Snow in the Valleys

Dusting
Oil on canvas, 11x14

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

This morning, the dogs and I ran and romped and raced around the yard in the thick, wet snow. They scampered and played like puppies. Kaja rolled and rolled, a look of absolute delight on her face and I had to laugh at her and realize again - with joy - that this was the dog who, three months ago, I thought was at death's door.

There is revival in these cold, short days. The snow falls and blankets the earth, the birds flash gray and red and blue at the feeders, flower bulbs gather energy, trees rest, and we think of gardens and springtime and, at our best, we blossom in these winter whites.

The opening of the group show at the Emporium in Mystic, Conn., was fun and crowded. There were visitors aplenty, fine snacks and punch and a real feeling of holiday. One of my paintings sold, and while I could have wished for more, I am thankful for that one, and for the feeling of celebration and community that came with the evening.

The show will be up through the end of the month. There are paintings and sculptures and photographs in every price range - and what better gift than something made by a neighbor or a friend?

Thank you for reading.

Wildness Takes Over

Purple Haze. Oil on canvas, 8x10
sold

I have a thing about abandoned houses, especially ones I drive past or walk past, day after day. I construct lives for them, families and dogs, landscaping, decorations. As vines grow over them, and windows break, as roofs sag and paint chips and thins and fades, wistfulness grows in me, and the buildings seem to take on more life, not less.

This is a house on Route 17K, just outside Montgomery, N.Y. It's more abandoned than it looks in my painting. There's a big hole in the roof, and in front of the house stand the remains of a sign that once offered the house and its land for sale.

Even as the house sinks into its demise, and the yard grows up around it, it's taken on a wild sort of beauty, a harmony of color and chaos and the way of the world.

There's a song by Kate Wolf that I've always liked, "Carolina Pines," and that song ran through my heart as I made this painting.

Here are the lyrics; it's a pretty, pretty song:

Carolina Pines

Just an old house with the roof fallin' in Standin' on the edge of the field Watching the crops grow like its always done before Nobody lives here anymore The sun's going down on the Carolina pines I'm a long way from home I miss that love of mine broken windows empty doors Nobody lives here anymore Old memories come whistling like the wind Through the walls and the cracked window panes And the grass is growing high around the kitchen door Nobody lives here anymore Once there were children and a few hired hands A hard working woman and a bone tired man Now that old sun steals across a dusty floor Nobody lives here anymore

Eight to Two

Autumn in the Bashakill
Oil on canvas, 10x20.
Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

Several good things have happened in the past few days.

1. Kaja, our big old red dog, is doing better and better, day by day.

2. Sandy, at Center Framing & Art in West Hartford, Conn., loves the paintings I made for her, for the dog project. She's happy with my other dog paintings, too, and is going to give me the entire window of the store. She wants two of the paintings from the show at the Wallkill River School Gallery, too, a big lhasa apso piece and a small painting of a cat.

3. I had the fine good fortune to see the leading edge of autumn slip into the mid-Hudson Valley. Along the edges of the roads, purple flowers bloomed, leafy vines turned yellow, trees were burnished gold and copper, and a soft, sweet not-quite scarlet.

4. I had the good sense to drive through the Bashakill, and to take a chance with my schedule and stopped to paint. It was so entrancing, I'd have ached all day if I hadn't painted.

5. I took down my show and found that I'd sold four paintings. Yay!

6. I got to see Marilyn Bove, who was watching the gallery when I arrived to take my paintings down. We had a good talk, and we hugged, and I drove off.

Some bad stuff happened, too.

1. Twenty minutes after I'd left, Marilyn called to say I'd left a bag of paintings there. Crap. I turned around and went back.

(Another good thing:

7. When I went back, I got to see my friend Shawn Dell Joyce, a wonderful painter and one of the founders of the gallery.

Another good thing:

8. When I went back, I got to see my friend Jacqui Schwab, a wonderful painter, hanging her show. )

Another bad thing:

2. I pulled the van in to the gallery in West Hartford, and found that I'd left another bag of paintings in Montgomery. The big dog and the small cat that I'd promised Sandy.

So I turned around and drove right back.

See why I listed all the good things that have happened? To remind me that there's more to these past few days than two stupid, time-wasting forgetful mistakes.

Thanks for reading!

