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!

Gregg Kreutz Workshop At The Scottsdale Artists' School

Hey Everyone.  I'm back from a great still life/figure workshop at the Scottsdale Artists' School.  My teacher, Gregg Kreutz, was the instructor for the workshop and we all had a great time.

The week long class was a mix of still life and figure.  Since I do still life all the time, I decided to concentrate on painting the models.

We started the first day with Gregg doing a demo of our beautiful model, Dani.

This is the finished demo.  Just beautiful and done in two and a half hours while answering questions from the students.  (Sorry for the glare in the photo.  We had overhead light, which is not great for photos).

Then it was time for us to begin painting.  It's been quite some time since I have painted a figure so I was a little rusty, but got back into it in no time.

This was my view of the lovely Dani.  Side views are so hard for me to do.  It's much easier to paint a model who is facing you, but in a workshop that will probably not be the case.

This is my block in.  That was the easy part.  The hard part is getting the flesh color right and of course, the features on the face have to be correct.  With a model or figure, the viewer can tell immediately if something is out of place, so it's really important to take the time to get it right.

This was the end of the first three hour session.

And this was the end of the second three hour painting session.  My regular readers know that what I really needed was a full week (or more) on this pose.  I'm a very slow painter, and I'm happy with what I got done, but I would have loved to bring home a finished portrait.

Luckily for me, the next pose was for two full days.  Here we had the lovely Kyla posing for us.

For this pose, I was looking at a three quarter view, so as Gregg explained, the face is no longer an oval.

Here is the block in.  This painting was actually a bit easier since I was using a larger canvas.

This is where I left off at the end of day one.  The canvas was covered and the most important part, her face, was in good shape.

Here is the finished painting.  Of course, I wouldn't have minded an extra day or two on this, but I'm happy with it.

We had three models while we were there, and they were all beautiful, professional and could hold a pose.  It was really a pleasure to paint these women.

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And... here is my painting of Kyla the last time I saw it!  There was a bit of a delay in the UPS pick up, so I'm hoping it arrives soon and all in one piece.  As I said on Instagram, say a prayer to the art gods for me that the painting arrives intact.

Scottsdale Artists' School was a great place for a workshop.  I'll have pics of the school and Scottsdale in my next post.

David A Leffel, The Mastery Of Light Retrospective Exhibition

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend the opening reception of David Leffel's retrospective exhibition at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art in Malibu.  It was a fantastic exhibition and it was great to see so many of David's paintings all in one place.

There were two rooms filled with portraits and still lives.  There was a great turnout and it was so fun to see everyone from The Artists Guild as well as workshop participants that I've met over the years.

As you can see, David has done many self portraits.  I have never attempted it and don't know if I would, but I always like to see how other people do it.

After taking a look at the paintings in the small room and catching up with some friends, I went into the large exhibition room.  This is where all my favorites were hanging.

This is a large portrait that David did years ago of Sherrie McGraw.  I was lucky enough to see this a few years ago during their Taos workshop and it is one of my favorite paintings ever.  I was so excited to see it again.

Do you recognize the couple in this painting?  It is John Mellencamp and Elaine Irwin!  John is an amazing singer and songwriter, but he is also a painter and took lessons from David Leffel.  When John and Elaine married, David was in attendance at the wedding and he was commissioned to paint this portrait of the couple. Sadly, they are now divorced and rumor has it that Mellencamp is dating Christie Brinkley.  Just to fill you in on the gossip :)

I love all of these still life paintings.  The light that travels across them is so beautiful.  A good reminder to myself that I need to pay more attention to that.

David signing books

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A beautiful book was published for the exhibition and David spent almost the entire reception signing them.

Me with the man of the hour

Tim Newton and Jackie Kamin.  Tim is the chairman of the Salmagundi Club here in New York.  It was so fun to run into him at the show.

In the middle of all this, a crew was filming the reception!  They have been working on a documentary about David Leffel for the last three years.  The director told me that it should be finished up in a few months and then they will start submitting it to festivals.  I can't wait to see it.

Such a sweet story behind this painting.  I love the fact that he wanted to paint someone who had lived life.

Check out this close up.  The colors of the white vase are amazing.  So often we think a white vase has to be white, but adding in all the surrounding colors makes the vase look so rich and helps integrate it into the rest of the painting.

Tim Newton,  Jeremy Lipking and Gregg Kreutz.

My favorite pic of the night.  Such a sweet photo of David and Sherrie.

This was a fantastic exhibition.  If you are near Los Angeles or want to do a fun friends trip to LA for the weekend, you should definitely pay a visit to the show.  There were a bunch of us who got together with friends and made a fun weekend out of it.  I had never been to Malibu and it is absolutely one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

The day after the show we did some sight seeing around Santa Monica.  A beautiful, fun place to hang out for the afternoon.  It was so fun to see the pier in person after seeing it several times in movies.  The perfect weather did not hurt either, especially since spring is only making sporadic appearances here in New York.

 

Hope you enjoyed this look at the exhibition.  I'm off to the studio now to try to finish up at least one of the three paintings I am working on.  Have a great rest of the weekend!