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

Storm

Storm

Oil on canvas, 36x48

Please contact me for price and delivery information
sold

It's the last night of 2010, and it's been an interesting year.

It has been a year rich in experience and in choices. I've gone from painting full-time to working more than full-time to learning, bit by bit, day by day, how to balance the two.

I've done something I swore I'd never do again - go back into journalism. But it's an entirely new sort of journalism, and barely feels like the same thing.

And while I am enjoying it, it is entirely too easy for me to be sucked in again.

What I want is to paint, to make my living painting. It is that simple and that huge, and I am on my way.

During this year, my faith and spirituality have developed to a point where I feel that I am prepared to continue this quest, and make progress at it, while still making my living in journalism. I must say that my family and my friends are doing all they can to support me in this - and I thank heaven for that support every day.

Each of you who reads this blog is part of this, too. Every eye, every heart, every mind that sees my work adds to my momentum and my success.

So, that is my resolution: To keep painting in the center of my life, in the center of my heart, in the center of all that I do.

Happy new year to all - and thank you.

Italian Hilltop Farm

Italian Hilltop Farm

Oil on gessoboard panel, 4x4, $75 framed

OK, continuing the joke, "campo grande, casa poco." That's "big field, little house" in Italian. 

Now that I can fly, I find myself wanting more and more to go to Italy. We have too many dogs, but the promise of Italy is the one good thing that I can see when I look ahead and see the deaths that are certainly coming. 

This winter is the first that Kaja hasn't greeted the first snow - and every snow - by flopping on her back and rolling around. In fact, she stumbled in the snow this morning and needed help to get up. 

But just when I think it is the end for her, she will do something like this: We decided to take her and a couple of the others out for a walk. Where we expected Kaja to turn back, she insisted on continuing. She climbed up a hill and then tramped on down the other side. I had to run to get ahead of her to turn her back toward home, and even then, she stumped purposefully past the turn-off and I had to run ahead of her and turn her again. (She is stone deaf, so there's not calling her). 

So, Italy is something, but I'd rather have my old, stinky, arthritic dog. 

Ledyard Farm

Ledyard Farm

Oil on canvas panel, 4x6, $75 framed

The first snowfall of the season came the day after Christmas, and it was a humdinger - mostly because of the wind.

On Monday, I was out in it all day, writing stories and freezing my butt off.

Tony Bacewicz, a wonderful photographer who worked for the Hartford Courant for 35 years, is freelancing for Patch, and he was out in it, too, shooting in Ledyard. He took a photo of this farm, and gave me permission to paint it.

I'm doing a large version of it, but did the mini first. It made me laugh a little, as I realized how much it is another in my "Big Field, Little House" series.

Maryland Dawn

Maryland Dawn

Oil on gessoboard panel, 5x7, $75, framed

sold

As I write this, the sun is starting to set, and it's spilling over the snow, throwing long blue shadows over the undulating surface of the yard. The wind blew our plastic Adirondack chairs over. Squirrels and bunnies have left tracks in the snow, as have hundreds and hundreds of birds.

I am starting to find a rhythm here, and I think it is working. I've been able to paint for most of the days of the past couple weeks. Not every day, and not for the entire day, but for most of the days, and for enough time to make progress. 

I've begun doing these small pieces, minis, as Lori at Center Framing & Art calls them, and I find they are good for limbering up, and for finding where the problems will arise if I do the painting larger. Also, people like them and buy them. 

I am gearing up for the first show of the year, which for me is in February at the Wallkill River School, with artist and teacher and animal lover Susan Miiller. Save Saturday, Feb. 12, which as far as I know, is the date of our opening. It's going to be an excellent show, with landscapes large and small - and animals galore!