International Museum Day

Since today's hashtag is #InternationalMuseumDay, I thought I'd show you some of my favorite paintings from my local museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I'm incredibly lucky to be a subway ride away from The Met.  I can easily pop in any time and get a dose of great art, something I really needed when I hit a creative wall last year.

You could spend a month in the building and not see everything, so I picked out a few of the pieces that I'm sure to see every time I visit.

This is my all time favorite painting in The Met, Woman With A Pink, by Rembrandt.

Being a floral painter, I always stop to see the Fantin-Latour's.  Above is Summer Flowers, the painting below is Roses In A Bowl.

The Dance Class

Love all of Degas Dancer paintings and sculptures.

The Dancing Class

Of course, I always visit the VanGogh's.  This is one of my favorites of the Sunflowers.  One of these days I'm going to try doing a copy of it.

Roses, Vincent Van Gogh

I can't pass by the most famous woman in The Met, Sargent's Madame X.

The Pink Dress, Berthe Morisot

I always visit the Monet's.  Years ago while visiting France, I trekked to Rouen just to see the Cathedral.  It was pretty amazing to see the building that I knew so well from the paintings.

Garden At Sainte Adresse

Morning On The Seine Near Giverny

I hope you enjoyed seeing a few of my favorite paintings from The Met.  By the way, these and thousands more of their works are now in the public domain, so if anything catches your eye, you can download the images for yourself.  Have a good weekend and enjoy the Royal Wedding!

Painting Sunflowers

I'm happy to say that after having a few months of nothing working, I now have two completed paintings.  First up, I will show you my sunflowers.  Years ago there was a grower at the Long Island City farmers market that sold the most amazing variety of sunflowers.  I used to buy bouquets and paint them, but unfortunately, that was back when I did not have a clue what I was doing, so those paintings never worked out.  After that one summer, I never saw sunflowers like that again until a few weeks ago when I spotted them at the Union Square Greenmarket.

I grabbed a bouquet and got to work.

My placement on the canvas and the color block in went very well, so I deluded myself into thinking the painting was going to be easy.  Of course, that was not the case.  I've long said that the reason Van Gogh occasionally went off the deep end was not unrequited love, syphilis, epilepsy or the latest theory, neighborhood kids.  It was the sunflowers!  They are one of the most popular flowers in the world, but painting them is extremely difficult.  They have a ton of little petals and buds and the color looks the same on many of them, so you have to fake the shadows.  But I must confess, the biggest issue I was having was that I kept comparing my sunflowers to the most amazing sunflower paintings of all time, Van Gogh's.  That is not something that I usually do, but like many people, his sunflowers are in my brain.  I pulled out my books and started looking at his paintings to get some inspiration, but also to remind myself that my paintings are not suppose to be copies of a Van Gogh.

A little tip:  these art books are heavy.  In order to avoid lugging them to my studio, I snapped pics on my phone so I could easily refer to them without having to bring heavy books all over town.

I kept building up the layers, but if you look at the set up in this photo, you will see that the flowers were croaking out and I was nowhere near finished.

After six days, the flowers were starting to lean over, so it was time for drastic measures.  I took some old brushes and used them to prop up the flower heads.  Between the brushes and the blue tape, I kept them standing up for another day or two.  In the end, I used three different bouquets of flowers, but I'm glad I was able to use the original long enough to get the painting on it's way.

I was happy when i reached this point.  The background was finally working and the pitcher was looking like porcelain.  I was not completely happy with the flowers, but I decided to just keep going with the rest of it and deal with them later.

I began to paint the blue pattern onto the pitcher.  I did this in one afternoon and it was the easiest part of the painting.

However, I still was not happy with the flowers.  They looked bland to me, especially once the blue was on the pitcher.  After going bonkers for days painting and repainting them, I happened to be talking to Gregg and showed him a picture on my phone.  Of course, he spotted the problem right away.  The shadows!  They just were not strong enough.  He suggested using some transparent red oxide for the shadows in order to pump everything up.

That worked like a charm and I was able to finish the painting.

Here it is fresh off the easel.  I'm very excited to have a finished painting after a dry spell of things just not working out.  And I'm especially glad to have another sunflower painting to add to my collection.

Happily, I also finished a still life painting last week.  I'll have that on here as soon as I get a signature on it.

Sunflowers And Sag Harbor

Hello Everyone.  I'm back.  I did not mean to take a summer blogging break, but things have been a little crazy.  I'm in the middle of four paintings.  I had not meant to start so many, but a big batch of sunflowers and a lovely model changed things up.

Here in New York the temps have been in the 90's this week, but last week the weather was perfect so I took a ride out to the East End of Long Island.   We stopped in Sag Harbor first, just to take a look around.  It is lovely there.  Just walking around town there were beautiful flowers in bloom, boats, nice restaurants and lovely, old homes.

I love this old sign hanging in front of the Sag Harbor Pharmacy.

Near the dock and boats, we found a bunch of beautiful swans and ducks.  They did not seem to care that a bunch of people were there taking photos.  They just went on with sleeping, fishing, and swimming around.

On the way back to the city, I came upon a great farm stand and they were selling enormous bunches of sunflowers for $10.00!  You know I got one for myself and started painting it the very next day.

I have to admit, this painting was not going well at all.  The sunflower right out front was making me crazy.  I just could not get it right.  I started thinking that no wonder Van Gogh had issues.  It was not epilepsy.  It was not syphilis.  It was the sunflowers that caused him to have a stay in the sanitarium!  I knew at that point the painting had to change, so I moved the vase around until the set up seemed like it would work better and once I did that the painting began to flow.

