Pleinair Painting

   If you're a painter you've probably tried a clayboard at some time or another. I did it yesterday. They were on sale...so I decided to try them out. I've heard people rave about the amount of detail you can get with them. Since I was painting an organic farm with lots of interesting plantings...I decided now was the time to give it a try. It was the most frustrating material I've ever worked with! The paint slid around on the surface not finding anything to cling to. Lines were impossible and detail was even more impossible. Also the adjacent colors were picking up each other and blending into a terrible muddy mess. After two hours of struggling...I took a turpentine rag and wiped the whole thing out! The last time I wiped out a painting was about 15 years ago. I was so downcast. After sitting there for a few minutes in front of the beautiful little building I was trying to paint...a little voice inside my head said: "Other people use this board and come out wit

Say Hello to Summer on the Treasure Coast where the sun feels like it's twenty feet away and you need a shower after ten minutes outside. Believe me when I say: "I'm not complaining...just explaining." It's amazing here with the right mindset. Who said the temperature had to be between 68 and 74 to be acceptable to humans? What was the weather like when we didn't have air conditioning? It was the same. When I was growing up we went to the lake cottage for the summer. There was no air conditioning there. In fact I don't think we had air conditioning in our house in town either and the furnace wasn't all that great either. But on the lake...it felt cooler. Why? Because you were on water that was cooler than the air and there was an abundance of trees shading the grounds and there was usually a cool breeze. When you are in a city...there's a lot of concrete and few trees and no breeze because the buildings block it. And no cooling water.  So it's

  Some things you do without knowing you are going to do them. That's how I ended up in Florida three months ago. It's a long story, so I won't bore you with it. But I will say that if anyone had told me four months ago that I would be moving here, I would have laughed at them. There are no regrets. Life here is unlike anyplace I have lived. There are no mountains, and I kind of miss that. But with no mountains, you have a clear view of the sunrises and the sunsets. Your horizon is always visible. And after 2020, I like the fact that I am able to see the horizon.  Nothing is hurried here. There is no reason to speed anyplace. When I see the odd car rushing past me or riding my bumper when I'm going the speed limit, I know they are not from here. If they stay here and let the heat sink into their bones, they won't be speeding for long. There's always enough time to get done what needs to be done. And people help each other out down here, so it's not a lazines

THE COVID HOLDING PATTERN  I've logged several thousand air miles in my lifetime. And during those miles, there were many hours spent either on the ground waiting to fly or in the air waiting to land. The worst, in my opinion were the hours spent circling and circling in a holding pattern over the city that was your destination...waiting to land...waiting to land...waiting to land. Every half hour or so, the captain would get on to explain the situation, or sometimes not to explain it...but just to say something to the uncomfortable passengers. See, there were two problems. The first problem was not that we couldn't land, but that we had a destination to get to and we couldn't get there because something or someone was holding us up and we usually weren't told exactly what it was. The second problem was that we didn't know how long we were going to be up there circling and circling. The second problem was really the kicker. Because you could make contingency plans i

MURALS FOR LLOYD BRIDGES TRAVELAND RV Back in 2002, I was asked to paint the largest mural of my painting career. The mural took 9 months to complete after I had toured several national parks in the Grand Circle out west. There were several challenges on the job. One was working with scaffolding that was 25ft in the air. When I was on the top level, the platform swayed with my brush movement, or when someone opened the bay doors. It was a little terrifying, so I worked with climbing gear and strapped myself to the ceiling. The second challenge was transferring the design to the wall. Often I use a projector to transfer since all I need is a simple outline to start getting the proportions right. But the site had huge windows in the front and there was no way to darken down the space with all the street lights. So I had to use an Old Master's Grid System transfer technique that took several days longer for each section. The other challenge was the blending of one scene into the next,

"Red the Cow" the true story of a boy and his dairy cow is a book I've been illustrating the last few months. It's a beautiful story about a young boy who was given an older dairy cow to milk. Written as a rhyming Alphabet book, "Red the Cow" is an easy read for young children, but it also contains sidebars with lots of additional information about how farming was done in the 1950's. The illustrations were all done using models. I did the book this way because the characters ran all the way through the book and I wanted to maintain their likeness from illustration to illustration. The paintings are very realistic, but I took great license with the colors, pumping up the warms for a beautiful sunlit look. To be honest, this was done mostly to brighten my own mood during those long grey winter days in 2018. My favorite illustration is one of the saddest ones in the book. The main character discovers that his cow is no longer producing milk, and that