10K Paintings
Updated: Jul 6
Be w the Masters to see what they see feel what they feel and then paint what they painted
Gorky
Look for inner nature, not outer scenery. As “Gorky,” I’d tell you to treat La Jolla Cove as a trigger for memory and emotion, then paint from within that experience rather than copying what you see.
1. Look for living forms in chaos
Notice how water, kelp, swimmers, and cliffs constantly morph into suggestive shapes—organ‑like blobs, tendrils, winged forms, twisting roots. Let those fleeting biomorphic shapes become your starting point: a line of kelp can turn into a spine; a splash into a strange bird; a cluster of caps into a single breathing organism.
2. Look for memories the cove awakens
While you stand at the entry or float past the buoys, pay attention to what old scenes rise up—family, danger, safety, exile, belonging. My work fuses remembered places and people with present landscapes; you can let the cove blur into childhood shorelines, hospital corridors, or family faces, then let the painting show that fusion instead of a literal swim.
3. Look for automatic marks
When you get back from the swim, make fast, unplanned drawings: tangled lines, sudden color patches, half‑formed shapes. Trust those automatic marks; they’re like the “first language” of what the day meant, and you can later refine or edit them into larger abstract canvases while keeping their spontaneity.
4. Look for nature “from within”
At the cove, don’t just stare at the horizon—notice the sensations inside your body: fatigue, cold burn, fear spikes, joy surges. I’ve said I paint from within nature; for you, that means your heart rate, breath, and emotional waves are part of the landscape, so your color and gesture should follow those rhythms more than the camera view.
5. Look for contradictions and wounds
Notice where beauty and threat meet: slick blue water over dark depth, playful sea lions near sharp rock, charity relay beside the reality of diabetes and drowning risk. My paintings carry trauma and tenderness together; let the cove’s mix of celebration and danger show up as both delicate, luminous passages and jagged, scraped, or scarred areas in the paint.
If you like, I can help you design one “Gorky‑mode” sketch ritual to do right after each La Jolla swim so your paintings grow directly out of those experiences.
Arshile Gorky’s color palette centers on muted, earthy neutrals—tawny browns, warm creams, soft grays—punctuated by luminous peach-pinks, sulfurous yellows, reds, and greens that feel organic rather than decorative.paletteinspiration+1
Core “Master” palette
A useful way to think of Gorky’s typical palette is the master profile distilled from multiple works.paletteinspiration
Deep charcoal gray: hex #343230 — grounding, often used in outlines or shadowed areas.paletteinspiration
Warm beige/tan: #C4B792 — a dominant field color, like aged paper or sun‑bleached earth.paletteinspiration
Soft olive gray: #6E6E62 — a neutral green‑gray that keeps the palette subdued.paletteinspiration
Pale warm gray: #D2CEC6 — veiled, mist‑like light areas.paletteinspiration
Golden ochre: #D2B35A — wheatfield, apricot, or sunlit rock notes.artsy+1
In painter’s terms, think of a base of tawny earths and greys, with lighter veils and small hits of golden warmth.
Typical ranges he used
Across analyzed palettes, Gorky tends to stay within families of soft, natural colors, with fluctuations depending on mood and period.flash---art+2
“Soft fawn / ecru / cream / alabaster”: light beiges and off‑whites that read as skin, parchment, or hazy sky.paletteinspiration
“Shadowed sienna / veiled tawny”: browned reds and oranges rather than clean cadmium brights.paletteinspiration
Luminous peach‑pinks and soft greens: used as misty, atmospheric veils over biomorphic forms.flash---art
Occasional stronger reds and sulfurous yellows: tied to memories of red earth, wheatfields, apricots, poppies.artsy
His palette often feels “soothing and deeply personal,” shifting from airy, pastel‑like surfaces to bleaker, more rusted tones in later, traumatic years.hauserwirth+1
How this translates for your painting
Since you’re working from La Jolla swims and thinking in “Gorky‑mode,” you can approximate his palette like this, then adjust for the cove:dzudo+2
Ground colors: yellow ochre, raw sienna, light burnt sienna, unbleached titanium, warm gray.
