view.

My latest personal project is this painting of Raymond Chandler’s famous detective, Philip Marlowe. 

I enjoy Chandler’s writing and I have for some time wanted to illustrate a scene from one of his stories or a representation of Marlowe the character. The current pandemic and resulting quarantine has provided me with the time to do it. I painted this with water soluble oils on a gessoed masonite panel.

Some Background

Raymond Chandler had been the Vice President of the Dabney Oil Syndicate. The Great Depression, along with his fondness for alcohol and his female employees, changed all of that. By 1932 he was unemployed. That’s when Chandler decided to take up writing.

Chandler started writing short stories for what were commonly called “pulp magazines.” His first printed story was Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, written in 1933 for the magazine Black Mask. Chandler’s stories were hard-boiled mysteries featuring an assortment of detectives and other tough-guy protagonists fighting the good fight against killers, drug dealers, gamblers the mob and more. In 1939, at the age of 51, he wrote his first novel, The Big Sleep, in which he introduced his straight-talking, quick-witted, private investigator Philip Marlowe.

My finished sketch for the painting

In retrospect, one can see Marlowe developing throughout Chandler’s earlier stories. There are little bits and pieces of him in the detectives Dalmas (Red Wind), Delaguerra (Spanish Blood), Carmady (Gold Fish) and Grayce (The King in Yellow). 

Marlowe, however, is Chandler’s masterpiece. He is a man of modest means and high ethical standards. He takes his job and the privacy of his clients very seriously, albeit with a wry sense of humor. He is tenacious when pursuing a case and has been known to refuse payment when he fails to meet his client’s objectives or his own high standards. Smart and with a strong sense of character, he still manages to occasionally misjudge people and situations and pays a heavy price for doing so. He likes women but has firm boundaries. He drinks but not to the point of being an alcoholic. He smokes cigarettes as was common at the time. He speaks the language that the common man of his time spoke, our modern sensitivities not withstanding. 

In The Big Sleep, Chandler subtly uses the imagery of the medieval Knight as a hint to Marlowe’s character. We can also sleuth through Chandler’s other novels to learn much about Marlowe’s character, even watching it weather under the strain of his job, his friendships and his more intimate relationships. 

Chandler’s own problem with alcohol even takes a toll on Marlowe. In The Long Goodbye, Chandler appears to have written himself into two characters in the story, both of whom are alcoholics befriended by Marlowe. It is revealing to see Marlowe pull no punches as he confronts these men, and by proxy Chandler himself, berating them for their self-absorption and destructive lifestyles.

Marlowe is a reflective individual and I think 
this quality comes through in my painting.

When it comes to Marlowe's physical appearance and his personal history, Chandler (who is known for his very descriptive writing) brilliantly leaves us with a lot of mysterious blanks to fill in on our own. We know Marlowe was born and raised in Santa Rosa California but by the time we meet him he has no family. With regard to his age, in the Big Sleep he is in his early 30s but in the other novels he is in his early 40s. We know he used to be a detective for the District Attorney of Los Angeles but he was fired for “talking back.” He has brown hair and brown eyes, is about 6 feet tall, 190 pounds. That’s pretty much all we know about him. So when I decided try to illustrate Marlowe, I turned to what is probably the most descriptive, Marlowe-focused paragraph in all of Chandler’s novels – the paragraph that gives us our very first glimpse of the man – the very first paragraph of The Big Sleep.

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Here we see Marlowe dressing his best for a very important interview and a chance to land a wealthy client. He’s feeling confident. It looks like a pretty straight forward job. A millionaire’s daughter is being blackmailed and Marlowe needs to lean into the blackmailer and flex enough muscle to make him stop. Soon however, Marlowe will realize this case is anything but simple, as he finds himself knee-deep in more danger, filth and evil than he could have imagined. There are monsters in this story. They don’t spit fire but their guns do. The knight setting out to rescue the wealthy man’s daughter is about to have his armor seriously tested. By the end of this story, he is going to need more than a can of Brasso to restore whatever shine it once had. In The Big Sleep as well as the other novels, Marlowe’s armor will receive many dents and scratches – mostly around the helmet and over the heart.

To represent the mystery and danger Marlowe faces in this case, I painted the background as a fog split by a blood red swath. Within the red space I added a couple of details suggestive of the time period (represented by the 1939 Packard) and the location of Los Angeles, California (represented by the palm trees).

Also suggestive of the impending danger is the wind rustling Marlowe’s tie and suit jacket, revealing a glimpse of his holstered Luger automatic.

