 God's beauty is all around us and my goal as an artist is to capture and interpret that beauty on canvas and to take you the viewer along with me on this painting journey. Hello and welcome to Painting Journeys. My name is Kitty Lynn Klisch and once again we're here in the studio and we're about to take a journey to a very old mission in San Gabriel, California. But first of all I want to tell you a little bit about how I finished up our home on the Mississippi, our last episode. So I'll just show you a little bit. I as you can see there's a I brought it to a little more finish. I didn't really change anything. I just put a few places where there was some sky showing through and heightened up the the the pillars that are that it's that it's standing on and some little you know branches and everything down here in the foreground. Didn't really have to do a lot with that one. It turned out you know it pretty much painted itself I like to say. So anyway, today we are going to the San Gabriel mission in Southern California. San Gabriel is right outside of Los Angeles and this is the like I said this is the San Gabriel mission. This is just one view. It is a huge place. In fact some years back it was hit with a an earthquake and there's a whole new section to it that has been built on to it. So it's much larger now than it originally was. Originally when not too long after the mission was built it looked like this and I'm showing you a picture now of the way the mission looked in the very beginning and after the the Spaniards came and they founded it and then the Franciscans took over and the the Indians that were there they were the workers. So they were the souls that were there working. So anyway I have it sort of sketched on in some pale acrylic. I did this this morning in about five or ten minutes of which you can tell. I don't know how accurate it is but it does give me kind of an idea of where I want to go with this. But first of all I would like to just read you a little bit about what it says on this sign right here because I found I found that very very touching. Saludos amigos. We witness here the beginning of a new civilization wherein Christianity was introduced to a pagan sphere some 190 years ago. The nearly two centuries this Garden of Peace has been a haven for the weary travelers, adventurous pioneers and builders of the magical desert. Here trod the daring red skin, the blithe spirited Mexicano, the valiant Spanish soldier and the venturesome americano. Here you are welcome forget your cares and troubles as you relive the early days of the Western world. So I kind of would like you to be in that frame of mind as we talk about this painting and my journey there as we're painting it. First of all now it's the same palette that I always use, same layout. I don't vary and there's a good reason for that. If I vary I might get confused. So I'm really glad you join me today. We're gonna have a nice time kind of stumbling and bumbling our way through this across this canvas. I'm a little disappointed in my printer because I tried some ink that had been repurposed in my printer and instead of going out and buying the new stuff somebody told me oh try this it'll work just fine you won't have any problems at all and after about a half a dozen printings of this painting or this photograph here that I'm going to be painting from I could not get it to get any darker than this I could not get it to to really be the color that it was it was much much darker and of course then another thing too the day that I was here it was an extremely hot sunny day and everything already had sort of a bleached out look to it and I think that's definitely coming through in our photograph we're gonna take a little bit of liberty with that because we don't really want to just copy the photo we really want to give our impression of what we saw what we saw what we see and how we feel about it all of that goes into your painting what you see what you feel how it touches your heart your soul it all goes in there I'm making one heck of a big pile of gray here is it close no it's a little too yellow yet so I'm still working I'm adding the paint gray and then I add a little bit of the yellow ochre and I'm trying to bring this down I don't want it to be in the background there I want it to be very very soft and I'll see that got a little yellow on me that's how you do that if you want to you know try to match a color somewhat just mess maybe a little bit of red just looks dead I don't like that color I want it to have some pizzazz now let's see okay that's not bad and I'm not gonna I might end up doing a little bit of palette knife work on this but for right now what I really want to do is just get these areas blocked in as much as possible this is a little darker up here where I'm going to go and I want I want to just like I said just block it in with with a thinner coat of paint and then I think I better go for my sky next then I want to come back in and give it more of a stucco look we may not have time to entirely complete this painting today or bring it to a good place this may be a two-part show but only time will tell if it's going to be a two-part episode or not I don't mind doing a two-part episode because I can really go much further in depth with you and show you you know what I'm talking about but then on the other hand it's it sometimes can get a little lengthy for you all right here just talking away to myself do I like that sky yeah I like this guy maybe not maybe I just remembered something that sky in California I'm not going to paint all of the smog it's very very smoggy in California it's very seldom that you get to see a blue sky but I want this to be a little bit bluer and dream a little bit try to paint it like it used to be oh now we've got a nice knocking sound that'll drive us all crazy for the rest of the show so the Spaniards were the ones that explores that came up and founded this this place and they sent a father who know her Sarah to be the first person or priest to try to make a Christians out of the Indians and get them to work they had a quite a once they had the the Christian or the the Indians had accepted the the faith and the food and everything and how that came about as now this is a legend and I'm just repeating the legend to you but how that came about was when father and his father Sarah and his group arrived there the Indians and they were called the Gabriel Gabriel Lee Lino's for the San Gabriel Valley I guess anyway they were going to stop them not let them come out come you know go any further and father Sarah put a painting of which was not uncommon for them