Veils: very diluted peach, cream, pale blue‑gray, soft green over drawn biomorphic shapes.
Accents: small areas of rust red, deep olive, and darker charcoal‑black line to define forms.
A simple example: start with a warm beige field, float pale peach‑pink and cream shapes, then thread in olive‑gray and golden‑ochre forms with fine, dark lines that suggest kelp spines or swimmer organs rather than literal figures.
Franz Klein
As Franz Kline, I’d tell you to look for big, structural forces in your La Jolla swims—then reduce them to bold, almost architectural strokes. You’re not hunting for scenery; you’re hunting for beams, crossings, and collisions of energy.
1. Look for strong black‑and‑white structures
During and after your swim, ask: what feels like a massive, simple structure?
The line from shore straight out to the turn buoy
The vertical drop of cliffs against the horizontal band of water
The crossing paths of relay swimmers entering and exiting
Kline turned thumbnail sketches of structure into large, black‑and‑white paintings, eliminating narrative and color to focus on pure composition. At the cove, you’re looking for those few dominant “bars” and “crosses” that could become thick, assertive strokes.
2. Look for crossings and collisions
Pay attention to where things intersect:
Your swim line crossing chop coming from another direction
Lifeguard gaze or boat path cutting across swimmer traffic
Swell moving one way, wind pushing surface texture another way
His work thrives on positive and negative forms colliding, edges pressing, and directions interrupting each other. Each crossing you notice in the water can become one intersection of brushstrokes: a main diagonal interrupted by a vertical, a thick bar cut by a thinner one.
3. Look for feelings as structure
Kline said he painted not the things he saw, but the feelings they aroused. Translate emotional states into simple structural ideas:
Confidence as a wide, stable horizontal
Anxiety as a tilted, unstable diagonal
Fatigue as a sagging stroke leaning on another for support
On a La Jolla day when the water feels protective, your structure might be mostly stable, sheltering forms; on a rough relay day, more fractured or abruptly cut shapes.
4. Look for what can be simplified
When you step back after a swim, ask: if I had to draw this day in three strokes, what would they be?
One for the main route you swam
One for the cliffs or shore holding the scene
One for an interrupting force: current, crowd, or an internal shift
Kline famously enlarged a thumbnail sketch and realized its minimal structure was already complete. Train yourself to see the “thumbnail” of each swim—the simplest, strongest arrangement—before you add any nuance.
5. Look for edges between presence and emptiness
"Sabra," an abstract painting by Franz Kline from 1956, is in the Berardo Collection Museum.
Notice where there is “nothing” that actually feels powerful:
Empty water between packs of swimmers
Quiet sky over an agitated surface
Silent time between relay legs
His paintings live on the tension between thick, assertive marks and the white space around them. At La Jolla, those voids are as important as the strokes; they’ll become the unpainted areas that let your big gestures breathe.
If you’d like, I can help you design a “Kline mode” exercise: after each La Jolla swim, you make three or four black‑and‑white sketches capturing only the structural forces of that day, which you can later scale up into larger paintings.
De Kooning
As Willem de Kooning, I’d tell you to look for the messy, shifting mix of body, water, and place in your La Jolla swims—and to let that mixture stay unstable in your paintings. You’re not choosing between figure and abstraction; you’re letting them collide.
1. Look for figures emerging and dissolving
During and after your swim, pay attention to how bodies appear and vanish:
A swimmer is clear for a moment, then becomes just arms and splashes.
Sea lions, buoys, and teammates turn into fragments—curves, teeth of foam, flashes of cap color.
De Kooning’s work famously lets figures half‑form and half‑disintegrate inside gesture and color. At La Jolla, look for those in‑between states: not “a swimmer,” but “a hint of a back, a jawline of foam.” Those fragments become your brushy, partial figures.