Sing a Song of Praise

Gone
Oil on canvas, 16x20

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

I've found myself thinking a lot recently about faith - in God, in nature, in human nature. Sunday was a worldwide plein-air paintout day, I found out, and as I made this painting, I wondered about Sunday painters, and what they do about church.

The thought came easily to me, then: This is my church, this plein-air world, and these paintings are my prayers, my faith made visible.

I don't want to make too much of a point of this, or scare anyone away, but I do believe that a power greater than me brought me to painting, out of the blue, at the age of 50 - and brought me to painting for a reason.

And so I paint, and I sing a silent hymn of thanks and of thanksgiving, for this world, the blue skies, the ever-changing landscape, the universe of humans who live upon this land.

Thank you for reading.

Pieces of the Heart

Red House. Oil on canvas, 11x14, $85.

Of course, I love it when people buy my paintings. But every time they do, I feel a little pang.

When I went back to Maine this week, and opened the door of the Denmark Arts Center, I actually said hello to my paintings. Sounds nuts, maybe, but I felt like I was seeing a bunch of old friends I hadn't seen in a while.

As I took my paintings down, my uncle said he felt something like this, too. He and my aunt and the other folks at the Denmark Arts Center loved having my paintings on their walls. My art brightened their rehearsals, cheered their meetings, added another element to their performances. My uncle said he'd miss my art.

When someone buys one of my paintings, they're buying the art, for sure. They're also taking home a little piece of my heart. And that's fine. It's good, even! After all, if I didn't put my heart into this, it would be worth nothing. So that little pang I feel, that's what it's all about, I think.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Edge of the Catskills. Oil on stretched canvas, 11x13, sold

Just out of the frame of this painting stands a snow fence. Hanging from it and propped on it are flowers, stuffed animals, mementos.

On a day close to graduation a few years ago, several teens from Port Jervis, N.Y., died there, in a car wreck.

This crash, and others that happened after and before, set the staff of the Times Herald-Record, the paper where I worked, on a mission to change teens' driving behavior. The project, Not One More, involved most of the staff, and was headed by the newsroom management team, composed of me, Mike Levine, Terry Egan and my immediate supervisor.

Looking for facts on this crash this morning when I posted this painting, I downloaded some pdfs of our work, and I must say I was a little stunned. I knew at the time that it was good. I knew that I was working with a group of people who were changing the way newspapers told stories, presented information, engaged with the community. I knew that we were doing important work.

I just didn't know how good it was. (To judge for yourself, click here. The work we did was before April 2007, in the pdf files in the center of the page. )

Now, that little management team is no more. Mike is dead. My job and Terry's job were eliminated in the first round of staffing cuts, in 2007.

Looking for the facts of the crash made me think this morning of journalism, and my career. Finding those pdfs set off in me a feeling somewhat like longing, or at least nostalgia.

Then, the phone rang. It was Gail Geraghty, one of my reporters in Maine. Now, she's working for the paper in Bridgton, and is writing a piece on me and my art for the paper there. Exciting!

She made a bunch of interesting points, discussing my painting, and I took particular heart in two - one, that in newspapers, I worked in a field that created community. Now, I'm doing the same thing - just in a different way.

The second point she made was this: It's liberating to be free of daily journalism!

Finally, Summer

Otisville Afternoon
 Oil on stretched canvas, 8x10, sold

At long last, summer has arrived, and I welcome it! I love the yellow light, the long shanks of evenings, the early gentle dawns. I love the heat and the sweat, the birds and the mosquitoes, the smell of the earth finally, finally warming.

It might be too late for most of the vegetables, and for many of the flowers. Oh, sure, we'll get something, but not a regular summer's worth. Still, the roses have loved these cool, wet weeks, and the impatiens have flourished, and here and there, the perennial seeds I planted have begun to poke through.

While I painted this, the sun warmed the grasses and the tips of the trees, and the shadows fell, blue and green on the yellow field, and it was something like a rainbow, splayed along the ground. What heaven.

Blue Evening

Otisville Park
Oil on stretched canvas, 6x12

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

A couple days ago, after a long day's work on the house here in New York, I treated myself to a dinner of steamed dumplings from the little Chinese place in Otisville.

For reasons I do not understand, we always end up living near good Chinese restaurants. I'd thought our luck would run out here, in Cuddebackville, but lo and behold, there's a wonderful if truly dingy place five minutes from our house.