This is where I left off last weekend.  I was determined to get the flowers done before they faded, but the rest of the painting is on hold for a bit as I had the opportunity to paint one of my favorite models last week and will be doing so again this week.  I will be going back to this painting and the others that are in progress soon.  I am determined to get them all finished in the next few weeks.

While on the East End I did something very exciting, but that event is getting it's own post.  I hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Girl With A Pearl Earring, Van Gogh's Letters And Blogging

Hi Everyone,

How is everybody doing?  Like much of the US, it has been freezing here in New York.  Cold weather is not my thing and I have not been getting out to my studio as much as I usually do, but I am working on a new portrait (have the third sitting tomorrow) and I finally got back to the dahlias.  I'm finally happy with the background and the flowers.  I also repainted the vase, but still have to do the blue pattern.  I've never taken this long with a painting but I think the results will be worth it.

I did manage to get out to see the Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals show at the Frick.  It was a great show and seeing the permanent collection at the Frick made it even better.  Of course, the star of the show was Vermeer's Girl With A Pearl Earring.

Girl With A Pearl Earring,  Johannes Vermeer.  Google Images

After seeing the show I stopped in the gift shop to pick up the catalog and I also bought the fictional novel based on the painting.  The book is fabulous and I cannot put it down, but it also got me thinking about something.  As the author, Tracy Chevalier, tells us in the foreward, the book is a work of fiction because nobody knows anything about the young woman in the painting.  As she points out, the model could be anyone.  There have been all kinds of speculation about who she is, but nobody will ever know for sure because Vermeer kept no notes or journals and did not write letters about his work.

A few months ago I read Van Gogh's letters for the second time.  He wrote letters to his brother Theo describing what he was working on and I realized that those letters were similar to what I and so many others are doing on our blogs.  As Van Gogh was writing the letters, I'm sure he never imagined that they would be seen by anyone but Theo.  Luckily for all of us Theo's wife, Johanna, saved the letters and now the world knows about his process, his models, and his thoughts about art.

While talking about the book in a discussion group, I realized that blogs are the modern day equivalent of Van Gogh's letters, only our thoughts are put on the internet for the entire world to read and they will be available forever.  I love that people all over the world are looking at my paintings and enjoy reading about the process of making them.  Long before I started writing this blog, I was a voracious reader of them.  I'll read blogs about almost anything; art, interior design, cooking, writing.  Being an artist can sometimes be a solitary endeavor and I love the fact that I can just go online and find a whole community of people who are also creating something and writing about it.  A few months ago I received a lovely email from one of my readers.  She complimented my work and sent me a link to the website she set up for her grandfather.  He was an artist and even though he is no longer with us, everyone can still see his art and will be able to do so forever.  How fantastic is that?!

Years from now no one will have to guess about the thoughts or process of an artist that they are interested in.  It is all out in the world for anyone to see.

What do you guys think about blogging?  Do you love to read about your favorite artists or writers or designers and know how they created their work?  I'd love to hear your thoughts!

My First Successful Sunflowers

Regular readers of this blog know that my favorite thing to paint are floral still life arrangements.  Painting flowers has always come very easily to me with one exception:  sunflowers.  I can't tell you how many times I have started a sunflower set up only to realize it was not working and wipe it down.  I could not understand why I seemed to have a mental block with this one particular flower.

One day I was talking with a group of painter friends and somehow we got to talking about Van Gogh's sunflowers.  One of the women remarked that while his sunflowers were very colorful, they were not luminous.  Ding, ding, ding - we have a winner!  As Oprah would say, I had a light bulb moment.  Every time I was painting sunflowers, I was trying to paint them in the same colorful style that Van Gogh did.  I was not trying to copy him of course, but I think all those years of studying them seeped into my consciousness.  My paintings lean more toward the Old Masters than the Post-Impressionists.  That bright color just does not come naturally to me.  

Last week I started a new still life, and it was amazing.  I finished in just a couple of days and had no problems at all.  This was a good lesson in staying true to your own style no matter what.  

This was my original set up.  It was nice, but something about it was bugging me.  I woke up at 7am yesterday and realized that the problem was that the right side was too empty compared to the left (don't you love it when problems seem to get solved in your sleep?).  I happened to have another bouquet at my house so I snipped off one of those and brought it to the studio.  

Here is the finished painting.  I'm so happy to have finally gotten this right.  I found a guy that has different sunflower varieties and I am going to try them next.  

Sunflowers, 16x20, oil

I'll post the new painting as soon as it is ready and as always, thanks for following along on my painting adventures.

Sunflowers: Monet and Van Gogh

I'm working away on my sunflowers (finally!) and I wanted to take a look at Monet's sunflower still life.  Since my bookshelves currently have a bunch of paintings stacked in front of them, I turned to google and the painting hanging in the Met popped up.

Bouquet of Sunflowers, Claude Monet, Metropolitan Museum of Art

According to the website, Van Gogh saw the painting in the Durand-Ruel Gallery and in a letter to his brother, Theo, remarked that Gauguin told him that while Monet's sunflowers were very good, he liked Van Gogh's better.  Van Gogh said he didn't agree.

Sunflowers, Vincent Van Gogh, Metropolitan Museum of Art

I'm a huge admirer of them both.  I love finding out about these anecdotes.  It seems amazing to me that the masters were having the same conversations with each other that I have with my artist friends.

This is my set up.  I'm hoping to have the finished painting in a few days.  Have a great weekend!