in those days they carried these religious paintings around with them very carefully as they traveled from place to place anyway he put this painting of the holy mother of sorrows down in front of the lady on the ground in front of the Indians they were so taken with this painting that they backed up and let them go forward and so that painting even to this day hundreds of years later still hangs in the older part in the in the the main part of the of the old church in the sanctuary that painting is still there it's really it's really something and how the Indians they thought the painting was so beautiful that it convinced him right then and there to let the priests come forward and so I I my own idea of that is they were probably very very peaceful of a very peaceful nature because they came and and they worked and they learned Christianity from Father Sarah in fact and I think it was 1939 there was a statue of Father Sierra I'm gonna show you a picture of that now this this is a statue of Father Sarah and who founded the mission and he if you look carefully you can see in the background there's an olive tree that olive tree is the oldest olive tree on on the land of the mission and what they the mission Father Sierra what what they specialized in was lamp oil as the other missionaries came and went further north up and down California the state of well what is now the state of California and opened up other missions they actually got their oil from the olive trees the orchards the olive trees that Father Sarah and his Indians Christian Indians what they they planted and made and he produced all of the they produce all of the oil for the for the missions 21 of them there were let's see here I want to get this shape it's a little bit redder excuse me my quietness I'm thinking really hard it's kind of an important part here I'm trying to paint that doesn't look right but darker and darker still and this is more rounded and in here we have quite a dark shadow right in here oh you can hear me whispering to myself I'm sure yes and then we're gonna have some sky down here it's gonna be a little lighter as it comes down we have some sky over in here and right in here all right we just keep coming down with this here this is coming down to about here I think and then there is a almost need to outline things here to get them to be able to be seen this is going like this it's a little different shape in this little piece right here and there's a bright highlight on it right here and that comes down like that we have the wall and I'm going to make the wall just a little bit more orange here over here maybe a little violet would work so you know it's painting is truly a journey you it's trial and error it's all just trial and error you you think well maybe this will work and if you're lucky it does and then sometimes it doesn't work okay we're just gonna I'm just gonna go over this and block this in I can always wipe out afterwards where my where my little pot and the other little sign if I even decide to leave those in there I may not I may not put leave those in there because it may just be too much but I do want this to be a corner right here right there a little lighter here now this is that dark stuff again and it's coming here and down now I see this pot here I see the pot I see the the green we growing out of it and everything I'm not gonna worry about that because I can use my my wipeout tool and and fix those things later now then right under here right about here we have a darker edge this should be darker right here too so now in this place they have the the old church you know the the one that is and it was so phenomenal that most of the old church was not harmed in the in the earthquake but they have the the old church and then they have the new church and that they've added on to because there's just a lot of people that in the area that attend mass there the grounds are huge there's gardens everywhere and they have restored areas certain areas and you can take tours through here when I lived in California I used to attend mass here at this mission I always thought it was quite a quite a treat to to get to go to the mission for especially for the special masses every year they have a giant fiesta and where I mean it's just like a two-day thing and it takes the whole street is fabulous music and food and dancing now we need a little dark coming right here where this window is and then some light over it now I know I have my green in here but I don't want to put it in just yet because it's going to bleed if I put that in now that's going to bleed and I don't want to make that mistake of having a green mission so I'm waiting for those things and just just trying to block in the big the big areas now all of the detail that you see I'm trying to leave that for later okay and then let's see we have darker down here a little red in it and I'm just going to come down and narrow that sign up because I don't want the sign to go off the side of the of the canvas even though I that's not what I'm seeing here in the photograph I'm going to do that because I don't think it would be good composition that's the other thing you know you have to constantly be aware of of what kind of composition you are building up is it is it going to work read correctly and I see right in here this little dark is coming right there that makes that little corner right there okay now then we have some of the reddish dark right here this cast shadow that's kind of coming across here and it's there and then it's coming back here all right maybe a little blue in there might work a little better make it have a little different tone there we go and the shadows coming down here and and it comes here that's the bottom and this is kind of a rose color that's really pretty down there it's too bad there it's that's so far low so far down on the painting because that's kind of a rose color right in there and these little bits of okay let's see now all right I think what we'll do now is get hard some of our dark greens in and for the tree in the background here I'm going to have to scoop up my pal a little bit this is wow it grew really did it went everywhere that's one thing you know if you're a painter you've got to use paint that's for sure this next picture I'm going to show you is a part of the grounds and I wanted to tell you about that the olive there's olive trees and the seedlings of the olive grove which once produced the oil for fueling of the lamps and then there's an orange tree that was planted there in 1980 because the Franciscans moved on and the Claritians they planted the first Valencia orange grove