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