Why I Keep Painting LA Palms in Oil
Los Angeles has one of the most underrated skies on the planet. Nobody talks about it the way they talk about the light in Tuscany or the clouds above the North Sea, but it's there — this particular quality of afternoon gold that hits the palms on a clear day and makes everything feel slightly cinematic. I've just recently embarked on the challenge of trying to capture it, and I'm not sure I've got it completely figured out yet. That's part of why I keep coming back.
Palms are strange trees to paint. They shouldn't be as interesting as they are. They're tall, mostly vertical, and not exactly overloaded with detail. But there's something about the way a California fan palm moves — not like a pine or an oak, which feel rooted and fixed, but loose, almost restless — that makes them harder to get right than you'd expect.
The Light Problem
The challenge with painting Southern California palms isn't the palms themselves. It's the light around them. The sky here is almost never flat. Even on a clear day there's atmospheric haze, a kind of luminous pressure in the blue that pushes the green of the fronds into something more silvery than you'd imagine. Get the sky wrong and the whole painting goes flat. Get it right and the canvas feels warm in a way that's almost physical.
My approach is similar to how I approach other paintings in working the background and darks first. I have found the key to painting anything like this with multiple layers to be painting in reverse order of how the light sits on the object, meaning starting with the darkest shades, and building up the form by gradually working lighter.
Ultramarine blue mixed with burnt sienna make the perfect near-black color to establish the darkest of darks. Sometimes, I will throw some Alizarin crimson if I want to warm things up, or go more heavy with the blue for the cooler tones. I then let that layer set the temperature for everything that comes after. The trunks go in relatively thin. Burnt sienna, raw umber, Naples yellow are key. What I spend the most time on, and where I lay the paint on heaviest, is the crown. Impasto up there to create real texture. The fronds catch the light differently depending on the angle, and the thickness of the paint lets you communicate that in a way flat brushwork just can't.
The real key to all of this however, the part that I thankfully found out relatively early on in the process, is the use of the pallet knife. It is a tool I have found myself using more and more in my painting process. It forces you to do one key thing that a brush does not: be decisive. It creates a sense of texture and movement that is crucial to painting a palm that, despite my best efforts, is not achievable with a brush.
With Afternoon Palms, I was specifically chasing that moment around 4pm when the sun is still high enough to be warm but low enough to rake across the foliage from the side. Two palms, trunks splitting the composition, sky going a little restless behind them. The whole painting is trying to say one thing: this is what Los Angeles actually looks like, not the postcard version, but the real thing if you stop for a second and look up.
Why the Subject Still Feels Alive
I've painted bison on the open plain. I've painted cowboys lit from one side. Those subjects carry a certain weight — they're loaded with mythology, with everything American painting has done with the West for two centuries. Palms don't carry that weight. They're not symbolic in the same way. They're just palms. And there's a freedom in that.
Painting them feels more like observation than interpretation. I'm not layering in any particular meaning — I'm just trying to get it right right, to capture what it actually looks like to stand on the beach in Venice at 4 o'clock on a Tuesday and look up. That's it. That's the whole assignment.
There's also an interior design reason why palm paintings work so well in real spaces. The verticality is useful — a tall painting with a strong vertical element does something architecturally useful in a room. It draws the eye up, makes ceilings feel higher, gives the wall a presence without cluttering it. I've had people tell me Afternoon Palms is the first thing guests ask about when they walk in. That doesn't surprise me. It's a painting that holds the eye without demanding anything from you.
What I'm Thinking About Next
The palm series isn't finished. I've been working through what it means to paint a specifically Los Angeles subject without defaulting to the obvious — without making it a sunset painting, without leaning into the kitsch that a lot of palm tree art falls into. I want the work to feel like it was made by someone who actually lives here, not someone imagining what LA looks like from the outside.
That's the real standard I'm trying to hit, with the palms and with all of it. Not beautiful. Not decorative. True. If you're interested in seeing where the work is headed, the originals collection has the most current pieces, and the prints are available if you want to live with the work before committing to an original. Either way, come back and see what's on the easel.