there at the mission and then the Franciscans had already used cuttings from Spain and planted you know the same oranges so anyway and they also planted fig and plum and pomegranate and all of those things flourished in the early days and I had to I already told you about the oldest olive tree that was planted in the 1860s by a father bot as time moved on and now how do they get water out there in the mission how in the world and out there in the desert of Southern California did they get water to water all these beautiful trees and plants and grapes and everything that they grew because you know that they needed a lot of water in order to sustain you know groves of grapes and they got that by building an aqueduct and they laid clay pipe well here let me show you another picture this is a picture of the the well and and the early the aqueduct in the early days of the mission the only water supply came from Wilson Lake crudely built clay pipes brought the water from the open ditch to the aqueduct from where the water was piped to the tannery and to the kitchen on the mission grounds and such engineering skill is displayed in the building of this water system and it was from these crude beginnings that the desert land was made to bring forth an abundance of fruit that's really tremendous that they had the ingenuity and the skill to think to do this and and turn Southern California into a rich farmland at that time just going to mass this in a little bit and I and you'll notice that I'm using a little bit of a brownish looking green because the olive trees are not a bright green they're a brownish green and I definitely I don't know if this is an olive tree or not but I know that in my painting I wanted to be an olive tree so and then I'm going to come back on there and make a few I'm going to have some real dark in here right back in here and now then I'm going to take a piece of paper and I'm going to crumple it up I know it sounds terrible doesn't it sorry about that guys okay I'm gonna take a piece of paper and I make some some more paint and of a grade lighter green and to take the paper dob it with paint and come up here I'm sorry about all the noise kids just can't be helped you know maybe if I hum to you while I'm doing this and I'm gonna try to make something that that represents all those little branches that we're seeing up here that will pop that out and make it look more more true to life maybe just a little bit lighter in one this one area here there we go now we have no place to throw this I'm not gonna hold it so I'll just lay it right down there and we'll go on all right that doesn't look too bad needs a little dark to without the dark the light doesn't look light enough I'm losing it but don't tell anybody gosh I'm glad you joined me today you probably feel like you're getting a history lesson as well as a as a little painting lesson and and journey but you know this this is the kind of stuff that's really important to me I love it and I hope you do too yeah that looks a little better with a little dark popped in there here and there okay don't touch it too much kitty I always have such a tendency to over do and that just makes me so mad about myself all right I think we can put this green over here now too and that will and it's very dark on the bottom here so I'm just kind of like laying the brush on because I don't I don't want it to be big big big shapes I want it to look you know as I in other words the way that I approach laying in the paint I want that to be describing the object the feel of the object and that's what's really important to me now then I can come up with some of this other lighter stuff that I have and I can push up in here and I and I've got I've got my base and you know and it doesn't matter if we go up a little higher if we choose to have a little more of the greenery show that doesn't matter there okay now all we have to do is come back and make a highlight on our wall right there there we go now that puts the greenery behind the behind the the wall like it is rather than in front of it and then I'm gonna take just a little tiny bit of a shadow so that you get the feeling that the wall has a little bit of a light striking on the top of it I'm gonna darken this right in here and raise it up some there we go all right and then down in here we have some lovely kind of a pinkish reddish tile that is so old you just so you just faintly whoops not dark and I'm not light enough you just faintly see the color of it and I showed you the picture of the aqueduct and I talked to you about that I don't want to forget anything today let's soften that line okay I wish this picture would have turned out as dark as colorful as I saw it on my camera really bothers me so I guess kids the this the final solution there is don't buy rebuilt cartridges for your printer because they don't work so now that's our little shadows and stuff all right we're coming along pretty good here let's see we have some real light right in here and that's coming like this and that's about the same color as this is too comes like that and then this is coming down like this feeling like I'm sort of like I'm building it trying to whoops I just heard my camera girl yawn I hope you're not yawning at home made her laugh oh I do hope you're not yawning at home okay it's coming it's coming let me see here some a little bit of reddish bricks and we've been I think we've only got about 20 minutes left so we're doing pretty good really I think a little reddish bricks coming right there now we're not gonna you know make little individual bricks I'm trying really hard to stay loosey goosey that's what we want today loosey goosey I gotta be a little redder though don't you wish you had my job just travel around and then have fun painting places and making things up just standing here gabbing away it's fun I have a good I have a good job I guess I wouldn't really call it a job it's my passion it's what it is passion what's your passion I hope is watching my show that would be nice and some shade in there I'm not quite sure what's going on there yet so we'll just knock that down just a tad there we go okay let's see here let's get something on this on this sign here oh wow that was fun look at that I just grabbed some of that red and put it right there and look at how that pops that's exciting to me when that happens we gotta tone it down though it's a little too much all right let's see here we have I better on second thought I better do the inside first because I know what I'll do I'll mess it up there we go now I'm not going to put the writing on it I read you what the sign said so you