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Showing posts from 2011

Grey Gray Grey….The Last Day of 2011

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On days like today, it's challenging to be a pleinair painter unless you like to work in charcoal. That's why I'm staying indoors for the 10th day in a row and working on paintings in my studio. Although some artists would tell you that you should be able to find beauty in anything, including a grey landscape, I disagree. It's the reason I don't put parking meters or power lines into my city scapes or landscapes. An artist is not a camera, and we can choose to edit. I choose to ignore the ugliness that city engineers and thoughtless planners construct to blight our landscapes…and I paint around them. I also choose to ignore the grey days and choose instead to focus on making my day brighter. Many years ago I lived in Arizona where the sun shines 340 days out of the year. I never understood what a gift it is to see a sunrise or sunset until I move back here to the midwest. Thankfully, I've taken about 2000 photographs of the southwest and it's at times like

Core Beliefs Influence Art

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The painting above is by Bierstadt, an artist from the Hudson Valley School. Each Saturday that it doesn't rain, I meet a bunch of artists to paint in the outdoors near my home. It's not an incredible landscape we look upon, but sometimes, I get incredible paintings from going there. This past saturday, my painting was just ok, nothing spectacular, just ok. I didn't follow my usual pattern of facing the sun...which may have made the difference. I've written in here before that I am usually the only one facing the sun. Everyone else paints what the sun is illuminating. But on Saturday, there was one artist facing the sun and his painting was pretty spectacular. It was dark except for one slice of sunlight on a patch of grass illuminating the island. I asked him why he had chosen that particular subject when there was all the fall color to paint. He mentioned the Hudson Valley School and that they had one thing in common: they all painted light from a mysterious source. T

Painting in Competition

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Recently I won the "People's Choice Award" for a plein air painting done up in Glen Arbor, Michigan. It was a multi-challenging 7-hour experience. After camping with a dog that had never slept in a tent or outside before, and rising at 6am to slam down a breakfast, pack and be at the Art Center by 7:45am, we headed out to select a site (my dog and I). The sun was peaking briefly in and out of the clouds, but it didn't look promising for a sunlit morning. I headed as fast as possible to the shore of Lake Michigan, to a site that I had explored the night before. The scene I wanted faced west, and there was no sign of sun. I couldn't see a picture in it. Driving back on the dirt road, a rare bit of sunlight caught the inside of a three-trunked birch tree and lit it up with orange. I slammed on the brakes and pulled over to snap a photo. Quickly, I pulled out the easel and started setting up, but the easel leg fell off and everything dropped into the dirt.

A Personal Voice

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I don't know if all artists go through a reinvention process. I only know that after spending two weeks in the forest alone painting, I came out a different person. Since that time, I have looked at my massive body of work with a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. It's almost as if it didn't come from my hand, but was the work of someone else. Someone who was readily influenced by the demands of clients and was responsive to a public that constantly wanted something other than what they were doing as an artist. Believe me, I have been grateful for the work. And, I have been fortunate to have been able to deliver so many different styles of work for so long. But now, I'm finding that a different voice is speaking to me, a personal one. One that keeps asking: "What do you want to say?" And, I think that's an important question. So, I'm trying to answer it. Little by little over the past two months, I've made some progress. It's not a verba

The Destroyer of Worlds

A few days ago I went to a film entitled: "Midnight in Paris." A line from that film haunted me. The author Hemingway is speaking to the main character, Gill, (also a writer) and he asks Gill if he is afraid to die. Because, Hemingway tells him, if you are afraid to die, you can't be a writer. He goes on to tell him that he must be fearless in all things. I have been struggling with a mural for the past month and I had finally decided that I just wasn't going to get the effect I wanted with the painting...so I was about to give up and deliver it to the client. Over the weekend, I went Plein air painting with the Michigan Plein Air group...and my frustration with the mural seemed to have transferred to my painting there as well. I was disgusted with my work. At one point, I took the watercolor and dunked the whole thing into the creek. ...It made it better, but I decided to tear it up anyway and start over. I became a destroyer of worlds that day...my own worlds. And,

Artists out of work

It seems such a shame these days that many artist friends of mine are not working full time in their field. The ability to create visual worlds is a gift, and a relatively rare one I am discovering. But, I have always taken it for granted. And as a result, it's taken me many years to place the appropriate value on my work. Sometimes I'm good at valuing it, other times, not so good. I think it's difficult to put value on one's work until someone else puts a price to it for you. But one thing is universally true for artists, and that is that we live in our own world…the world of our making. A painting student of mine said she had recently watched a video of Bob Ross yesterday. I'm taking it for granted that everyone who has ever painted or aspired to paint knows who Bob Ross is…if not google him. My student commented on his dialog while he painted, how soft and gentle he was. I have watched Bob paint at least 100 times in my life, and I never grow tired of him. He i

Biting Problem

It's true, I expect a lot from my dogs. I expect them to travel with me without complaint or concern for where we are going or what we are doing. I expect them to tell me when they need to go out, but to know that I often won't be able to take them out immediately (like when I'm on the interstate). I expect them to be off schedule, as I often am, and except eating dinner late, going to bed late and often in strange places. In fact, about the only thing a dog with me can count on is that I'll always be there with them and for them. That's always worked in the past with the three dogs that have chosen to spend their lives with me. So, imagine my surprise when my most recent dog started biting me for no reason at all. The attacks came at odd times. When I asked him to do something he didn't want to do, during playtime, before he went out, after he went out and during his time out. The worst times were during these last three. He would often fly at me at high speeds

Maestro!

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Death of a friend

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On the eleventh of January, 2011 my beloved Weimaraner, Jacque died of blebs which caused leaking of air from his lungs into his chest cavity. Six of the seven lung lobes were effected with blebs and only 50% of the lung can be removed with successful recovery. Upon his death, I realized yet again how much these loving creatures contribute to my life. Without him, I no longer wandered into the woods to paint. I no longer wished to walk at all. I didn't know what to do first thing in the morning. I had no one to eat with, or to share the couch. I had no one to talk to in the car when an inconsiderate driver cut me off in traffic. When I laughed, he no longer came running wondering if he had done something funny to bring me such joy. Eight years earlier, my first Weimaraner died of cancer and a swore I would never get another dog. As a stood sobbing at the dog park, woman I barely knew changed my mind when she said: "If you don't get another dog, you don't understand the