Larry Cannon | In the Flow

By Norman Kolpas

This story was featured in the February 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

Standing above the estuary of Malibu Creek in Southern California, Larry Cannon regarded snowy egrets as they foraged in the shallow water, suddenly striking at fish just below the surface and leaving ever-widening concentric ripples. Patiently, deliberately, using a viewfinder with a superimposed grid, he executed some thumbnail pencil sketches. Then, using a lightly penciled grid on a sheet of watercolor paper, he spent about an hour meticulously drawing in his ideal composition.

Unlike some artists, who hurry to capture just the right moment of natural illumination when they paint in the open air, Cannon then spent three to four hours applying layer after layer of translucent watercolor. “If the light changes, I’m not going to chase the light,” he says. “I know what I want to do.” In this case, the chief element he aimed to portray was “that real liquid quality of the water”—a goal he superbly achieved in the painting he titled MALIBU LAGOON.

Perplexingly, the show for which he was painting it, at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art on the campus of Pepperdine University in Malibu, ultimately declined the work. “I was quite disappointed,” says Cannon. “It was the best I had done to date and a terribly difficult painting to accomplish in watercolor, one that truly had to be right on the money at every step of the way.” Undaunted, he eventually submitted it for exhibition with the prestigious American Society of Marine Artists, which went on to display it at eight major museums on both the west and east coasts before it was shown at two other museums in Southern California. “This has become my most successfully exhibited painting,” the artist notes.

The story of MALIBU LAGOON neatly sums up several qualities that make Cannon a plein-air painting star. Dedicated in his work ethic and deliberate in his process, he explains his approach by saying, “I study and think a lot but paint only a little.” And he’s persistent, believing that his particular combination of preparation, mindfulness, and inspiration will lead him to produce paintings that not only meet but often exceed the high standards he sets for himself.

So it may come as a surprise to learn that Cannon, now 78, began painting seriously only in his mid-50s, following a highly successful career as an architectural consultant, to which he still devotes about half of his working time. How, then, has he come to produce such an impressive body of work that has been displayed in 32 museums nationwide, received coveted awards, and earned him membership in the California Art Club, the California Plein Air Painters, the California Watercolor Association, the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association, and the aforementioned American Society of Marine Artists?

The answer may best be summed up by a personal motto he aims to follow in his artistic work: “Learn to look. Look to learn.”

Cannon doesn’t recall any particular art training during his early years growing up in the Champaign-Urbana area in Illinois. “But when I was 7 or 8 years old,” he says, “my mother and my aunt taught me how to embroider, and I vividly remember all the beautiful colors.” In his teens, he says, “I got interested in tying flies for fishing, ordering bags of beautiful feathers with different patterns and colors.” Such experiences helped develop in him “an appreciation for color and texture,” essential to the process of learning to look and looking to learn.

A scholarship student and athlete of the year at the University Laboratory High School on the campus of the University of Illinois, Cannon “was equally involved in science and architecture.” He went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture at the university, and some of his required studies endowed him with knowledge and skills that would come into play later in life. “My very rigorous art-history professor gave me some appreciation of Leonardo and Michelangelo, who were great architects as well as great artists. We also had to take classes in constructing perspectives, something a lot of artists struggle with understanding. And I did one semester of watercolor painting, too.”

Master’s degree in hand, Cannon worked for a few years at a large architecture firm in Champaign-Urbana before heading west to San Francisco. There he was hired by the internationally respected Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons, where he stayed for two decades, eventually becoming a partner. From the start, he specialized in the master planning of large projects and the redevelopment of cities in the U.S. and abroad; he spent a year in Saigon, while the Vietnam War still raged, working on plans for expanding the city by 25 percent. The logical discipline involved in such assignments, he says, still benefits him today in thinking through his paintings.

