FAN Gallery Opening on Fri July 3rd...

Tomorrow evening, July 3rd, I will be heading to the F.A.N. Gallery in Philadelphia for the opening reception for my current show. The gallery is at 221 Arch St, and I’m really happy with how the show looks, so if you get a chance, you should stop by and check it out. The show is half Maine paintings and half Philly scenes. Both of the paintings above are in the show. The top one is a painting of Higgins Beach in Maine, and the bottom one is a scene of Boston common.

I’ll still be running around a bit for the next month, but this week has been a great break from the constant stress of painting and framing and delivering work to galleries. I’ve been hanging out at the beach in New Jersey, and I’m loving the warm water and sunny days. Surfing has been pretty good, the food has been excellent, and I’ve been able to visit alot of family. Not a bad little break!

Getting ready for the next show...

This weekend I’m driving down to Philadelphia to hang a show of my work at the FAN Gallery, 221 Arch St. The show will be mostly hung on Sunday, and will be hanging for the month of July. The gallery is open from Wed to Sun, from 12-6pm.  This show is a mix of paintings from Maine and Philadelphia. I really hope you get a chance to stop by if you are in the area, and if you can make the opening reception, it is the evening of Friday July 3rd, so stop by and say hi.The images above are all paintings that will be in that show.

Also, you can see my work hanging at the Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth, ME in a group show. And the Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland, ME has a two-person show right now, with me and David Vickery. The opening for this show was a blast, and I’m really pleased with how it looks. Go check it out if you can.

Busy...

Front Yard Flowers 30×40″ sold.

I haven’t had much time for updating the journal lately, so I thought I would jsut throw this image up with a quick update of what I’ve been doing. Things are a bit hectic for me this time of year, and I’m just trying to keep up with all of the work. There are a few main events taking up alot of my time.
I have a show coming up at the Dowling Wlash Gallery in Rockland, ME. That show just got hung in the last few days, and the openign reception is coming up next Wed, June 17 from 5-8pm. This is a show of my work along with David Vickery’s. It’s taken alot of work getting everything ready for the show and delivered to the gallery, but it’s been worth it. Jake (gallery owner) is alread making some sales from this show, which is great news!

I also have a show coming up in July in Philadelphia at the FAN Gallery. I have most of the painting done for that show, but I still have alot of framing and prep work to do before delivering the paintings. I’m spending alot of time in the studio getting ready for these shows, and still stretching and priming canvases for future paintings.

And the other big event, which is coming up this weekend, is a workshop I’m teaching at the North River Arts Society in Marshfield HIlls, MA. This will be a two day workshop, which should be a lot of fun, but first I have to get all of my stuff together for my plans.

There are more shows coming up later in the summer, which I’ll talk more about later, like shows of my work at the Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth, ME… a show at the Addison Gallery on Cape Cod… a Plein Air Festival in Door County, WI…
I have to go get to work before I get overwhelmed thinking about all of this!

Morning Surf...

I’m back from Higgin’s Beach, where I’ve been surfing and painting for the last week. It was alot of fun being at the beach, and painting some new scenes. I also had fun playing in the water. Now that I’m back, I’m getting thrown right back into reality with the rush of trying to get work ready for my upcoming show at the Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland. I can’t wait to see the show hanging, and I’m looking forward to dropping off the last few pieces.

Things around here are a little hectic, but I’m managing to get the garden off to a good start again this year. Hopefully the weeds won’t get out of control again as the summer picks up.

Beach painting...

Monday I loaded up my car for a “painting” trip as you can see above. Actually, I have been doing mostly painting since the waves are flat right now. The surfboards are sitting idle. Yesterday I got a bit of painting in to make the most of the sunshine. Below is the painting I was working on into the evening, despite the freezing cold breeze off the ocean, and the fading light. You can see in the photo how much warmer and sunnier the painting is than the view. It started off sunny with beautiful warm light on the rocks and water, so I decided to stick with that. I’m pretty happy with this painting. I’ll try to get a good pic of it posted when I get home from this trip.

