I love the barren, windswept coastal areas of the New England coast. On the Cape, there’s no shortage of these rugged places. This stretch of sandy land, with it’s stubborn cedars standing amongst patches of heather, moss and ther groundcovers, separates the Bass River (an estuary into Nantucket Sound) from the Atlantic. It’s a simple landscape, but when you look closely at it, it’s more complex. When painting it, I try to balance the simplicity of the scene, with the complexity of colors and textures of the landscape. “Estuary” 48 x 36 oil on canvas.
Our town is fairly rural. Not like the more northern towns of New Hampshire, where farms with hundreds of undeveloped acres are found, but rural enough that many roads are still dirt, and the land is open enough to accommodate a good number of horse properties. It’s not uncommon to pass horses and their riders on the main roads through town, but more so on the back roads, many of which began as paths, decades ago, where the main means of transportation was horseback. “Bridle Path” 16 x 12 o/c.
Most trees are known for their foliage. Maples are famous for their brilliant autumn colors. Pines for their ability to stay green year round. Others for their flowers or fruit. Birches are somewhat unique, as they’re known for their bark. This place is out by the New Hampshire Seacoast, in Newmarket. It was that thin spindly tree that captured my attention with the stark white limbs cutting through the barn’s shaded facade. “Birch” 40 x 30 o/c
Fences are funny things. Their purpose is to mark territory, to keep things out, or contain things that are within. When I come across old rural places, with remnants of old split rail, or barbed-wire fences, the sense is that they once kept grazing animals from wandering off. More so now, I suspect our fences in suburbia are more designed to let others know where your property ends, and theirs begins. In this piece, I began without consideration of the fence, but I put it in, and as the painting came together, it seemed to became the subject of the piece. Whether you respect it, and stay on your side of it, is subjective. “Fenceline” 48 x 36 o/c
If you’ve ever spent any time in Vermont, you know it’s rural roads. You also know it’s main routes, which, aside from the two interstates that cut through it, everything else is secondary “highways” meandering from one small village, to another, and maybe to a larger city/towns like Montpelier, Burlington and Rutland. And aside from those secondary roads, pretty much everything else is a back road, carving up and over hills and mountains. It’s a great state to get lost in. If you follow any one of these old roads, often gravel and many not navigable after winter snows, you come across places you never new existed. Destination aside, following these seemingly primitive country roads is pure exploration, as they meander up and over slopes, switching direction this way and that, almost like the path of a skier, cutting across the grade. “Switchback” 48 x 30
A friend recently commented on a piece (posted to my social channels) that she wished she could “live in the painting.” I replied that I agree, and that I would too. Most of the artists I know paint what they love. They paint the places they love, the things or people they love, and they paint these subjects however they want, presumably to convey that love to viewers. I don’t often think about how or why I paint what I paint (or why I do so they way I do), but that comment got me thinking. My “subjects” aren’t as important to me as how I portray them. They’re places I know, or have discovered, and feel an attachment to. They’re places and scenes I like being at when I’m there, and in the studio, I make them how I want them to be. I don’t try to recreate how they actually are, but modify aspects of the setting to become more than it really is. Hearing that a viewer wishes to have a deeper connection to a piece by wanting to “live in it” is the ultimate compliment. “Envisage” 24 x 24 o/c.
Our property is surrounded by tall bush blueberries. Might be 20 or 30 of them, and each July 4th, the berries are at full ripeness, and from a distance, they’re puffs of green with dabs of blue from the ripe berries. But in the Fall, long after the berries have been harvested and eaten by birds, they turn a fiery rusty red, which lasts almost into December, as they’re the last tree or bush to lose their leaves. “Fall Blueberry” 36 x 36
On a recent trip to Vermont, driving along rural Route 106, I spotted an old farm to my right, across the river that follows the twisty road South from Woodstock. A small service bridge crosses the river, and the road turns left and right, leading to a couple of old farms. As I approached the fork, a blast of red caught my eye to the left. Turned the truck around, and tucked into the overgrowth, a small abandoned shed seemed to be hiding behind a stand of fall-reddened sumac and other wild brush. I grabbed a couple photos of the scene, crossed the bridge, and continued south…forgetting to visit the old farm that had originally caught my attention. “Distraction” 36 x 36 o/c
Here in New Hampshire (and especially in Vermont), there’s a span of about 10 days where the color of fall foliage is at its peak. Sugar maples (amongst other hardwoods) are on fire, with the bright reds, yellows, and crimsons overtaking the once all-green leaves. Today is just about peak in Southern New Hampshire, and the sugar maples outside my studio window have been inspiring the palette of this piece for a few weeks. As our local foliage progressed to it’s peak this past week, it’s appropriate that this piece should be completed simultaneously. “At Peak” 48 x 48
In Western Massachusetts, between the college towns of Amherst and Northampton, the lowlands of the Pioneer Valley are home to many farms, as the soil along the banks of the Connecticut River are ideal for farming. When I was in college there, I often visited these farms, many of which featured unique-looking barns, whose walls were vented slats, allowing air to freely pass through. These structures were built to allow tobacco leaves to dry after being harvested. Quite a few tobacco farms still exist all up and down the valley, from Hadley down south into Connecticut, and the leaves grown there were generally used for cigar wrappers…not the tobacco itself. It’s been decades since I’ve been to one of these farms, and while I did some quick drawings of a few of them, many years ago, I’ve never painted one. Until recently. “Tobacco Rows” 48 x 30 o/c
