Mystic Hills of Vieques, PR
Art and story by Michael Hooper
When you find yourself doing the same, dull thing day after day, you probably need to shake things up. Art can make a routine encounter interesting. I often find myself doing the same bicycle ride to the Sunken Gardens at Gage Park. Next time, I arrived with art supplies and painted the Sunken Gardens.
I love painting gardens. I painted a vase of flowers at the Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, where I met a bohemian from San Francisco while I was painting en plein air. Years later, we still text each other once a week.
Sitting on a hillside, I was drawing and painting the mystic hills above Esperanza, Vieques, PR. The view captured my soul, beauty never felt so good.
In the woods of northern Minnesota, I was sitting on a road, drawing and painting the light against the forest.
Water Cress Lane, Ponto Lake, MN
When I seriously began studying oil painting in 2019, I studied the nine levels of value from light to dark. I progressed slowly. I embraced a thought from David Bowie, "If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area." He advised artists to "always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. When you don't feel your feet touching the bottom, that is exactly where you can produce something exciting." I feel there is a lot of truth in Bowie's words. I challenge myself to get better with each painting.
In 2024 I took an oil painting class with Barbara Waterman-Peters. I had heard she was teaching the class at Washburn University and I got in just before it started. I was ready to take my painting to the next level and enjoyed learning how the finest painters in history used oil to paint their masterpieces.
Barbara taught me how to reduce my palette to the essentials, including a dark yellow, a bright yellow, a dark red, a bright red and a dark blue and a light blue, along with titanium white, which we should use only sparingly. We painted in this grayscale, the underpainting, then add color, It was so educational and useful to train the eye to look for values and develop representational paintings of real objects, bowls, coffee cups and a cow's skull.
I learned to sit close to the subject and draw without the aide of photographs, trusting my eyes to see the composition. I love real life, I want to bring it alive with the same exhilaration that I feel in front of this subject, I immerse myself into this special moment: I sit next to the Seine in Paris and paint the river passing by. It is such a thrill, I cried, painting the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris.
I spend a lot of time mixing paint and preparing the brush for a specific brush stroke, making sure I get the right value and applying that stroke with deliberate care and accuracy, and then leaving it alone and moving onto the next brush stroke.
Under Barbara Waterman-Peters, I studied John Singer Sargent and fell in love with his work and style and feel he is worthy of emulating.
I like his portrait work and his landscapes, Sargent could paint anything, and was brilliant water color painter in addition to being a master portrait painter with oil paint.
More than anything I have loved the magnificent extravagance in painting at all these beautiful places, including the Flint Hills of Kansas. I make some connection to nature as I set up easel, chair and painting supplies and work for two hours looking at a field of grass with hills in the background while a hummingbird checks me out.
I felt that connection to nature recently as I painted on a hill near my home in Vieques, PR. Horses on the trail captured my attention. I painted them.
It's lush. It feels like a great memory worth saving in the form of a piece of art.
Horses on the Trail
A view of Esperanza, Vieques, PR
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