Mesa

Mesa

10x30, oil on canvas

Please contact me for price and shipping/delivery information

Not so long ago, I was spreading paint sort of thinly on canvases. When I drove to Arizona, that's how I often painted. It was on that trip that I began using a LOT of paint, but many of the paintings from that trip have thin paint with flat surfaces.

As an experiment, I took this painting and, using the thin paint as a guide, repainted it. I slathered the paint on. I piled it up, and spread it thickly, and have ended up with a painting that I absolutely adore.

I should have taken a "before" photo. I have already done this to one other painting - without thinking of the "before" photo. But if I do it again, I promise I will take one.

Sometimes, with a feeling approaching despair, I look back at the ever-increasing span of "yesterday," and feel that I've wasted a whole lot of time and energy on ideas and pursuits that will never matter to me.

Doing something like this, though, makes me reconsider.

Yowza Cowza

Yowza Cowza

Oil on gessoboard panel, 8x8, $125 framed
sold

My life gets too complicated.

Well, that's not quite true.

I complicate my life, and I do it without knowing I am, and I am so, so good at it.

Really, in most of my life, I simply need to get from point A to point B, and that's it. No one cares if I do it in an inventive way, no one cares if I do it better than anyone else. No one cares if I do it creatively, or with great passion, or great energy. Get there. That's it. Get back.

If I can keep from complicating certain things (read: job), I can direct the creativity and the passion, the inspiration and the energy to my painting, where it belongs. I can direct the love to my family, and my dogs and cats, and my friends, where it belongs.

These cows don't complicate things for themselves. I can learn from them. I must.

Lavender Fields

Lavender Fields

Oil on canvas, 12x12, $100
sold

A year or so ago, I bought a painting by Patrice Lynne Young, a Georgia artist whose work I love. It was a painting of lavender fields rolling off to mountains in the background. I loved the painting and still do, and I look at it every day and appreciate it.

A year ago, in my show at the Wallkill River School, Shawn Dell Joyce and I demonstrated our painting techniques. I demonstrated palette-knife painting, using Patrice's painting for inspiration.

The painting here is the painting I started during that demo.

I began it and then invited people watching to participate, and lo and behold, they did! They all had fun, and for the most part, made marks that made sense in terms of the painting. A couple really didn't, and so I never finished the painting, never knew what to do with it.

But it has intrigued me for a year, and I have looked at it for a year, and so, one day last week, I pulled it out and went to town.

I guess it's fair to say that this is my painting - but it is my painting based on a painting by an artist whose work I love, and a painting informed and helped along by friends and strangers. And so, it is very much like life.

My show this year at the Wallkill River School - titled Rough at Hand, from a poem by Robert Hegge - is Saturday, Feb. 5 (not the 12th, as I had originally thought). Please save the date, and please come to the opening from 5-7 p.m. I will have new work, small work, big work, and exciting work! I think you will love seeing it in person, so please come, say hi, and let me thank you in person for your support.

Rough at Hand

Love is like a landscape which doth stand,

Smooth at a distance, rough at hand...

- Robert Hegge