Recently I’ve had quite a few inquiries about my palette set up and how it works, but before I get into that I have do a wee bit of self promotion. This weekend I am teaching a 2 day painting workshop in Rockland at the Farnsworth Museum of Art. I think there are still a few spots left, so let me know if you are interested.

Now on to the palette…  This is something I made myself, to be the best possible solution to my own needs. It’s not perfect, but if someone wants to make something similar these photos might help. The palette is 13×26″ and has a wooden cover. The sides are made of pine with a channel cut into them to slide the top into. Both the top, and the palette surface are made of thin oak ply. There is a small support piece glued to the top to keep the cover from pushing down  in the middle where the top would have the most flex. When the cover is removed, I use a bungee cord to attach it to the easel. Hopefully the pics below will show all of this.

This past weekend I taught a fun class at River Arts in Damariscotta, ME. They were a great group and we really lucked out with some decent weather.

I wanted to mention again a few of my classes that are coming up this summer. Below is a current schedule for this summer.

May 19-20
Farnsworth Art Museum
207 596 6457
Rockland. ME
This will be a two day class similar to this past weekend, but on my home turf of Rockland, ME. And the Farnsworth has great classroom space if we do get forced inside by the rain.

August 13-17
Farnsworth Art Museum
Workshop retreat at Nebo Lodge
207 596 6457
North Haven, Maine
Nebo Lodge is a great b+b on North Haven, an island in Penobscot Bay. We will take the ferry out Monday morning and have the week to live and work together, sharing meals and stories outside of class time. North Haven is a quiet and beautiful island.

September 10-14
Coastal Maine Art Workshops
207 594 4813
Rockland, Maine
This class sold out with a long waiting list, so we added another 5 day class the week of September 24-28. These 5 day classes are a fun week with lots of challenging projects to work on different aspects of our painting each day. We visit some of the places I paint when I am on my own.

October 6-8
Haystack Mountain School
207 348 2306
Deer Isle
Part of their Open Door Workshop weekend. I have always heard great things about Haystack, and I am excited to experience it myself this year. There will be other workshops going on this same weekend, so we can share the weekend with people studying other disciplines. Students stay at Haystack, with all meals prepared for us. We will have a nice long weekend to paint this beautiful part of Maine, and work on improving our plein air skills.

A week ago I was looking for a place to paint on an incredibly windy day, and decided to look for shelter in the woods of Camden Hills State Park. My wife pointed this tree out last time we hiked as a good painting subject. It was a fun challenge painting this downed tree because of all of the interesting color relationships. There is cool light and warm shadow on the trunk, and a mostly cool cast shadow. The sapling that has been pushed down also creates an interesting spatial relationship.

I also want to mention the Liebstar Blog Award I was given by another blogger, Brian Cameron. This is an award that is passed from blogger to blogger. When you are awarded the award you are supposed to link to the three blogs you want to honor. This gives an opportunity for us to share new images and ideas. Since most of my favorite bloggers are either well known already, or are not posting very often anymore. So I am sharing some of my favorite sites that are not

Powers of Observation
This is a great site for seeing some interesting approaches to realist painting. The blogger, Catherine Kehoe, also posts slide shows of different themes, which are a great way to get exposed to even more painters.

In the Make
This blog is a view into artist’s work through their work space. I love seeing how different people set up their studio and the little windows that gives us into their process. This is a fun one to spend some time browsing. Lots of different types of art here also.

Painting Perceptions
I have mentioned this site on this blog before. There are some in-depth interviews here and good links to look into. He has interviews with artists whose work and thoughts I respect. I particularly recommend Ken Kewley’s notes on color, and interviews with Stuart Shils.

Last fall I painted this in the weeks before my daughter was born. This is a painting that I was unsure of when I finished it. I thought it was ok, but did not really love it at the time. This past weekend I was cleaning up my garage and stumbled onto it again. I was surprised at how much I like it now. I am really happy with the composition and movement through the painting. Funny how perceptions of our own work can change so much.

I found this barn the other day when I was looking for a subject. I enjoy the shape and color  of weathered old barns like this, but what I really like here is the pile of junk in the foreground. This place was a run down piece of property with tons of trash scattered around. A place like this, with old junk around is so much more interesting to make a painting of than a well groomed landscape.

I have fun with these orchid paintings and playing with how the flowers look against different colored backgrounds. This one is posing in front of another painting so I could have a fun green to play the flowers off of. I also enjoyed painting the leaves of the spider plant in this one. It was a challenge figuring out how much to simplify that mass of information with all of those leaves.

In the previous poll question I asked which form of expression has been the most moving for you. With 102 votes the results were:

painting 66%
music 15%
writing 7%
photography 6%
dance 3%
theater 2%
sculpture 1%

My wife says I should not be surprised by these results, since this is a blog about painting. But I have to admit I am a little surprised. I love making paintings, and I do find them moving and exciting, but I also have had more intense reactions to other forms of art. For me, music is consistently the art form that stirs strong emotions. I do not have as deep of an understanding of it, and I am amateurish at making music, but I find a strong connection to it. I have occasionally seen a painting bring someone to tears, and I am always interested to see that. I think part of my vote here has to do with the way I look at art. I spend my whole life trying to analyze paintings and problem solve my own work. Maybe that makes it harder for me to have a truly emotional reaction to a painting/drawing? I don’t know. But it was fun to see the way people were voting. If anyone had a specific piece of art they were thinking of when answering this poll, I would be curious to hear what it was. Maybe you could mention it in the comments below so others can see too.

I have two orchids in the house, and I love the shape of the plant, the stem, and the flowers. They also look great in different kinds of light. I am not painting many still lifes these days, but they are still a fun project on a rainy day.

So, I am posting a new poll question: Do you find better results when you wait for inspiration to make art, or do you prefer to work regardless of inspiration and see if you can make something of it? Sorry for the delay in posting it simultaneously with this blog post. I look forward to seeing your answers.

This is about 20×48″, and was painted out in Hope on a friend’s property. I had fun with the brushwork and color on the back half of the truck, as compared to the realism on the front half. While looking for a good vantage point for this painting, I found that I liked being close to the truck, which gave me a kind of fish-eye lens perspective. This makes for an odd composition, but I like it.

One of my first winters in Maine was spent working on the still life. As a landscape painter, I was a little unsure where to start. I found I really enjoyed the color of ornate tablecloths and the view of the table from above… a more aerial perspective. The tablecloth in each painting set a sort of color scheme for that painting. It was tough, but also fun to play around with the objects and the design of each composition also.

Looking back on these paintings, these are my favorites because they are simpler and more graphic than some of the others.

While living at the beach in New Jersey, I started painting plein air more often, and also developed a series of paintings of the screen porch. I looked at Matisse quite a bit and worked towards capturing the differences in color between interior and exterior light.

This screen porch was a great subject to play with. For one the architecture of the room was a great framing element to organize the space. The view of the landscape outside is a series of sand dunes with sparse vegetation, which also made for some interesting shapes.

There are parts of these paintings that I still enjoy very much. I think they have a great energy and spirit to them. There are also things I wish I could change, but that is true with almost every painting I see again after a few years away from it. I guess that is the nature of the beast with painting, but it also makes me feel vulnerable posting some of these older images. It’s weird posting paintings that I am proud of, but also are things that I did 10+ years ago.