Friday, October 4, 2013

A Week in Paradise with an old friend

Hey everyone, Guess where I am!

I'm sitting by the pool in my friend's house in Miami and I'm here for five more days. ML has a great sense of style and an eye for color, and it sure shows in her house. She collects all kinds of art and carvings and knickknacks and puts them everywhere - everywhere!

I'll get back to that.

AND she runs a B&B through AirBnB.com! For $50 per night (shared bath) you can book a stay right in Miami, central to everything and on a bus/metro line! Check it out: The Library Room at Maria-Luisa's.

I'm in the room called Welcome to Paradise. And you can't have that room until I'm gone!

AND she can serve the best coffee in the morning that I've ever had! (She's trying to teach me so I can take it home with me - more on that later, too.)

For now, just check this out:





Thursday, September 5, 2013

A Full Life

Every self-employed person knows that you are never off-duty when you work for yourself. And if you have a family nearby, time must be found for them. School, other projects, all of these choices made in life demand time.

Priorities must shift to accommodate events, and it is always a test of endurance to balance these different parts of a full life.

This evening in Ashland for the opening of the Gallery Flux "Art of the Horse" show.









Tuesday, August 20, 2013

What to say?

During the day, while I am working, or running errands or reading, I have so many ideas that would make for interesting reading here, but by the time I sit down to write, they have all fled, leaving not even shadows of what they had been. So, I sit in front of the screen, with nothing! Very frustrating.

This rivals the painting process. The flow of creativity works the same on canvas and on the keyboard, doesn't it? At least for me. When I am least expecting it, the painting surges ahead, taking wondrous new directions. When I am trying, sitting or standing, to produce something of interest, it seems as if I've hit a wall. They talk about 'runner's wall'. That's nothing to this kind of wall! Well, I suppose that's sort of inflated. They're probably just the same. A wall you fling yourself at over and over, until you break through or just give up. Yes. That sounds right.










Thursday, July 18, 2013

Emergency pond repair!

On the hottest day of the year, so far, my brother called: the great blue heron or a raccoon or some other misbegotten creature had punctured the new liner we'd installed in his fish pond just a couple of months ago - taking a full day's hard labor!

So, sun beating down, my brother began transferring the fish into kiddie wading pools at the break of dawn today, and I cam over with a harvest of thrift store comforters as soon as possible. Two hours of back-breaking labor later we were done. Experience pays. Along with some brilliant ideas from your truly which cut the fish return effort into just a few minutes from what had taken hours last time.

Yahoo! Looks great. And hopefully is now permanent.





Saturday, July 6, 2013

Full strength Summer

The studio warms up as the morning progresses. I keep the windows closed so that the heated air from outside stays outside, and have all the fans running. Being on the north side of the building, I don't have the sun coming in the windows, so I can last until about 2 or 3 pm before I am too hot, too sweaty, to move at all.

These days of summer, I work my way through a palette worth of paint at most. Sometimes I even leave paint on the palette and cover it with plastic wrap for tomorrow. Using up paint and running out of iPod battery power - these are indications that it is time to leave.

Lately, I have once again been struggling with what to paint. I am not in a block, but am not red-hot either.
I start my studio time by studying the photos I am interested in using as inspiration.
Sometimes - rarely - one will leap out and onto the canvas almost despite me.
Most of the time I shuffle through the sheets of paper, looking, feeling, trying to picture it. Then I settle on something and go to work.
Once I've begun, if it is going to work, I will fall into my working mode - singing (under my breath fortunately for anyone nearby!) and moving back and forth between the canvas and the palette and the photo and the stream of air from the fan.
Until the paint is gone or the painting is done or the heat has become too much to bear.

In any case, some new results from the past month's worth of work since my last entry:


         

    Farmer's Market Bounty I, II, and III


Morning Paper - final version

Antique American Landscape

Barefoot Picnic

Perched Above the Flood



Monday, June 3, 2013

All revved up and cranking them out!

Once again, each day seems only marginally productive, but then I turn around and look at the last month's worth of paintings and there's a lot there. Now for places to show them!

I'm doing something else different now, too.
When I am having trouble finding an image to paint, I turn and take a look at my older paintings. Sometimes I want to revisit a particular scene, sometimes an older painting spurs me to try something very different.
One of these (actually several of these) are from old and very old family photos (you'll know who you are!).

Cat Perch


House on the Strand


Morning Paper (reworked)


Universal Language


Magic Em


The Reading Lesson


Friday, May 24, 2013

Absent, but with an excuse!

This past week has been lacking in the painting department, but I do have a very good excuse!

I have been helping my brother expand his fishpond. The fish have been targeted recently by a beautiful but deadly great blue heron. So we decided to expand the pond and incorporate lots of underwater ledges and hiding places to give the fish a fighting chance.

Jim's estimate of fish population before this pond excavation began was about 40 - 50 fish.

When we got down to transferring them into the wading pools in order to reline the expanded pond, we found no more than 10, with only two larger than 5" long!

That heron is a superbly engineered fishing entity!

So, days later, and many hours of back-breaking work, and all that remains is cosmetic - for next week.











Saturday, May 18, 2013

Life and Death (and the hereafter of paintings)

So, the scythe of destruction has swept through my paintings and has transformed them into new, reincarnated canvases, with heavier textures and more complex histories.

Here are two, with old and new versions.


Old

New


Old


New





Monday, May 13, 2013

Danger Will Robinson, Danger!

OK, I am giving notice: I am in a genuinely dangerous mood. Paintings beware!
I am restless and bored with the same old, same old. This means it's time to recycle canvases.

New works:





Some in imminent danger:






Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Crazy spring

Love the fact that more people have stepped forward to help with the Open Studios.
But with each succeeding year, I get more burnt out. Would really like to be able to hand over the chairmanship of this event to someone else.