Florida Memories

Palm trees, beaches, Disney World, nothing says Florida to me like a herd of white cows in the shade of a giant live oak trees covered with Spanish Moss.

Cow near Ocala

8 x 10 Oil on linen panel

SOLD

A work in progress.

Here I am finishing the painting of St. Mary's Chapel at the fundraising dinner and auction. Yes, it looks like I have put the brush down and am blending paint with a finger...

Below is a slide show of the preliminary work to the painting

Memories of a Summer Evening

Here is a new painting from the Four Seasons series. "Memories of a Summer Evening"

If you are familiar with my work through the Oils and Watercolor Portraits, this at first might seem a bit different, but these paintings have allowed me to combine techniques from both oils and watercolors.

Memories of a Summer Evening

Acrylic on Canvas - 22 x 36

$550. shipping included

Evening Skies, Pasture

What's an artist to do? It is winter in North Carolina. What to paint? There are no snow covered scenes to paint. Not that I am complaining. All the colors of spring, summer and fall have turned to a dull gray mixed with a muddy clay colored brown. Enough to bring you down.....

But look up! There in the sky! It's... It's...the sky!

It seems that nature compensates for the lack of color on the ground with a dazzling show above. No more hazy summer days when the humidity won't let you see a blue sky. A clear blue, a dramatic light.....Time to paint!

I really haven't settled on a title for this painting. Something with evening and pasture. It's getting dark, it's cold and muddy. Home from work and you have to move the horses or feed the dogs before you can go inside and relax. As you trudge along you glance up and see the departing day throw a splash of color.....

It is an 8 x 10 oil painting on canvas. And it is for sale. $360. shipping included.

Tuscany to Carolina

Another Acrylic Painting and another Oil Painting

Tuscan Memories
8 x 10 Acrylic on Board

$300. shipping included

Originally this painting was planned to be a model for another Wine+Art Painting Class(Party?) at the Twisted Vine Wine Shop in Wake Forest, NC. In fact, I painted it at the Twisted Vine, something about painting with a glass of wine on the table just makes me think back to the Impressionist and post impressionists in Paris during the late 9th and early 20th centuries.

But as you can see, it is a bit more complex than the last one and might be a bit frustrating for first time artists. It is destined to be hung with other works at the shop, unless of course you decide that you want it....

Turquoise and Steel 1

18 x 24 Oil on Canvas

This painting is the first in a series exploring the landscape and skies of our lakes, beaches and the farmlands of the coastal plain. You may also notice that these are larger paintings, starting at 18 x 24. Quite a change from the 4 x 6 paintings in the 1hundredpaintings blog. The painting in progress below is a 30 x 40 and an even larger canvas awaits....

Recent Paintings

Here are two recently completed paintings. Both are landscapes, one was commissioned by a collector and the other painting while not a commission, was done for a specific purpose. One is an acrylic and one an oil.

Lets look at the first painting, the acrylic.

This painting was done to be used as a model for a painting class held in a nearby wine shop, The Twisted Vine. ( You can read about the class here, and the shop here.) Since our students use acrylics, so did I. After painting mostly in oils the last five years or so, but having painted watercolor portraits for over ten years before, the acrylics were interesting to work with. The first layers started out very transparent, like watercolors, on a white canvas. Later opaque passages were worked in. New colors to learn such as the difference between lightening a color by diluting it and letting the white show through and lightening a color by adding white. A good example of this is burnt sienna. You can try this with oils or acrylics.

And then you have to decide when to go opaque and when to leave transparent passages alone. And this was supposed to be easy, to provide a guide for students....

The second painting is an oil, a painting of a golf course. However, it is not your ordinary golf course.

The painting is 12 x 24 on oil primed linen. A transparent ground of Charvin French red was applied (Why do French paint companies come up with such names. Why not use the pigment names so we know what we get. Cadmium Red, Cad. Red Light, Cad. Red Deep. Make it a little easier for us easily confused artists) The French Red has a very orange cast to it when applied in a thin layer. Then comes the nice soft buttery oil paint with enough pigment load to actually be opaque. Except, the oil primed linen has a very slick surface compared to an acrylic ground. So a first layer was blocked in rather transparently. Once paint was on the surface, your brush would remove paint rather than blend it. So plan your work. Get the color right and get the shapes right.

After it had a chance to set up and dry somewhat, the surface was more receptive and would grab the paint. Overpainting and blending became possible. Like the acrylic, I had to decide what to leave as is and what to paint over. (The answer is that most of the painting was overpainted, however a lot was left from the original session. Most of the area above the grass. The shadows of the hills were let mostly alone. The dark shadows in the sand traps also. The sky was painted over three times, using the grain of the canvas to let some previous colors come through.

A fun to paint painting. It's always great when a painting works out and you get to enjoy creating it.

Busy Busy Busy,

Let me tell you a bit about what has been going on through July and August.
First, the Blowing Rock Charity Horse Show took place the last week in July and the first week in August. I was honored by the BRCHS Foundation when they asked me create the painting for the poster, t shirts, cards etc.

The painting is 24 x 36 and was auctioned off at the Horse Shows Gala party to benefit the foundation.
While the horse show was underway, you could have found me throughout the grounds painting scenes of the show, including a "Foggy Day at Blowing Rock"

Foggy Day at Blowing Rock
Oil on Canvas 9 x 12 $410.

Blowing Rock, Afternoon Clearing
Oil on Canvas 9 x 12, $410

In addition the paintings of the show, I had many requests for specific commissions. I am still working on them.

But more that the Blowing Rock Horse Show has been going on, but I am going to leave that for the next post.

More Small paintings

A summer's Sunday evening in Middleburg Va. The town has quieted down but the sun is still bright and high in the sky. This is a view down Washington St. I am always amazed that by painting this shape in one color and adding another color blog there you end up with a painting of a scene.

Of course, all that throwing of color on the canvas has work and time behind it. Working with the same colors on the palette for years will enable you to mix colors almost unconsciously.
And we have to learn how to translate the incredible range of values (light and dark) of the world around us into that narrow band we can create on canvas. How do you create the luminosity of an awning glowing from the sun behind it with just paint? How do you paint a black wall in the sunlight?

When painting is going well, and here I am using "painting" to refer to the action of painting, not the object on the easel, I seem to be holding a running conversation with myself, or more accurately, I find that a part of me is telling me what to do next, "Mix a bit of cadmium orange into that blue. Make that shape darker in value towards the bottom. Bring that line over to the left..." All that practice and lessons learned come back as they are needed. Then at some point I will look at the painting and think to myself, "Wow, did I do that?"

To me, this is one of those paintings.

Middleburg Afternoon
4 x 6 Oil on Canvas
$100. shipping included

Of course, it isn't always this way. Sometimes I look at my subject, at the canvas and the palette saying to myself, "How the heck am I supposed to do that?" or "What am I supposed to do now?" A painting will often go through a stage that an artist friend call "the uglies." So persevere and you can bring it on through.