2. Look for space that feels physical
Notice how the cove presses on you:
The weight of swell against your chest.
The squeeze of narrow entry channels compared to the openness farther out.
The way cliffs and buildings feel like planes leaning over the water.
De Kooning cared about a felt sense of space—planes that billow, collapse, and pulse, almost sculptural on a flat surface. Look for places where the environment feels like it’s physically pushing or pulling at you; that’s where you want dense, layered paint, scrapes, and overlapping planes.
3. Look for gesture that matches your body
While you swim, notice your own movement as a kind of brushstroke:
Long, sweeping pulls on a calm day.
Short, choppy strokes when the water is rough or crowded.
Sudden directional changes when you sight or dodge kelp.
His painting is “action” not just as drama, but as the record of physical decisions and revisions—slathering, scraping, changing, overpainting. Look for the exact feel of your arm path and breath rhythm; later, let your hand move on the canvas in that same way, revising and smearing rather than drawing neatly.
4. Look for emotional collisions
De Kooning talked about putting “drama, anger, pain, love, a figure…my ideas about space” all into one painting. At La Jolla, notice where emotions clash:
Pride in the relay cause pressed against anxiety about conditions.
Joy in community beside the solitude of your own laps.
Safety inside the cove next to the knowledge of open‑water risk.
You’re looking for moments where two or three feelings happen at once; those are places for violent color contrasts, abrupt shifts in line, and scraped or reworked areas.
5. Look for recycled shapes from previous swims
De Kooning often traced shapes from one work and transplanted them into another, building a vocabulary over time. After each swim, notice any recurring motif:
A hook‑shaped curve of cliff you keep seeing.
A certain bent‑arm silhouette you always remember from drafting someone.
A repeating zigzag route around kelp or swell.
Keep these as reusable shapes or lines, bringing them back in later paintings—almost like puzzles pieces—so your whole La Jolla series feels like one evolving, messy, living language.
If you’d like, I can help you design a simple “de Kooning mode” journaling and sketch step after each swim that captures: one half‑seen figure, one felt space, one gesture, and one emotional collision, ready to feed your next painting.
You are Hans Hoffman tell me what to look for
Completed 2 steps
As Hans Hofmann, I’d tell you to look for forces in your La Jolla swims—push, pull, balance, imbalance—and to translate them into color planes and spatial tension, not literal seascapes. You’re watching how nature acts, then recreating that action in paint.
1. Look for push–pull in the water
Notice where the ocean is clearly exerting a force and where it’s being answered:
Swell pushing you toward shore while your stroke pulls you outward.
Current dragging your line left while sighting and body tension pull you back on course.
Crowded relay traffic pressing into the entry channel versus the open space beyond.
Hofmann’s core principle is push–pull: any force in a painting should meet a counterforce, creating living space on a flat surface. At La Jolla, look for these pairs; they’re the seeds of your abstract structure.
2. Look for color acting as space
During and after the swim, pay attention to color not as description but as spatial behavior:
Deep blues and greens that feel far or heavy.
Light turquoise or foam whites that feel near or light.
Warm cliffs, caps, and sand that seem to jump forward against cooler water.
Hofmann builds space with color planes—reds, yellows, blues, and greens pushing and receding without traditional perspective. When you see a color in the cove, ask: does it come toward me or move away? That “movement” is what you paint.
3. Look for form balanced by space
See the cove as an interplay of form and surrounding space:
Swimmers as forms suspended in a vast volume of water.
Buoys as small accents floating in large open fields.
Cliffs as vertical planes cutting into and containing the sky and sea.
Hofmann insisted that form and space must exist together in a three‑dimensional unity on the canvas. At La Jolla, don’t just look at “objects”; look at how much space they generate or compress around them—your abstract planes will grow from that.
4. Look for nature, paint, and intuition all at once
His teaching: honor nature, understand paint, trust your intuitive relationship with both. For you:
Nature: the cove’s changing chop, light, traffic, and mood.
