By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

The paintings, acrylic and watercolor, are from locations all over the Bay Area, sweeping vistas of hillsides, seashores and waterscapes. All, the artist says, are within 40 miles of Benicia.

Marshall Lockman’s show at Benicia Plein Air Gallery, “New Looks at Local Scenes,” is a colorful and accessible tour of the area most of us think we know intimately.

Most of the paintings are acrylic, a medium Lockman, a longtime LIFE Magazine photographer and NBC cameraman who retired in 1989, has been trying out for the last couple years. “I think I’m getting the hang of it, maybe.”

He said the challenge of working with acrylic versus watercolor is in the different approach to light. “When you start with watercolors, the lights are saved, you save the white and keep getting darker. Acrylic is the other way around. You put the lights in last,” he said.

Yet some of the paintings in the new exhibit blur the line between acrylic and watercolor. “Bike Talk,” with its thick black lines, is an acrylic that looks like watercolor.

“You get bored with doing the same thing all the time,” Lockman, 87, said. “It’s a new look.”

All of which could be seen as a second career, albeit a more tranquil one after the adventures of the first.

As a LIFE photographer, Lockman remembers flying across the Bering Strait in the middle of winter “in a little Piper Cub to photograph Russian radar in Siberia” at the height of the Cold War.

Years later, working as a cameraman for NBC, he was across the street when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Chicago in 1968. “I didn’t witness it, but I was across the street when it happened. I rushed over there and photographed him being carried out.”

Still, “when I retired and went on to greater things,” he said.

Lockman has lived in Benicia for 13 years. He and his wife “came to Benicia by boat,” he said. A night’s stay in town made her proclaim a desire to live here.

A member of Benicia’s Da Group for the last five years, Lockman was one of the founding members of the Plein Air Gallery three years ago. He has been a member of the California Watercolor Association since 2000.

And now that his latest paintings are on display, he has a plan for what’s next.

“I’m going to rest!” he said.

If You Go
Marshall Lockman’s “New Looks at Local Scenes” is now on display at Benicia Plein Air Gallery, 307 First St. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. A reception for the artist will be Saturday from 5-7 p.m.