I recently returned from four days of painting and enjoying art with seven of my painting friends. We started the week with a visit to the pink ice plant on the cliffs in Pacific Grove. The sky was cloudy and the wind was mild. The boulders along that stretch of coastline mimic  the shape of the mounds of ice plant. My first painting has a view back to Lover's Point and the path leading there with the ice plant in the foreground.

After lunch and after checking into our retreat home, we traveled down the coast to a special overlook of Garrapata State Park. I wanted to have another chance to paint a plein air piece of this scene, to include the cypress and the far away mountains of the area.

Day two we stayed in the Point Lobos area, as the weather was forecast to be sunny the next day for a long day of painting to southern Big Sur.  At Point Lobos, on the south shore trail, I found a large growth of light violet asters to place in my foreground near the tide pool area. The tide was low and many people wandered around the tide pools looking for ocean creatures.

After lunch on day 2, I painted a small piece of the meadow and ocean near Monastery Beach.

Then I rested my feet before prepping a frittata as my part of our group dinner in our retreat house.

On day three, the sun was shining in the morning and we drove south. I had to stop and take a look at the meadow at Garrapata. The trefoil flowers were just beginning to bloom, and there were a few monkey flowers and white yarrow. Looking North, I painted the receding mountains and the colorful foreground.

Then on to the South after lunch and refreshing my energy at the Big Sur River, we stopped at Hurricane Point to say Hi to friends painting there. The crowd was too much for me to focus on painting there, so we moved on to the scenic overlook above Julia Pfeiffer State Park. I painted on a dark panel, which allows me to emphasize the darks in the trees and cliffs. The emerald water in the bay below was its usual exceptional color. After a few hours of painting, we returned to the River Inn right in Big Sur Village to sit in the Adirondack chairs in the water, and waited for the whole group to gather for our final dinner.

On the last day of our trip, we 8 artists started with a Critique in the morning. Everyone put out their paintings and we walked around and jointly talked about what we liked about them as well as making suggestions of how they could be improved.

Then several of us went to see the Mary DeNeale Morgan exhibition at the Monterey Museum of Art. Several of her large landscape paintings are on exhibit at the Museum now, providing a thrill of inspiration for current day artists like myself. We had lunch and then went on to view paintings at the Trotter Gallery in Pacific Grove.

I'm so looking forward to our retreat next year!