I have the good fortune to be able to coach my son’s and daughter’s baseball teams. Though the season spans the busiest time of year for galleries (May through July), the travel from town to town, region to region, does allow for the discovery of new subjects for paintings. This year, my son’s 12-year-old all-star travel team swept the Districts tournament (playing some tough New Hampshire teams) to make it to States. At the time of this writing, we’re preparing for the State Championship game tonight against the undefeated team. Having entered the losers bracket with a loss in our second game, the team has won every game since and has clawed it’s way back to the championship game. That’s the upside. The downside is that the tournament is way up in the White Mountains, in the small town of Lancaster, just an out-of-the-park-homerun from the Canadian border. We make the 5-hour round-trip drive daily But the upside to this downside is that the Whites are full of old barns, beautiful landscapes, Christmas tree farms, and old farmhouses.
The barn pictured is right behind the parking lot of the fields where we play. I’ve seen this barn (and envisioned it as a painting) daily for the past 8 days. Yesterday afternoon I shot this picture of it. Once the tournament is over, win or lose, this will become a series of sketches, then a painting or two. I spotted another beautiful barn last night on our drive South just before entering Franconia Notch. On our way up (again!) this afternoon, I’ll shoot that. It’s a huge, simple barn, sitting on a hillside with Indian Head mountain in the background. No shortage of inspiration…even during Baseball season.
The Left Bank Gallery in Wellfleet will be exhibiting new work under the show title “Summer Places” from August 27 through September 9. This new piece, “Truro Cottage” depicts a once typical beachside cottage along Shore Road, with Pilgrim Lake in the background. Though these small, humble summer cottages still dot the Lower Cape landscape, many have been replaced by massive trophy homes. Like Hopper’s small, simple Truro summer home, there is something universally appealing to these old summer places…their stoic ability to withstand fierce weather, to have housed generations of sandy-footed children, and simply to have survived time.
Growing up, my idol was Andrew Wyeth. How he used the loose medium of watercolor to create amazing detail became my young-artist obsession. My drawings were highly detailed. Every clapboard and blade of grass was accurately (as best I could) rendered. With a drawing or watercolor completed, I’d return to my Wyeth books to compare his work to mine (or vice versa). His detail was different. It was there, you could see it and identify it, but somehow it looked a little less fussy than mine. His success as a realist–critics often wrote–was all the more significant in that his early career came in contrast with the huge abstract expressionistic and non-representational movements of the time.
As my own work has evolved, I’ve continuously strived to avoid detail and find the essence of a subject. But recently, I’ve begun to explore bringing back little bits of detail here and there, not to create a more literal representation of a place or thing, but to give that place or thing a little bit more of what makes it uniquely “it,” rather than entirely ambiguous.
In this recently completed piece, titled “Three Windows,” there is more detail in the windows, a hint at the shadows beneath the clapboards. This old, abandoned house on Cape Cod has a history. You can tell just walking around it. Remnants of an old clothes line. The bird house nailed to one of it’s peaks, the old warped-glass of the windows, and the emerald sky and dry-grass gold reflection they display when the sun is just right. Though I started painting this house for its own sake, it became clear the painting was less about the house, and more about these three windows…and the mystery and history of the life that took place on both sides of them.
“Far Shore” :: 26 x 26 :: oil on canvas :: 2011
“A Clearing” :: oil on canvas :: 26 x 26 :: 2011
At Woodstock Fine Art, Woodstock, VT
I’ve always loved Edward Hopper. Much of the beauty and mystery of his paintings comes from what he didn’t paint, as much as what he did. When I was younger, the process of drawing was fueled by a love of detail. I’d labor over weathered clapboards, the trickiness of windows, often consumed with individual blades of grass. Many artists do just fine with that level of detail. But for many, including me, there is a general feeling behind a scene that needs to be captured, not the literal scene itself. The trick, I have learned, is to be brave enough to leave stuff out, or to keep things in.
Yale University Art Gallery recently purchased a collection of Hopper drawings…studies he did for paintings we all now recognize. Studies are great for understanding process. In Hopper’s Western Motel (left, above) he made the wise decision to leave out the motel sign, to simplify the distant hills, and to get rid of the woman’s companion. What he saw that day was a mundane event (a couple sitting in a hotel lobby). What he painted is something more mysterious, and more universal.
When I’m on the Cape I always poke around Hopper’s old haunts (Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham), as the light and architecture that captured his attention captures mine. Near Wellfleet’s Mayo Beach, sits a stately white house you can’t miss, as it abruptly interrupts the view of the bay as you enter the beach parking lot. A thin line of scraggly pines attempts to provide privacy between the beach lot and the house. I was immediately struck (as I often am) by the blast of late afternoon light on the white of the house. But in drawing the scene, I became equally interested in that line of trees and the role they played. Though I only did this one preparatory sketch for Treeline it involved decisions on what to leave out, and what to keep in. The decorative finials were beautiful, but distracting. The addition to the right of the house is unnecessary (an artist mentor once barked at me in critique, “just because some carpenter built a damn porch doesn’t mean you have to paint the damn porch!”) I even considered leaving out the trees, to put more emphasis on the house and the light. Instead, I left them in as they are (I think) the real subject of the painting.
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