More Palm Springs Artwork

Burning Man Airplane,
Bombay Beach, CA

While in Palm Springs, we drove an hour away to Bombay Beach, located on one end of the polluted Salton Sea. It's a shame that the largest body of water in California is full of poisonous algae. People live there now to be off the grid. The ghost town contains broken down trailers and homes where you can find artwork such as this sculpture making use of a recycled airplane fuselage.

Television Art Display, Bombay Beach, CA

One abandoned building was converted into an art gallery of sorts. Recycled TVs were individually painted or stacked and painted to create new objets d'art.

Salvation Mountain

We had to visit Salvation Mountain to witness first-hand this large painted mound. We couldn't decide if it was a religious mecca or just another hangout for people who wanted to camp in the barren wasteland surrounding the 'typhoid' (Salton) sea.

Indian Totem Pole,
Victoria Park, by Henry Hunt

Horse Sculpture (Unknown)

In the neighborhood where we're staying, we took the dogs for a 4-mile walk and spotted some more local art. Unfortunately, the Palm Springs Art Museum remained closed during our trip.

Photo of Bryce & Jeju

Watercolor Version of Bryce & Jeju

My next watercolor is of our two dogs looking out the window at me from a bedroom window. The dogs are both in shadow with halos surrounding their bodies as they peer out between our house and the wall overlooking the Palm Springs neighborhood.

Here are two more watercolor paintings -- one of the floral arrangement of lilies, orchids, and hydrangeas that my daughter received for her birthday and the other of bougainvillea vines outside a bedroom window.

Wanted to paint one more floral painting, so I tried the yellow bush outside our garage where we're staying. I took pictures separately of the two lanterns and incorporated larger versions for the composition. My daughter suggested sponging on some texture for the mostly unpainted white areas. For the yellow flowers, I tapped my loaded brush then added extra brushstrokes for the flower clusters. I may decide to go back over the lines on the lanterns and the cinderblock walls with ink pens.

I have to update this post to include my final artwork from my month away from home. I wanted to finish with pastels, having experimented with colored pencil drawing, then spending the rest of my time doing watercolors. I brought with me another photo from last year's trip to a dog park in Redding, CA. The challenge was the gravel surface where the three dogs were wrestling. A second challenge was painting a white dog (Bryce) and the black face of a pug dog. The addition of cyan accomplished both the shadows on the white fur and the highlights of the surrounding rocks. After I apply the fixative spray, I will attempt adding some warm golden highlights to the pug's muzzle.

I love how the rocks in the foreground turned out. For the ones in the background I used a lighter gray and more blending. I like to use a variety of strokes and textures when I paint with pastels. I hope it is reminiscent of the Impressionist or Post-Impressionist works from the time of Pissarro, Seurat, and Van Gogh.

All of the works I've endeavored during this quarantined vacation, including my show-and-tell Zoom meeting with fellow artists, has taught me valuable lessons that I hope to share with my students once my volunteering resumes. Stay tuned for more painting as I work to complete my mountain landscape in oils when I return home.