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Exerpt from Palos Verdes Penisula Artists by Stephen Smoke
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"Renaissance Man" is something of an understatement when applied to Don Crocker. After a successful career as a lawyer he eventually became President and Chief Operating Officer of the crisis management firm, J.E. Robert Companies. The job required commuting to Washington, D.C. Now in his final career he paints from about seven in the morning till well into the night. His commute is from his house to his backyard studio. Or to a mountaintop, a cliff, a tidepool, or just a carefully chosen spot to capture the moon as it scatters light like diamonds rolling across the Pacific toward the shores of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Or to a spot in Santa Barbara to capture the rising or setting sun. Or to a high promontory in Alaska overlooking massive glaciers and iceberg-choked lakes and fields of sunflowers. Crocker is a "plein air" artist. "The focus of plein air painting is all about natural light. In my paintings you almost always see the impact of the sun or the moon on the landscape, sometimes partially obscured by clouds or fog." A third generation Californian and an avid mountaineer since his youth, Crocker knows a lot about natural history and about California. Every painting projects an aura of his affection and appreciation of the land he so obviously loves. "Pre-subdivision California means a lot to me," he explains. "Sometimes I purposely leave out a lot of the 'human habitation.'" |
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Crocker has a theory that he had to be so focused and hard-working in his
business life that he had time left over at age 65 to have one more career.
That career is being an artist. "I don't want people to say, 'He was a
lawyer who was a pretty good artist.' Either I'm a good artist or I'm not a
good artist. When people take my business card it says I'm an artist. So if
they're going to judge me, they need to judge me as an artist. That's a high
standard, because I was successful in the law and in business. To just forget
that part of it and just say I'm an artist, it's a great challenge. So I've
worked real hard at it. I'm prolific and very focused." Crocker often attends plein air workshops with artists he highly respects, which generally require field work. "Some people are intimidated by field work," he says. "They do fine in the studio where everything's controlled, but they find it difficult to take their stuff out, walk and find their spot, work with the wind, the heat or cold, the insects, poison oak, rattlers, the changing light. The whole purpose of plein air is to try to capture the light at a particular point. That means you've got to work fast. You say, 'Okay, now I'm stopping all the shadows, I'm stopping the clouds, I'm stopping everything right now. I'm anticipating what the sun or moon is going to do, I'm stop-actioning stuff that's changing rapidly.' You have to work fast to capture the unique instant in time when the light is just so." |
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