Ken Goldman's "San Diego River Dusk" wins the Dynasty Brush Award
We’re delighted to share that Ken’s painting San Diego River Dusk received the Dynasty Brush for Artists Award at the San Diego Watercolor Society’s 46th International Exhibition. Earlier this year, the same painting was named a Top Ten winner in Artists Magazine’s 19th Annual Over 60 Art Competition.
The moment behind the painting
Anyone who lives in San Diego knows May Gray and June Gloom. That’s when cool Pacific air meets desert heat and leaves the coast under a marine layer, and real sunsets often don’t appear until July. One evening, though, the clouds opened just enough at dusk. Ken happened to be crossing a bridge over the San Diego River at that moment. He saw the distant USD tower glowing through a rosy haze, its light caught in the small channels winding through the gray-green cordgrass below. San Diego River Dusk is his response to that brief moment.
He painted it in acrylic and blended almost the whole sky with a fan brush. Ken generally prefers the spring of synthetic brushes to sable, so he’s looking forward to putting his award set of Dynasty brushes, donated by FM Brush Co., to work in the studio.
Fifty years of painting
Ken’s path started at home. His mother was an artist, and so were his two older brothers. His mother believed art helps people grow into fulfilled human beings, and she brought Ken to his first life-drawing class when he was a young teenager. Before he went out on his own as a professional artist in 1976, he worked at the San Diego Natural History Museum as an exhibition designer, muralist, diorama builder, and bird taxidermist.
He still goes to figure-sketching groups, paints often, and teaches. He says teaching and writing make him examine his own thinking and keep his work from becoming formulaic. He moves easily between watercolor, acrylic, and oil, and he describes it this way: “If knowing many techniques is like speaking different languages, then I’m a multilingual artist.”
His advice to emerging artists is to be authentic, work hard, and keep playing. Time away from the easel lets you return to the work refreshed.
Working across mediums
Ken Goldman is comfortable in watercolor, acrylic, and oil. He doesn’t think of them as separate specialties. For him, they are different tools for different ideas. Each painting begins with a concept, and that concept tells him which medium will express it best. A misty river at dusk might call for the soft blending of acrylic. A sunlit figure might call for the transparency of watercolor or the richness of oil.
Ken has said that the best part of knowing a medium well is the point where technique becomes second nature. Then his subconscious can take over and he can focus on the painting itself rather than on the mechanics of making it.
His brush choices change with the medium too. In watercolor, Ken Goldman reaches for mops, ovals, rounds, and slanted brushes, and he uses flats mostly in the early stages to cut crisp shapes. In oil, bristle filberts are his favorites. In acrylic, almost any good synthetic brush works for him, especially flats and slanted brushes.
Always learning
Fifty years into his career, Ken still treats painting as an ongoing education. He says teaching and writing about art have deepened his understanding of subtleties he might otherwise have missed, because explaining something to students forces you to examine what you really know. He is wary of becoming formulaic, so he keeps looking for new and sometimes uncomfortable ways of working. San Diego River Dusk is the result of that kind of attention: noticing an ordinary walk across a bridge and recognizing something worth painting.
Read the full interview
Our thanks to Dynasty Brush and FM Brush Co. for the award, and to the San Diego Watercolor Society for a wonderful exhibition. You can read Ken’s complete conversation with Dynasty Brush here: Inspired by Nature: Ken Goldman & the Award-Winning San Diego River Dusk
View the painting in the SDWS 46th International Exhibition gallery