 

I could not resist placing this illustration into a mock book cover. I set the type to resemble the pulp magazine mastheads and the book covers of the 1930s and 40s.

In his essay, The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler uses words to paint us a portrait of Philip Marlowe that is better than any illustrator could ever make with paint and brush:

“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.”

This description of Chandler’s detective hero fits Marlowe perfectly, at least in his earlier novels. In my opinion, Chandler strays from this ideal in his later novels, enough so as to damage Marlowe’s character. Maybe this was due to Chandler’s drinking or to other problems in his personal life. For this reason, I see the first five novels as Chandler’s best, with The Big Sleep as his magnum opus. 

All Illustrations © 2020, by Martin Jamison 

Moonlight

Click any image for a larger view

I’ve just finished my latest painting and this is another nocturne. There is something about nocturnes, the inherent mystery, the moodiness, the almost otherworldly eeriness of a scene illuminated by moonlight. Trying to capture this in a painting is challenging.

I used water soluble oils on canvas. I took my direction for this painting from the works of the famous painter of the American West (and master of the nocturne) Mr. Frank Tenney Johnson, as seen below: 

In my opinion Mr. Johnson has no equal when it comes to painting either western scenes or nocturnes.  He had an amazing way of painting only the detail that was necessary, with some parts of his paintings left essentially unfinished, or with details rendered by nothing more than a brief scrub of color. 

Here is Johnson’s painting The Pony Express.

Notice his attention to detail on this part of his painting...

...while elsewhere just a couple of brushes of color become a rock formation...

...or a mountain .

What captivates me most about Johnson's paintings is the way he renders the moonlit sky. 

I couldn’t find much in the way of research regarding Mr. Johnson’s technique except that he would prime his canvas with a slightly reddish tone. In researching other artist’s approach to nocturnes, the recommendation I found helpful was with regard to the underpainting. 

Rather than using the complimentary color to the intended overpainting (orange to blue, for example), the recommendation was to think in terms of warm vs. cool; make the underpainting warm so that the cooler color of the finished night sky seems more illuminated. My approach to this was to use dioxine purple at the outer edges blending gradually warmer toward the center for the underpainting — for the sky only. For everything else I used burnt umber mixed with a little ultramarine blue. 

I tried to keep my detailed work on the horseman and his train with a  minimalistic approach on the nonessential details but I found this to be more difficult than expected as I kept wanting to add details even in non-essential areas. Knowing which areas to keep vague and less detailed takes practice to be sure.

Here are some other nocturne. Notice the different approaches to rendering realistic subjects in moonlight. 

Mead Scheaffer

Charles Rollo Peters

Artist Unknown

In researching how we see the world around us under the light of the moon, I’ve learned that moonlight tends to steal color from that which it illuminates. Objects such as flowers which are vibrant with color when lit by direct sunlight become more gray. Landscapes which we would see as green in daylight become gray as well.

Further, if we stare at them long enough (without any artificial light to spoil the effect) that gray landscape will become blue. This explains why so many artists and even film makers resort to using blues or blue greens when depicting moonlit scenes. But why do we perceive as blue that which we are actually seeing as gray? We know the moon is not blue. In fact, we know it is just reflecting, albeit with less intensity, the same sunlight that illuminates everything so brilliantly during the day. 

To make things more interesting, try reading a book under moonlight. The page will look bright, but if you stare at the words they will fade away! 

The reason for all of this has to do with how our eyes work. Our eyes have two different kinds of cells for detecting light: cones and rods. The cones are stimulated in bright light and are very good at seeing color and details. In dim light cones become less active and the rods more active. The rods, however, are colorblind. Also, the central part of our retina, which we use for reading, is full of cones and has no rods. So at night, when those cones become inactive, we experience a blind spot in that very area of the retina which we use for reading.

This still leaves us with the question of why do we perceive moonlit objects as having a bluish/greenish color? Science simply does not supply a firm answer. I suspect that our brains just take some artistic license by “seeing” blue in moonlight as it attempts to interpret a gray world we normally see as very colorful. A more convincing scientific theory is that rods are not completely colorblind but are slightly sensitive to light in the blue/green end of the spectrum.

For a much more complete explanation of the scientific perspective, please see this article by NASA (its where I found all of my information on how the eye perceives color and I basically lifted the information from there):
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/28sep_strangemoonlight

Here is another wonderful article about our perception of color in moonlight:
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/01/is-moonlight-blue.html

For the present, the Moon continues to keeps it’s secrets!