Golden Fields

Golden Fields

Oil on black canvas, 36x60

Please click here to email me for price and availability

I work hard to take good photographs of my paintings, and for my birthday, Peter gave me a good camera, a real camera (not just my phone). I'm still learning my way around it, and can already see that it's going to help. 

The one thing I can say is that, in most instances, if there has to be a gap between the quality of the paintings and the quality of the photographs, I'd rather have the paintings look better in real life than vice versa! 

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I'M HEADING TO New England on Wednesday, to take part in the Paradise City Arts Festival in Northampton, MA. The show runs from Saturday through Monday at the Three County Fairgrounds, 54 Old Ferry Road, Northampton. I'll be in Booth 909, in the Arena Building. It's a really fun show, filled with high-end art and craft, beautiful stuff. There is an entry fee, but there's a coupon for a discount on the website. And one of my paintings is featured on the webpage about the show!

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Yes! Cowart Street! I should have gotten someone to take a photo of me with a cowscape beneath this sign. Next time I'm in Chattanooga, for sure! 

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Dog of the Day

This is Lisle's cat, looking affronted that I dared to drive down her street 

here in Wachapreague. She marched along in front of the car 

for quite some time, until she finally headed to a lawn, 

where she could stare at me accusingly. 

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A Final Thought

"Art and love are the same thing: 

It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you." 

- Chuck Klosterman

Golden

Golden

Oil on canvas, 12x12, commission

It's safe to post all the Christmas commissions now. I don't think any giftees were looking at the site, but you never know. Don't want to spoil any surprises!

I really enjoyed this series of Christmas commissions. It was a lot of work to do in a short time, 11 paintings in a couple weeks, but I am often at my best - in painting, writing, speaking, cooking - when I work quickly, in a whirl, without doing a lot of thinking.

I noticed decades ago, working as a reporter, that when I came in from an event and sat down and wrote a story on deadline, handed it off to an editor and walked away, those stories were inevitably the ones that got the most response - and the most positive response - from readers.

The same goes with paintings, I am finding.

The ones that I think about, and mull, the ones I plan and push at, the ones that seem to call for detail and rethinking and redoing, these are the ones people don't buy. They elicit no response on the blog. While I might like them, and value them for a technique I was trying or an idea I was working on, collectors tend not to respond.

I've always believed that when I am doing my best work, I am merely a conduit. "I" vanish. My hands continue to work, to paint or write or cook. My eyes keep working. But my brain seems to go away, and take my hearing with it, along with my sense of my corporeal self.

When I surface, in an hour or two or three, I find that time has gone, too.

The piece I've made - a painting, a story, a dish - is as much a surprise to me as it is to the viewer, the reader, the diner. And so it is a thing of wonder, a thing not of myself, but through myself, a connection with nature, a higher power, God, whatever terminology you'd like to use to describe the thing that is greater than us all.

"Golden" was like this. It's one of the best of the Christmas commissions I made, I think. I started to paint, and then in a while I looked up, and there was this painting, whole, expressive, shining. A little miracle. A golden little miracle.