Paint: viscosity, opacity, layering, lifting, scraping.
Intuition: the gestures and color choices that feel right even if they defy realism.
While you’re swimming, let your attention flicker among those three: what the water is doing, how you imagine paint could echo it, and what spontaneous response feels most alive.
5. Look for balance that is never static
Hans Hofmann abstract painting
When you step back from any swim day and imagine the painting, ask:
Where is the strongest imbalance today (rough sets, crowded relay, strong sun)?
What counterbalance exists (calm patches, emptier segments, soft sky)?
Hofmann’s push–pull creates a dynamic balance, never a rigid equilibrium. At La Jolla, you’re looking for that “alive balance”—the feeling that the scene could tilt but doesn’t—which you can capture through asymmetry, color contrast, and uneven yet coherent distribution of forms.
Bida Shiren
As Bida Shiren—the quiet observer watching your La Jolla swims—I’d tell you to look for four things: rhythm, edges, pauses, and small truths hiding inside the big scene.
1. Look for rhythm
Notice how everything moves in patterns:
Your stroke tempo against the push‑pull of the swell
The regular rise and fall of other swimmers’ heads
The repeating appearance of kelp, bubbles, and light patches in front of your goggles
The observer doesn’t care how far you go; it cares how the movement feels over time—steady, frantic, broken, or smooth. That rhythm can become line direction, brushstroke length, or the density of marks in your abstract paintings.
2. Look for edges
Pay attention to boundaries:
Where cold water meets a warmer patch
Where clear visibility suddenly drops into murk
Where safety (inside the cove) shifts to exposure (past the point)
Edges are where tension lives. The quiet observer notes those transitions very calmly: “Here is where I felt different.” On canvas, that can be a hard line between colors, a shift from smooth to scraped paint, or a sudden change in texture.
3. Look for pauses
Watch for tiny breaks:
The moment before you dive in
The second you stop at the buoy and sight
The quiet after tagging a relay teammate and stepping out of the water
These micro‑pauses are often where meaning collects—fear, relief, doubt, gratitude. In your abstract work, these can be blank spaces, softer tones, or areas with fewer marks that hold emotional weight precisely because they’re less busy.
4. Look for small truths
The quiet observer looks past the event story and notices simple, honest details:
“I always breathe easier on the second lap.”
“I feel most alone in the middle of the pack.”
“The cove feels protective on flat days and indifferent on rough days.”
Those are the truths your paintings and blog can carry. Each small truth can become one piece: color choice, title, and composition all built around a single observation, instead of trying to show everything in one work.
If you want, I can help you turn these four things—rhythm, edges, pauses, truths—into a short checklist you can run through in your head during each swim, so Bida Shiren is always “watching” and feeding your art.
Frank O’Cain
As Frank O’Cain, I’d tell you to look for movement and tension in the cove, not “things” to paint. You’re searching for how space, color, and forces press against each other, the way we talk about tension and volume in abstract work.
1. Look for a strong movement
At La Jolla, ask: where is the strongest directional pull today?
The sweep of swell across the cove
The diagonal of swimmers heading to the buoy
The curve of cliffs and shoreline holding that motion
O’Cain starts by finding or inventing a strong movement in the painting—your job at the cove is to notice that dominant movement so later you can build your abstraction around it instead of a literal scene.
2. Look for tension in shapes
Rather than “rocks, water, swimmers,” look for:
Large calm areas pressed by small active ones
Angled shapes pushing against verticals or horizontals
Crowded clusters next to open space
His demos emphasize tension—how shapes and colors lean on each other to keep the picture alive. In the cove, that might be dense swimmer traffic near the entry against emptiness farther out, or jagged rock edges against smooth water; these pairings become your abstract structure.
