It’s not easy being green
“Jamie’s waterfall,” 12X16, oil on canvasboard. Painted in two hours flat, and after packing my car and driving six hours. Only possible because I was working with a color matrix. We are at that moment when the greens of the northeast suddenly become massive, heavy, and sometimes overbearing to new painters. We love summer, we …
Some Days, You Just Can’t Get Rid of a Bomb
“Loren’s farm,” oil on canvasboard, 12X16 At our last painting session, Marilyn whipped out her grayscale markers (making me instantly regret that I hadn’t brought mine along). The forest was remarkably dark and moody this week, and the spring foliage far less advanced than down on the lake plains, and I was finding it difficult …
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There just might be something to this.
Early spring morning, Piseco Lake, oil on canvasboard, 12X16 Yesterday, I wrote about a Stillman & Birn Alpha Series sketchbook that Jamie Grossman gave me, and my first attempt to pre-sketch my paintings in it in watercolor. This morning as I walked my appointed rounds, I carried the sketchbook and watercolors instead of my camera. The …
Experimenting
Cloud moving in over Oxbow Outlet, Oil on canvasboard, 16X20 I stopped to see my pal Jamie Grossman last week, and we fell into a conversation about sketchbooks. We both use them religiously, but (unlike Jamie) I tend to use the cheapest sketchbooks available and fill them with scribbled notes. Ever generous, Jamie gave me …
Flailing around
“Spring fever”(figure sketch, oil on canvas, 24X30) Inevitably, someone will ask me, “How long did that painting take you?” This is a question I dread, as it is unanswerable. This figure sketch was done last Saturday and took me about four hours of actual painting time—three hours with the model, and one hour to rough …