Sorry to leave such a short post, but I have to get back to the house to meet a buddy who’s coming down to surf this afternoon, and I have some homemade cookies that someone made me for this week… YUM!

Cezanne in Philly....

Cezanne painting of Mont-Saint Victoire.
On my recent trip to Philly I managed to get to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the show “Cezanne and Beyond.” The show turned out to be a wonderful surprise. I kept reading that it was a great show, but I thought it would be hard for the show to measure up to the hype. I was happy to see how much work was there, and how many of the paintings were really lovely pieces in their own right. The intent of the show is to explore Cezanne’s influences on a wide range of artists, from Matisse to Giacometti to Gorky to Ellsworth Kelly, and 15 others. Some of the connections between Cezanne and those he influenced seemed like a stretch to me, but my interest in the show had less to do with those connections and more to with the quality of the work. I loved a room that focused on the still life, with some paintings by Matisse, Cezanne and Charles Demuth. There were also some great landscapes and figures… but what grabbed me in any of these was not the subject matter as much as the execution of the painting; the spirit of the endeavor to make a painting of an apple and do everything possible to capture the essence of that apple. It’s not about rendering every piece of the subject in perfect detail, but trying to convey what it is about that object that moves them. Some of the paintings were so simple, but had a powerful presence. Some of the works in this show may have been ground breaking when they were made, but I think that the reason they still hold the interest of artists today is that they are capturing something wonderful and moving about the world that we can’t verbalize, but will feel when we look at the painting with open eyes and an open heart. There is a resonance in these works that is so much more important than anything we say when we try to describe our work or justify it in an artist’s statement (something I’m trying to work on these days.) The things we talk about when we describe our work are important and are often great reasons for making the paintings, but they are less interesting to me than that quiet power that an excellent painting can have…some kind of  a deeper beauty. That all comes back to why I was so surprised to get excited about this show. I knew that there was a good chance that the premise of the show would require it’s curator’s to hang some works that fit their idea, but were not necessarily top-tier paintings. There was some of that, but for the most part, I think they did a wonderful jobof putting together a show that gave me pause several times, as I had to stop and lose myself in a Van Gogh landscape, or a Giacometti sculpture, or a Matisse still life, or one of Brice Marden’s large lyrical abstractions, or a small colorful canvas by Gorky. I almost missed the show but I’m glad I snuck it in to my trip.

From one thing to another....

This was the first of two night paintings I did in Philly last week. I went out after dinner and did this and one other quick sketch. I was doing these by the light of street lamps because I forgot to bring my headlamp and booklight that I like to use for illumination. And the secon painting I did is the following image.

I know these photos may look a bit muted, but the colors I used were pretty dull for the darks. I was struggling to see small differences in the value of my darks, so I kept them a bit on the softer, lighter side. It’s a really interesting challenge painting a night scene on site. It really tests my knowledge of my palette, and my ability to guess the amounts of a certain paint that will make the intended color. I was pretty happy with these, and think I can use them for some studio paintings later on. I have some other images and stories from Philly that I’ll share in a future post.
So I got back from Philly this past Thursday, late at night, and had to get my self unpacked and turned right back into work mode to teach a workshop this weekend. I taught a two day workshop in Damariscotta at River Arts. I really like working with them. They are a great organization that has invited me to do alot of fun (and challenging) new things, and they were very helpful this past weekend.

There were twelve participants in the workshop who were all very hard workers and alot of fun. I was lucky to have such serious students who were already good painters. We all had a good time painting, despite some pretty chilly weather on Saturday and getting forced indoors by the rain on Sunday. Saturday we worked on some tonal studies in the morning and did some work with a limited palette in the afternoon, painting some very overcast scenery, which is no easy task! It was a tiring day as the elements wore away at us, but there were some very nice paintings made. And Sunday I was nervous about, because I’ve never been forced inside for a workshop, so I was not sure how it would go with still lives… but I set up two tables full of fabric, flowers, vases, fruit, and some other random objects I could put together. It turned into a good way to work on alot of the same ideas I use in plein air painting. I spent alot of time this weekend working on getting my students to look much more carefully at the values and colors of the scene they were painting, and then worked alot with paint handling, applying clean colors, being more intentional and clear with your brushwork, looking at edges in the painting. By the end of the weekend I felt like everyone was making much stronger images and I’m really proud of how everyone did. I’m pretty sure we were all completely exhausted by the end. I know I ended the weekend with a nap when I got back home.

