Perhaps the most profound impressions that I came away with from Lorenzo Chavez’s five-day workshop was his profound mastery of his medium and his openness and compassion as a human being.

His achievement as an artist was reflected in his technical mastery of the major elements of painting: line, value, edges, and color, as well as the amazing simplicity of his materials, essentially Canson paper and some of the more widely available pastels. One came away with a profound appreciation for the fact that art resides not so much in the material aspects of the creative process, but in the mental energy and personal vision, not to mention emotional dedication and focus, that one brings to the creative process.

Another important dimension was his emphasis on a sense of lineage. He was quick to name artists, both historical and contemporary who have had a great influence on him, such as Edgar Payne, Maynard Dixon, Isaac Levitan, Nikolai Fechin, Richard Schmid, Clyde Aspevig, and others. This had the effect of reinforcing the notion that we paint, not only as individuals, but as inheritors of a proud lineage that goes all the way back to the Barbizon School in France and the Hudson River Valley Painters of the 19th Century.

The week began with an impressive presentation of his works, particularly in the American Southwest. It was followed by a more technical presentation of the basic elements of painting in terms of line, values, edges, and color. In particular, he emphasized the importance of small thumbnail sketches, leading the group through a very powerful set of exercises developing rapid thumbnail sketches of paintings. The emphasis was always on design, simplicity, and simple value gradations.

The second day involved a painting demonstration in Waimanalo in which he painted Mt. Olomana. However, in his selection of the composition, he demonstrated how one not need be a slave to what you see, but should feel free to radically simplify and move compositional elements freely to create a dynamic composition. He simply removed buildings and moved trees to get the effect he wanted. I was amazed by his ability to manipulate elements in the landscape to achieve beautiful compositional effects. I was impressed by the importance of really focussing in on what is important in the painting and not feeling constrained by whatever visual obstacles might be in the way. That can be profoundly liberating for plein air painters who can often be intimidated by the complexities of the visual landscape around them.

The third day was wet and rainy, and we found ourselves huddled under a pavilion at Kualoa Park. However, even given those difficulties, he used them to emphasize the importance of notan, or the practice of breaking down compositions into simple black and white shapes and using the shapes as the basis for the design of the composition. Overall, his continuing emphasis was on simplicity of design. For me, that translated into keeping a strong focus on the main central idea of the painting and placing less emphasis on the secondary supporting elements.

This idea came to the forefront in the fourth day at He‘eia State Park where Lorenzo presented two distinctly different approaches to landscape painting. The first, more traditional approach, is seeing the landscape as a broad vista with basically all elements with the same degree of focus. The second takes advantage of the idea of “refraction”, or focussing on a central core area and de-emphasizing the surrounding elements, somewhat like how the eye actually sees objects. This is the method often used by painters such as Albert Handell and Richard Schmid. Lorenzo demonstrated this brilliantly in his painting of the roof of the pavilion at the Park in which the roof was rendered in precise detail with the surrounding elements in less detail. He demonstrated that again on the last day when he focussed on a simple banana plant, giving it a sense of design, color, and edge that made it literally jump off the page. One could clearly see his joy in just drawing and painting. For me that really showed the simple basic pleasure that one can feel through the creative process. Lorenzo was a living and inspiring example of that. During the last day, he also gave a wonderful and even poetic presentation on the nature of light, breaking it down into direct sunlight, skylight, and reflected light and talking about their color, temperature, and reflective characteristics.

But, mostly importantly, through the entire workshop, Lorenzo showed an openness, caring, and compassion that was inspiriting. He showed a sense of humility in acknowledging his debt to all his teachers and he worked hardspending time with each participant, encouraging each person to develop their own voice. His whole emphasis was that of giving everyone the tools they needed to express themselves in the best way they could, while, at the same time, understanding that we all are part of a larger historical lineage of landscape painting. So, while the emphasis was on developing our inner voices, it was also about knowing that we are not alone, that we stand on the shoulders of all the great landscape artists who have gone before us.

And for that, I came away with a profound sense of gratitude and appreciation.