Reconnoitering
Castine from Fort George, 1856, by Fitz Henry Lane. It always helps to have seen a place you’re planning to paint, so I took a run up to Castine today in anticipation of next Saturday’s 2013 Castine Plein Air Festival. I packed both oils and watercolors, figuring I’d do a bunch of test sketches. At the …
What a difference a week makes!
Amy drew her cat. It’s a lovely likeness of a cat in motion. Last week I challenged Amy Vail to let me teach her to draw, after she told me she “lacked the gene” to do it. Amy has never had a drawing lesson before. I want to show you her progress, because it’s amazing …
Top ten seascapes of all time!!!
A recent Guardian columnsought to identify the ten best sea pictures of all time. I propose an alternative list, not the “best”—because the idea of “top ten paintings” is in itself ridiculous—but ten equally brilliant and perhaps less famous seascapes, here presented in no particular order. (My apologies to Turner and Monet; I only omitted …
Painting and politicians
Winston Churchill, The Goldfish Pond at Chartwell, 1932. I think any artist would be proud to have painted this. When we were painting in Camden at my first workshop last month, an elderly gentleman asked Sandy if he could take her photo with her painting. “After all,” he said, “you could be the next Winston …
Mostly, what’s changed are the trees…
Safe Harbor, 20X24, oil on canvasboard, almost finished. I started this during the last year in which my painting partner Marilyn Feinberg was still in Rochester. It is as big a canvas—20X24—as I ever do en plein air. That size usually takes two or more sessions to finish, but without Marilyn around to schlep up …