already know what what it says so I'm not gonna read I'm not gonna put the writing on it I will indicate the writing when I take it home in my studio to my studio to to finish it and you'll have to be sure I think yeah this is this is this is not going to be a two-part show this is going to be completed today and in my studio at home and I will bring back the finished product to you show you at our next show and Lacey says I have 15 minutes so I better kick it whoops that's not the right direction bring that up like that down like this oh my as soon as I saw that sign I got nervous let's see here and this goes down like this there we go that's good enough for now so about the only thing that we have left to really worry about right now is what is back in in here and now I don't know if you can see this or not but there's this so many different types of cactuses on this property and some of them are so old and curled up they you know they they look like snakes I mean they're just really it's it's really something the different types of cactus that are back here so I've never seen anything like like that before let's see here we have a little splash of something well first of all I think I better see that's what happens when you're just kind of thinking out loud confused okay we have some green in here and I think that is probably from that tree over here so I don't want to make it too solid and I'm not going to be able to put this this wrought iron fence on until after this sets up a little bit if I try to do that on I will really mess it up now we have some nice light green on the lawn there's a walkway there and there's some light green in the background there and then we have some yellow green right back over in here the plant that's behind here when I come back in I'll be reinforcing my edges and everything this goes all the way off here because it looks like it's a little tiny sidewalk whoops so this is going to go over to here gonna go like this then there's kind of an orange orangy reddish bush back in here and like I said we'll we'll fix all that up later I want to definitely put that snake cactus in then I'm seeing back there so I might just take my blue and come down here so I can do that he's such an unusual looking thing now we're going to have the door over that and this little bit of business right there and right here we're going to have a little bit of the alizarin crimson the darker alizarin crimson right in here whoa there we go bright bright bright can't get away from it there we go that's what we want a little something in here to kind of pick that up we have a little sidewalk and so that is right there and the little sidewalk coming right off of here and it should be very very light because the light is hitting that very strongly and then if we want to make this look a little bit more like grass we just take the the brush and I'm just poking and playing right now but we take the brush and we just push it up a little bit add a little bit of dark down here and it'll look a little more like grass there we go we got a little sidewalk back there now all we need is our little gateway and we've got this beautiful red pot let's see what we can do with that just at least get something with a little bit of of color in here now he's going to have a shadow underneath him and he's going to have this beautiful adobe red not particularly crazy about that plant so I'll make one up just so that we can have some something exciting there to kind of show that it's cactus that's what we want there is a little cactus see I think that looks better and I'm sure you do too of course what are you going to do you're not going to argue with me there at home all righty there we go there's our little cactus and let's see here this needs to come over just a bit there and then we need a nice little highlight right about here there we go that needs to be a little darker behind right in here okay all righty let's see here yeah I think that would look kind of nice when I think when I get home to my home studio I think I will kind of doctor this up a little bit I like a little more color in there yeah there we go now that doesn't look too bad maybe we can put another little pot right here real quick okay she says I have five minutes all right five minute pot coming up okay right here and it needs some red I do hope that you tune into the next show and watch so that you can see how how this finished up and also I wanted to tell you I have some exciting news you can now purchase videos of painting journeys for the first time since I've been doing the show we're now offering painting journeys so if you'll read the credits at the end of the show that will tell you how to go about getting your own personal autographed copy of painting journeys isn't that exciting yes all right I hope to hear from a lot of you oh I like what I did there that's fun okay yeah so anyway what did I tell you everything I wanted to tell you let me see okay oh I didn't show you the grapes on the pergola here's a picture of the grapes over hanging over this pergola and if you look really closely I hope you can see the grapes because they're they were so abundant when I was there it was just beautiful and those vines I mean how ancient are those vines and they're still producing like crazy so it's it's really something and I really thank you for for joining me today this has been so much fun journeying with you to the to the San Gabriel mission if you ever get a chance to go to California do stop by the mission and and just enjoy it's just the most wonderful place and all of those things that I shared with you today they have a lovely museum there where you can find that information and it's just it's just an awesome awesome piece of history of California history and of course being a California native that's kind of important to me so let's see here I see a little light right back there and I think I'm just going to paint right up until the last minute I really really hope that you will you know if I mean if the mood strikes you and you want to see this show again that you will purchase your own copy of it your own autographed copy of it would be great for gift giving too so that's kind of exciting I'm really glad that the station decided to make those available to you so okay oh you know what if I keep playing I'll mess it up I'm gonna leave it alone no I'm not I gotta do this right there and there okay all right that's it for today I'm so glad you're joining me and I hope you had as much fun as I did and once again this is Kitty Linclish with Painting Journeys and I will see you next time thank you for joining bye bye for now