Despite frequent international travel for his work, Cannon relished the opportunity his new home base gave him to enjoy San Francisco Bay and the Pacific. “Growing up a Boy Scout in the middle of the cornfields, somehow I always wanted to be a Sea Scout,” he says. He learned to sail and also loved driving north along the sinuous coastal route of Highway 1.

About three decades after his one watercolor class in college, a friend in San Francisco got Cannon interested in revisiting that medium. He gave it a shot with brushes and paints he picked up at the flea market in Marin County one weekend. “I had a misconception of how an artist works, and no rhyme or reason about what colors to use except that skies are blue and grass is green,” he laughs. “I was awful.”

But he persisted, guided by mentors both in person and in print. Almost from the beginning, he painted weekly from live models, training his eye and honing his discipline. Around 1996 or 1997, he took a transformative workshop from esteemed watercolorist and teacher Jim Kosvanec, author of the respected guidebook Transparent Watercolor Wheel, who taught him to paint with a more limited palette—an approach, says Cannon, that “allows you a lot more control because there are fewer decisions to be made, and also gives the painting a lot of unity.” In a similar vein, Australianwatercolorist Robert A. Wade’s 1990 book Painting More Than the Eye Can See, discovered by Cannon in a used bookstore during a visit to Santa Fe, NM, helped him learn to add “substance and depth” to his scenes.

Then, a major turning point came in 1999 when he visited a show at the Carmel Art Association of the works of Percy Gray [1869-1952], a Bay Area painter. His watercolors of the Northern California natural world combined realism with an almost mystical, poetic sensibility. “The exhibition changed my life,” Cannon says simply. “That’s how I wanted to paint.”

Of course, Cannon found historical influences and inspirations as well, from 18th- and 19th-century British watercolorists like J.M.W. Turner and Thomas Girtin to the American master Winslow Homer.  Like those role models, he says, “I have ambitions to produce paintings that can stand on their own.”

Along the way, he amassed a library of about 800 art books and 250 DVDs, the majority of which focus on oil painting. “I’ve learned so much more from oil painters, who are more conscious of nuances in the landscape and of the color and light and edges, trying to get to the essence of their subjects,” Cannon says.

All that hard work and study began paying off. In 2001, Lee Youngman Galleries in the Napa Valley town of Calistoga began representing him. Around the same time, he held his own as one of only two watercolorists among 35 artists participating in the weeklong Sonoma Plein Air festival. Invitations to other respected events and organizations followed, including the satisfying news that all three of his submissions had been accepted into his first show with the prestigious Laguna Plein Air Painters Association. He also earned the admiration and support of Jean Stern, a board member of LPAPA as well as the executive director of the Irvine Museum Collection and a respected historian on California’s landscape and seascape art. “I’ve had paintings in both of his books,” says Cannon. “I’m always grateful to him.”

In recent years, Cannon found himself spending so much time at LPAPA events in Laguna Beach and at the California Art Club’s shows in greater Los Angeles, as well as shows in other Southern California venues, that he and his wife of 25 years, Sondra Sheftz, finally moved from their home in the Sonoma Valley to Santa Clarita, just an hour’s drive northwest of LA. “While I love painting the rugged coastline and rough surf of Northern California,” he says, “there was something very appealing about being able to stand on the beach in warm weather in a short-sleeved shirt—something I have never been able to do up north.” He also looks forward to seeing how the Southland’s more abundant sunshine will influence his paintings.

Regardless of where he may paint, Cannon continues to devote himself to depicting “the forces of nature that have always been my theme, whether the landscape or the motion of the water or the wind or the sky.” His ultimate goal, he says, “is to be the best painter that I can become, and to help in enhancing the stature of watercolors by exhibiting side-by-side with high-quality painters in other mediums. I want to paint the beauty of California and of nature in a way that will speak to those who follow me and who love both, as I do.”

representationLee Youngman Galleries, Calistoga, CA; Nancy Dodds Gallery, Carmel, CA.

This story was featured in the February 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art February 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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