Mark your calendars! 2012 Shows

I've just scheduled 2012 --

I will be part of a two month group show in January - February 2012 at Har Shalom Congregation in Potomac, Md.

In June 2012, I will be part of a group show at the Ratner Museum in Bethesda, Md.

September 2012 will be my next solo show at the Foundry Gallery. BIG paintings are in my sights.

On an ongoing basis, I'll have work at the Foundry Gallery's group shows.

Quartermaine's Next Steps

There's something unsettling about painting a coffee shop before you've had your morning coffee. I almost left the paint in the car and went in to get coffee, forget this painting stuff. But the weather was beautiful and the work had to get done. I added people sitting at the tables, juiced up colors, light and shadow. There's some refinement to be done (how sad that I painted the name of the store without the "m" and need to fix that up) and maybe the blue umbrellas will come and seem like a good thing to add... or not.

Pizza Boxes & Jumper Cables

I learned two things while in Maine:

1. you can buy empty pizza boxes and transport wet paintings in them -- this is a wonderful thing;

2. if your car dies and you pop the hood, every grizzly bearded guy in the state will stop to give you a jump. And when the jump doesn't work, they will happily diagnose your problem, offer a ride, whatever you need. I think there's a reality tv show in there somewhere. Happily, for $35, the problem was solved by "Big Al" and I am eternally grateful.

Loose in Maine

I can't describe -- so here's a photo -- how spectacular the porch is of the house I'm in. I had time to paint this morning on a sparkling day and there were five Windjammers anchored right off the beach. They departed while I was painting, but I tried to catch a few just before they left. After last week's workshop, I felt a need to loosen up some more (bigger brush).

Maine Workshop

I had the amazing good fortune to paint this past week with artist/teacher Christine LaFuente -- christinelafuente.com -- in a workshop run by the Acadia Workshop Center.

Rossdhu Gate, before the rain

This is how far I got before the rain started this morning. Close, maybe close enough, to being done.

Quartermaine's Coffee Sketch

This painting is being done as a commission for Quatermaine's Coffee to use in a future marketing campaign. I've been waiting to start it in anticipation of blue umbrellas coming to the patio, but my time is short and the flowers are at peak state, so I got it underway this morning. The inclusion of the railing that curves along the patio is to add depth to the painting. I may be adding some people to the painting as it progresses.

Perspective, Looking up at a House

I had a small deck to stand on, looking up to paint this old Vermont house. When the sun got high enough in the sky to get past the roofline, it was impossible to look up and the glare obscured the view. I had to paint early in the morning and I didn't have nearly enough time to do it.

Like all these old houses, this house has a front section, a kitchen wing off of that and then a barn attached to the kitchen. Renovation has turned the barn into a really nice living space.

To get the full perspective on the foreshortening of the different segments of the house, I'd have had to stand back further -- an impossibility since there's a steep drop-off from the deck.

In this as well as the other Vermont photos/paintings, I used the camera in my phone for the images. Not as good as my normal digital camera and I think the color is a little off.

Here's a first sketch and the painting as far as I could take it.

House Painting in Vermont

I took up a spot across the street from the house -- here's what I was looking at and how I painted it. The hardest aspects to this painting were 1) making the street go downhill (it's a steep one); 2) using my sensibility to create the color of the house down the hill .. and having to use sense to make the house I was painting the right shade of gray to match the owner's view; and 3) 97 degree heat in Vermont.

In the winter, you can see the Village Green down the hill. It was peeking through the trees in the lush summer leaves, but I gave the landscape a little pruning so you can see the green a bit more in the distance.

I loved that you can see the mountains surrounding Woodstock beyond the houses.

Busy Week in Vermont

I was up in Vermont, really on vacation, but with the plan to paint at least one work -- the house I was staying in. While I was working on that painting, a man stopped by, asked if I'd paint the house he lives in. It was just up the hill, an 1800s bungalow that will be torn down in the next month by its owners.

There were so many interesting emotional aspects to this painting. In front of the house was a huge woodpile, clearly the result of many hours of hard work chopping wood. The house was surrounded by a spectacularly colorful garden with a rich array of perennials and annuals in such abundance that even hungry deer couldn't diminish its beauty (although you could see how they'd been feeding off the sunflowers!). And there was this old house, a survivor on its last days, showing its age. I took the photo from a little different angle than the spot where I'd painted, and you can see that I edited the view a bit to include more of the garden.

It was a wonderful experience, including the bouquet of flowers left for me on the front porch by the man who'd commissioned the painting.