So I got my dumplings and decided to dine in the car. I pulled up to a new little park just outside of bustling downtown Otisville, and watched the shadows fall.

The dusk gathered among the tree trunks, and spilled out onto the lawn, and soon enough, in the evening's blue quiet, two deer edged out from the woods and ate the newly planted grass.

Last night, when I returned to paint, there were no deer, but the shadows were as blue and as long and as lovely.

'The Drowned Lands'

Black Dirt, Looking North. Oil on stretched canvas, 10x20. sold

I did a stupid amount of work yesterday. My neighbor, Darryl, came over early, and we tore out carpeting and padding and loaded it into his truck. We pulled up staples, and we cleaned and swept and vacuumed. I finished the gardening, and spread wood chips and pulled an acre of weeds.

My reward was to go to the Black Dirt region to paint. I found an ideal spot, and made one painting looking south and another looking north. The views were simply breathtaking.

I talked to Darryl when I got back to our house.

"Where'd you go paint?" he asked.

"The Black Dirt," I answered, a little sheepishly, for I knew what was coming.

He shook his head and laughed a little. "You love that Black Dirt, don't you?"

Yup, I do. I'd paint there every day for the rest of my life if I could.

For those of you who don't live in Orange County, New York, the Black Dirt region is an agricultural mecca near Pine Island and Florida, NY.

Originally, it was called "the drowned lands." Eons ago, when the glaciers melted, they left an enormous, shallow lake here. The water receded gradually, and plants grew and grew and grew. German, Dutch and Polish immigrants eventually drained the soil, and found it incredibly rich with nutrients.

When we lived in Idaho, we'd see farmers burn the fields in the fall, to add nitrogen to the soil. The first time I drove through the Black Dirt, I thought that that was what I was seeing. The soil is absolutely black, as rich as any soil anywhere in the world.

Half of the onions grown in New York are grown in the Black Dirt. Many of the farmers who bring their produce to New York City to sell lease space in the Black Dirt. Lettuce, radishes, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, carrots, pumpkins, you name it, it's grown here.

Of Ears and a Nose

Black Dirt, Looking South. Oil on stretched canvas, 16x20

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

As I stood beside the road, painting, I began to imagine that I could smell corn. The sweet, soft, milky smell filled my nose, swept into my lungs, pushed the sense of spring and summer out to my heart, and my fingers and my toes. But no, I thought. It is too early for corn. And, hard as I looked, I saw none.

When my mother was alive, she delighted in sweet corn. A couple times every summer, we'd have whole dinners of sweet corn and tomatoes. Mom would boil an absurd amount of corn, heap it on a platter, and we would slather the ears with butter and salt and pepper, and the cobs would pile up and we'd eat until we couldn't stuff in any more.

But quintessential Mom is this: Time and again, summer after summer, she would pull the car over beside a cornfield, jump out, sneak to the edge of a field and take a couple ears of corn. She'd get back in the car, and we would shuck and eat those ears, reveling in their raw sweetness.

I was finishing my second painting of the day yesterday when the farmhands began to leave the fields. First, two carloads of them. Then came a truck loaded with... crates of corn. My nose had not been wrong after all. The smell of raw, fresh corn trailed after the truck and made me smile, remembering.

Thanks for reading!

Painting in the Park

Benedict Park
Oil on stretched canvas, 10x10

Call me at 860-442-0246 or email me

if you are interested in buying this painting

Benedict Park, in Montgomery, NY, is one of my favorite places in the world to paint. It's a beautiful park with the Wallkill River running through, past hills and valleys, pathways and forests and open fields, filled with flowers now in the early summer.

One of the last times I painted there was with the marvelous painter Gene Bove, who gave me my first lessons in oil painting and has continued to be an inspiration and a friend. Check out his website! We had a wonderful time painting, that autumn day, while people drove and walked, kayaked and ran with their dogs all over the park.

Yesterday, I went hesitantly to the park, figuring it would be filled with Fourth of July picknickers.

But I was alone.

So I stood on top of a hillside, and painted in the sun and the wind and the quiet of a solitary holiday, and I thought about a lot of things, including how lucky I am to be an American, and to have the chance to carve out this life.

Thanks for reading! And happy Independence.