Talking about art...

I have a few art talks coming up, and I hope to see some of you there. This Wednesday I will be at the Thomaston Public Library from 7 to 8pm showing slides of my paintings and sharing stories about my work. On Saturday, August 6th I will be one of the presenters at a Pecha Kucha event in Belfast, Maine. These are really fun nights where each presenter has 20 slides  and 20 seconds per slide to talk. There is a diverse group of presenters and it should be a great night. This will be held on the lawn at Waterfall Arts, with presentations starting around 8pm.

Also, I have a solo show coming up in Ellsworth at Courthouse Fine Art Gallery. The opening is 5pm Wednesday, August 10th, and I will be giving a talk about the work in that show at 5:30pm August 24th.

I also have a lot of work at Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland, ME, including the image in this post. The painting above is Squirrel Head Light, 16×20″. Dowling Walsh always has a lot of my work on display and is happy to pull out more paintings if you are interested.

Gills Rock...

This is another painting from my trip to Door County. At the far tip of the peninsula is a little fishing village called Gills Rock. It’s a pretty quiet waterfront, but it made for some fun painting. The work boats out there are really odd looking compared to what I am used to in Maine. Their fishing boats have really long flat decks, or are sometimes completely roofed in on top and look like a loaf of bread floating around. I preferred the shape of the two boats in this painting.

The heat while in Wisconsin was incredible. I spent a lot of time feeling overheated, standing in the sun in the middle of the day trying to get paintings finished. Frank Gardner and I were painting in Gills Rock on a day when it must have been in the high 90′s, and now, back here in Maine I had to put on a sweatshirt today to keep warm while boating around Penobscot Bay.

Door County Plein Air Festival...

This painting won first place last week at the Door County Plein Air festival. I had a great time with all of the artists, especially Frank Gardner, who I spent much of my time  painting with. We both painted this car at night, using small clip on lights to see our palettes and paintings. Frank did some great work at the show and won the artist’s choice award. The whole week was wonderful. The people in Door County are friendly, the venue for the event is a nice space, and the organizers at the Peninsula School of Art do a great job taking care of us. I heard several artists saying how impressed they are by how smoothly this event is run. The paintings will remain on display through August 13th. There was some very strong painting this year, so if you are heading out that way I would encourage you to stop by and see the work.

Boatyard...

There are a few things coming up that I want to let everyone know about. I will be doing a few talks about my paintings this summer and showing my work in a few exhibitions.

From July 18-23rd I will be at the Door County Plein Air Festival in Wisconsin. This is a fun event with some great artists participating. I’m excited that this year I will have some good friends coming for the first time, Frank Gardner and Logan Hagege. These guys are great painters, and if you are anywhere nearby you should come to see what they paint, along with all of the other artists.

I also have a show coming up at Courthouse Fine Art in Ellsworth, Maine. I am showing several larger paintings that I am really excited about, so if you get a chance I hope you can stop by the show. The opening will be August 10th from 5-7pm and I will be giving a gallery talk August 24th.

And lastly, I will be a part of the summer lecture series at the Thomaston Library here in mid-coast Maine. I will be doing a slide talk and sharing ideas about my work on Wednesday, August 3 from 7-8pm.

I also always have a lot of work at Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland, Maine. I have been leaving quite a bit of new work at the gallery so come to Rockland and see what the gallery has up.

The painting above is a boatyard in Rockland. I love the perspective I could get from this spot, looking down onto the boats and the yard. This one is 16×12″.

Swimming Hole...

It was incredibly hot today, and I spent the day struggling with a couple of paintings outside. I was trying to play around with the color scheme of my paintings and I had a lot of trouble. I started over a few times before finally getting some decent work done. I did not feel great about my work because of the heat and the frustration of uneven results. When I got rested and had a second look at today’s painting I realized I had actually done some decent work, and figured some things out. I wanted to choose colors in the painting that would help accent one moment of the scene, and also would help set a tone for the feeling of a hot and hazy day in the summer. Even small shifts in how I want to approach painting a scene can be really hard to incorporate, but also they can be really beneficial to improving my paintings. I feel like I learned a couple of good lessons today, even though it was hard work to get there.

The painting above is from Blue Hill. It will be in the show at Courthouse Fine Art in August.