"Reverence", 24x18-by Maryanne Jacobsen

SOLD"Reverence", 24x18by Maryanne Jacobsen
Note: click on the image to see the impasto better!

I have not done a Big Sur painting in a long time, so for the past couple days I worked on this one. Those ugly rocks in the foreground were kind of a drag but they were in my photo so I had to put them in. This is Big Sur in the afternoon, looking north towards the Bixby bridge which I indicated in the background.

I took the photo about 5 years ago during a trip up the coast. The painting was done with mostly a palette knife and some brushwork.


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"Hills of Santa Barbara", 10x8, oil on wrapped canvas

SOLD"Hills of Santa Barbara", 10x8, oil on wrapped canvas

Going back a few years, we took a trip out to California to help our middle son try to figure out which law school to attend. I was not all that keen on the trip, frankly, wanting him to stay on the east coast and closer to "home".

Nonetheless, when I saw the beauty of California for the first time, I truly understood why he had applied to so many schools on the west coast. During that trip we drove from San Diego, all the way up the coast to San Francisco. It was a fun trip, and along the way, we fell in love with a couple spots along the coast. Santa Barbara was one of them. We had lunch at one of the restaurants on the harbor, and with a view that was close to paradise, I can still recall that the restaurant served the best ahi tuna that I'd ever had.

After lunch we ventured up into the foothills of Santa Barbara, and came across the site of a hidden monastery where we found these words engraved into the stone wall:

"I am a man. No men are foreigners to me. Of one blood are all nations."


My son engraved his own little memento into a tree there, and that tree will contain his words until the tree no longer stands. After he carved his words, we both stood mesmerized, our gaze parallel to the treetops, captivated by the smell of jasmine wafting down from the mountainside.



Refreshed from our lunch and the sweet air, we ventured further up into the mountains and that is where I spied this gorgeous vista:



Although I know that there are a lot of celebrities that live in Santa Barbara, whoever owns this particular casa is under the protective shadow of the mountains and yet high above the sea. And that is the scene that I painted today, alla prima, impressionist style.

I painted this with palette knife only and it has layers of thick, juicy paint.

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Mission San Juan Capistrano

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"Mission San Juan Capistrano", 8x10, oil on linen

On Sunday night my husband and I watched migrating swallows create tornados of shapes and patterns in the sky here in Venice, Florida. This reminded me of a visit we took to Capistrano Mission in San Juan California back in March of 2007, while visiting my son in San Diego. The beautiful old Spanish mission is a site where the swallows also return annually to migrate. I took a ton of pictures while we were there , but now I wish I had taken more! At the time the grounds were covered in bright yellow and orange poppies, and the weather was quite gorgeous. I have had a hankering to do some paintings of the mission for some time now, but until I saw the majesty of the swallows in formation on Sunday night, I just didn't get around to it!

I elected not to add the brightly colored poppies to this painting, as I wanted the effect to remain soft and I didn't want the flowers to compete with the beauty of the mission's rosy architecture against the soft southern California light temperature. If you happen to go there for the swallow migration this year, which falls on March 19th each and every year, be sure to have a yummy lunch or dinner at the delightful Sarducci's Capistrano Depot restaurant, which sits right at the historic train depot, just a couple blocks and walking distance from the mission.

I was happy with the way that this little gem came out, and may enter this into the Philadelphia Sketch Club's small painting exhibit that is coming up in a few weeks and which I took part in last year.


If you would like to read more about the migration of the swallows at Mission Capistrano, please go here.
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