"Jedi"

Jedi I

8"x8" oil on Raymar panel

Jedi II

8"x8" oil on Raymar panel 

Above are two versions of a painting I've done as a gift for some friends. The first one is the value under painting with lots of burnt sienna (transparent) and white canvas. In the second version, opaque paint has been used over all. I'd love your opinion on the two, email or comment please! (And try to ignore the higher quality photograph on the first one.)

I'm even further behind on posting, so you'll see a few more over the next week.

Royal River Bandwagon Collaborative Portrait

My painting of section bwe4 of the Royal River Bandwagon Collaborative Portrait

8"x8" oil on panel

As many of you know, I do a lot of teaching at Artascope in Yarmouth, which is part of the Bickford Education Center (BEC). As part of an upcoming fundraiser, we are making a collaborative portrait of the Royal River Bandwagon. I've seen a couple of Susan Bickford's earlier collaborative portrait projects and was excited to participate in this one. She blows up a photograph, then cuts it into a grid of pieces. Participants take one piece each, and reproduce it using their chosen medium. The resulting pieces are put into a frame with metal backing with small magnets. The result is very very cool. Check out Susan's collaborative portrait website and this article about one of her projects. Many of them have been portraits of people, rendered in black and white. This one is the portrait of a vehicle, and we are going for color.  Hopefully I'll be able to show the whole thing in an upcoming post.

Doubling Point Light House

Doubling Point Lighthouse

8"x8" oil on Raymar panel

Don’t you just love lighthouses? I do. It’s easy to imagine them lighting the way in a storm. And then there's the solitude of the lighthouse keeper’s life. That would probably last about a day for me! Lighthouses can also be fun to paint. They show different faces as the sun moves across the sky and the tide ebbs and flows. When we’re out on our boat, I always have the camera ready when a lighthouse comes into view.

A few years ago my niece and I took a road trip with a goal of visiting as many lighthouses as we could. This little gem, on the Kennebec River, just south of Bath, Maine, was one of our favorites. It was commissioned in 1989, fifteen years after the founding of Bath Ironworks, just upstream. It’s not much taller than a person, and is just exquisite. You can walk out and around it, over the water It’s easy to get to by road, and the lovely people who own the property will likely let you park, but please ask first. Or, you can see it from one of the tour boats that operate out of Boothbay Harbor, along with several other lighthouses. It's a great boat ride. This painting was done from of several photos I took as we went by on our boat a couple of years ago.

Here’s some more information about the lighthouse, and about the boat tours.

And by the way, I painted this one mostly upside down. More about that in a future post.

"Gift Box" - Day 2 of Leslie Saeta's Workshop

"Gift Box"

8"x8"

oil on Gessobord

Day 2 of Leslie Saeta's palette knife painting workshop was a great learning experience. We are all getting a better feel for the knife in our hand, and learning to hold it up to the painting and I'm lagging behind. Afterwards, Leslie made dinner for all 14 of us, which was a very special treat!

"Churchy At LowTide"

 

"Churchy At Low Tide"

8"x8" oil on Raymar panel

plein air

$250

Color block-in

Value Underpainting

This week I've been taking a walk to our family cottage in the afternoons to see where the tide has deposited each of the rowboats. Every day it's different. Today, Churchy was in a nice position to paint her from the rocks. I wanted to use what I learned last week with Anne Blair Brown, so I did a value study in burnt sienna, then a color block in, and finally looked for shapes within the shapes (this last is the hardest part for me). I think I am starting to get it.

"A Summer in Maine" at the Artist Cottage

"With Pie"

8"x8" oil on Raymar panel

$300 framed

"Lucky Lady III"

10"x10" oil on Raymar panel

$385 framed

I'm delighted to let you know that two of my paintings have been accepted for the "Summer in Maine" exhibit at the Artist Cottage on Cousins Island in Yarmouth, ME. The cottage is a summer rental and event venue filled with art for sale on one of our Casco Bay islands accessible by bridge from the mainland. A beautiful spot for a bike ride or a beach walk, if you can't stay overnight.

Reduction Woodcut Printing with Don Gorvett - Day 1

Drawing with three values

Wood block, with channel and registration pins on the left

I'm fortunate this week to be studying print making with Don Gorvett. What Don does is called reduction woodcut printing, because the image is cut into a wood block, and more of the wood is cut away as each layer of ink is applied to the prints. The result is as dramatic as it is beautiful.

The top image is a drawing in three values that I made before heading to Don's studio this afternoon. I painted this scene earlier this year, and still love it. It seemed like it would make a good woodcut print. Don showed me how to transfer the drawing to the block he prepared for me, and how to put in the registration pins (sticking through the gray tabs at the left end). Tomorrow we are going to print the first color, I'm still thinking about whether there will be 3 plus white or just three colors. It's really fun!

"Two Sunflowers"

"Two Sunflowers"

8"x8" oil on Raymar panel

SOLD

I love sunflowers, and buy them at the farmer's market and the grocery store. I've had a couple of beautiful bunches in vases here for the last couple of weeks, but last weekend at the farmer's market there were no more.