3. Look for volume and depth in color
Notice where the color feels dense and where it feels thin:
Dark, saturated blues in deeper water versus pale, airy blues near shore
Heavy, warm siennas and umbers in rock shadow versus light, pinkish or golden areas in sun
O’Cain talks about volume—color carrying weight and spatial presence, not just hue. When you’re swimming, mentally note which colors feel “heavy” or “light,” “near” or “far”; that’s what you’ll translate into thicker paint, layering, or transparency.
4. Look for a unified surface
Ask yourself: what could unify all this—the swim, the relay, the cove?
A repeating directional mark (for example, slight diagonals that echo your stroke path)
A limited warm or cool range on top of which small accents play
A subtle overall grid or tilting plane suggested by the way you sight and breathe
His teaching centers on “transfer of idea through a unified surface,” letting a single organizing force carry many events and feelings. At the cove, look for that one underlying order—maybe the relay timing, your breathing cycle, or the curve of the bay itself—that can unify a complex abstract painting.
5. Look for what the painting will say back
O’Cain emphasizes listening to what the painting is telling you to do next. Translated to your swims: notice where your attention keeps returning—to a patch of water, a sound, a kind of fatigue. Those repeats are the painting “speaking” before it exists. You’re looking for the motif that insists on being seen.
If you’d like, I can help you turn these Frank‑style cues—movement, tension, volume, unity, motif—into a short note system you can jot down right after each La Jolla swim so your abstract pieces grow directly out of what you observed.
Hans Hoffman
As Hans Hofmann, I’d tell you to look for forces in your La Jolla swims—push, pull, balance, imbalance—and to translate them into color planes and spatial tension, not literal seascapes. You’re watching how nature acts, then recreating that action in paint.
1. Look for push–pull in the water
Notice where the ocean is clearly exerting a force and where it’s being answered:
Swell pushing you toward shore while your stroke pulls you outward.
Current dragging your line left while sighting and body tension pull you back on course.
Crowded relay traffic pressing into the entry channel versus the open space beyond.
Hofmann’s core principle is push–pull: any force in a painting should meet a counterforce, creating living space on a flat surface. At La Jolla, look for these pairs; they’re the seeds of your abstract structure.
2. Look for color acting as space
During and after the swim, pay attention to color not as description but as spatial behavior:
Deep blues and greens that feel far or heavy.
Light turquoise or foam whites that feel near or light.
Warm cliffs, caps, and sand that seem to jump forward against cooler water.
Hofmann builds space with color planes—reds, yellows, blues, and greens pushing and receding without traditional perspective. When you see a color in the cove, ask: does it come toward me or move away? That “movement” is what you paint.
3. Look for form balanced by space
See the cove as an interplay of form and surrounding space:
Swimmers as forms suspended in a vast volume of water.
Buoys as small accents floating in large open fields.
Cliffs as vertical planes cutting into and containing the sky and sea.
Hofmann insisted that form and space must exist together in a three‑dimensional unity on the canvas. At La Jolla, don’t just look at “objects”; look at how much space they generate or compress around them—your abstract planes will grow from that.
4. Look for nature, paint, and intuition all at once
His teaching: honor nature, understand paint, trust your intuitive relationship with both. For you:
Nature: the cove’s changing chop, light, traffic, and mood.
Paint: viscosity, opacity, layering, lifting, scraping.
Intuition: the gestures and color choices that feel right even if they defy realism.
While you’re swimming, let your attention flicker among those three: what the water is doing, how you imagine paint could echo it, and what spontaneous response feels most alive.
5. Look for balance that is never static
Hans Hofmann abstract painting
When you step back from any swim day and imagine the painting, ask:
Where is the strongest imbalance today (rough sets, crowded relay, strong sun)?
What counterbalance exists (calm patches, emptier segments, soft sky)?
Hofmann’s push–pull creates a dynamic balance, never a rigid equilibrium. At La Jolla, you’re looking for that “alive balance”—the feeling that the scene could tilt but doesn’t—which you can capture through asymmetry, color contrast, and uneven yet coherent distribution of forms.
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