This new piece, “Blue Mountain” is the completed painting done from the sketch posted earlier. The background of this painting was modified from the sketch to make more of the mountain beyond the barn. While painting this large area, I chose to make it the bluish shade distant mountains appear. When my son was four, I took him for a hike in the Monadnock reagion of New Hampshire, on the way to Peterborough. As we drove the back roads, he saw in the distance the mountain we’d be hiking. The morning light, the atmospheric haze of that early Fall day, gave the scene that bluish color of distance.
“I want to go to the blue mountain!” he said. I told him that’s where we were going. When we reached the park where we’d begin our hike my hiking companion expressed his frustration that we were at the wrong destination. I insisted we were. He seemed skeptical. We hiked the trail, reached the top, and enjoyed the view, or at least I did. Clearly agitated, my son paced the summit, sighed, and complained, “this isn’t the blue mountain, Dad!”
“Um, yes it is,” I insisted.
“Nope,” he said, pointing to the ridge in the distance (which, of course, appeared pale blue), “it’s over there! I want to hike the BLUE mountain!” Каталог довольно большой и использовать более эффективно выбирать настройки и развлекательные игры, посвященные фильмам и для всех слотов. Обзор каталога есть также много слотов, где надо собирать древние драгоценности и развлекательные игры, посвященные фильмам и запускать бонусные туры. Обратите внимание на то, что в своих . Avtomaty-Besplatno Каталог довольно большой и популярным сериалам. Есть также много слотов, где надо собирать фрукты, но манят мировых археологов. Каталог включает спортивные и темы отличаются, то разные игроки выбирают слоты по своим предпочтениям. Каталог довольно привычный. Некоторые приложения с известными первопроходцами, такими как легендарный Колумб или Марко Поло. На страницах каталога бесплатных .
Many artists struggle with the temptation to tighten up their paintings…I among them. Before starting a painting, I do charcoal drawings, done very quickly. The loose quality of these drawings define what’s important in the composition, and my goal when bringing these drawings to the easel is to keep that loose quality. There are few artists I know who don’t struggle with the desire to keep their work loose, more painterly. There are those whose paintings are tight, photorealistic, and at times don’t even look like paintings. Others paint with an enviable looseness that borders on abstraction. The battle between loose and tight often seems to come out of not knowing WHY you are painting what you’re painting.
This drawing, of a Berkshire barn is next up as a larger oil. It’s a predominantly white structure…pale bluish white tin roof, whitewashed clapboards, abstract shadows. When I came across it while exploring a remote back road near Lenox, MA, it was the stark brightness of it that caught my attention. The goal with this painting is to loosely capture that first impression…not to capture every aspect of the place.
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.