Streets of Phila....

I made a last minute trip to Philly this week. I’ve been trying to find time when I could get down here for a couple of days, and when the weather would hold up for me. Things finally came together and I got my stuff together and drove right on down here. I’ve spent the last few days painting all day. Sunday I found some fun new spots to work on Broad St. And then also saw some nice scenes by China town on my walk home from Broad. And yesterday I did some painting in the Italian Market on 9th st. in south Philly. Then looked for some new places to work between there and old city. I’m pretty excited about some of these new paintings. I’m doing more work on linen panels, for the ease of getting wet paintings around, and it’s working out well. This morning I was working on a rooftop scene, but I got rained on a bit near the end so I decided to pack it up and take a break. After getting some lunch in, I’ll hit the streets and go walking around with some smaller panels to see what I can get done.

On my way down here I stopped into LL Bean in Freeport, looking for a more comfortable bag to haul everything around in. I found a nice camping bag that is working out really well. It’s a big enough bag that everything fits inside, and with the belt-strap buckled, alot of the wait ends up on my hips instead of my shoulders, so it’s fairly comfortable, considering how much I’m carrying around. My back is still a littel sore at teh end of the day of painting, but part of that is from these marathon days of standing in front of the easel, and part is from carrying the bag. Either way, it’s a big improvement over my old system.

The painting above is one I did last year on a trip to Philly. That was done on the Ben Franklin Bridge looking out over 2nd St. It was a fun challenge to paint, and is kind of similar in some ways, to the painting I worked on all morning.

Well, I just saw the sun peak out, so I better get back outside!

Provincetown Painting...

So the weather has been good and I have a ton of things to take care of and plenty of distractions to keep me from getting to all of those things. I’m afraid that all of this good weather may keep me from posting as frequently as I did all winter. I’m still going to aim for at least one post a week.

In the meantime, I’ll just mention two new sources of inspiration for me. One is a book that was suggested by a friend, “What Painting Is” by James Elkins. I am still in the beginning of this book, but so far it is great. The other is a movie that I was just told about, “Painters Painting.” It’s a documentary about the abstract expressionists and some of the artists that came after them,  and it has alot of interesting interviews with them. This movie is chock full of goodies. It may be hard to find, but is REALLLY interesting. And I love watching these heores of mine move around and talk about their work. It’s so fun to get a sense of what their personalities are like, since some of them are painters I have looked up to for a while. I’ll try to get some quotes from the book, and thoughts on the movie into a future post. Until then, I’ll be painting, framing, stretching, gessoing, gardening, reading…

Long Overdue Post...

This is a painting of a dam right down the street from my house. It’s a 20×24″ canvas.

This is a 12×16″ painting from the past week.

I’ve been lazy about posting lately, and I apologize. I’ve been distracted by a lot stuff, notably the nice weather that is keeping me outside painting. Today is yet another sunny day, so I’m getting ready to head out for an afternoon of painting. But first I wanted to throw up a quick post here. The two paintings above are new paintings that I really like. And below is an excerpt from a blog I visit regularly. It’s a quote of Robert Motherwell’s that I enjoyed and thought I might share here. The blog I found this on is, www.dailygusto.com. It’s a fun place to read some interesting art reviews. You should check it out if you have the time.

From his essay “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” 1951:

Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need.The need is for felt experience–intense, immediate, direct, subltle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.

Everything that might dilute the experience is stripped away. The origin of abstraction in art is that of any mode of thought. Abstract art is a true mysticism–I dislike the word–or rather a series of mysticisms that grew up in the historical circumstance that all mysticisms do, from a primary sense of ugly, an abyss, a void between one’s lonely self and the world. Abstract art is an effort to close the void that modern men feel. Its abstraction is its emphasis.