Port To Port, An Art Exchange Exhibition

Hi Everybody.  Hope all of you are enjoying these last few weeks of good weather.  It is so nice here I may get myself out to do a bit of plein aire painting this week.

I wanted to let you know about a fun exhibit that is happening on Long Island.  The Art Guild Of Port Washington and the Greater Port Jefferson-Northern Brookhaven Arts Council are swapping gallery space this week.

The GPJAC artists are exhibiting at The Art Guild and The Art Guild artists are showing their work in the GPJAC space.

I am a member of The Art Guild, so I have two paintings hanging in Port Jefferson this week.

Peonies In A Glass Vase, 16x20, oil

Dahlias In A Ginger Jar, 12x16, oil

These are the two paintings I have hanging in the exhibition.  The reception for the show is Sunday, October 18, 2015 from three to five pm, at the Port Jefferson Village Center.  Port Jefferson is a lovely town on the water and a great place for a day trip,  so if you are in the area please stop in at the reception.  We would love to see you!

Port Jefferson Village Center
101 East Broadway
Port Jefferson, NY  11777

Port to Port is a signature event of the Arts Alive LI 2015 October Arts Month Celebration.

Hope to see you there!

Blue And White Bowl With Fruit

Hello everybody.  I have a new still life to show you today.  A few months ago I started work on this still life.  I have to say, it did take me awhile to finish it, but it was worth the wait to get it just right.

Somehow, I neglected to take a photo of my original set up, but here are the photos of the original block ins.  You will be able to see what the set up was like from the actual painting.

The set up was a bowl (blue and white, of course) on it's side filled with pears and grapes.  As you can see, the bowl is propped up on it's side, so even though it is still a round bowl, it had to be painted as more of an oval.  Luckily, I was working on this painting in Gregg's studio and he had a good solution for me.

He instructed me to lay a rectangle over the bowl.  This way I could see exactly how round the bowl should be.  We do the same thing in portrait painting if the model has her head turned.  This made things a lot easier, but we were joking that I was in "ellipse hell" until I finally got the shape of the bowl right.

Now we are getting somewhere!  I always like to cover the canvas the first day of a painting.  It makes it so much easier when you go back to it the next day.  Once that was done, I just kept adding on layers of paint every time I worked on this canvas.  I also kept playing with the set up.  I just couldn't seem to get it right.  That happens sometimes.  I've read about artists who will spend hours setting up a still life, but that is not how I do it.  I just set something up and rearrange as needed.

This was the second day of painting.  It is usually around this time that the painting actually starts to look like something viable and it is always a huge relief.  Even though I've been painting for years, I still get anxious those first and second (and sometimes third and fourth) days of a painting because you never really know if it will work until you get going.

In this shot, you can see I started adding more details on to the fabric.  There were a lot of folds and I really had to get them right as this blue fabric was a big part of the painting. Since the fabric was velvet, there was no pattern to paint in, so instead, Gregg advised me to find little points of "personality" in the fabric.  Velvet can be tricky.  If you do too much, it looks like regular fabric.  If you don't do enough, it ends up looking like an uninteresting blob.  You can see I painted in some little seams and bits of light to eventually make the fabric look like velvet.

This was my finished painting of the original set up.  But, as all of you know, the first time I think a painting is finished really doesn't mean anything.  I always go back and tweak things and this time was no exception.

I was never really happy with that pear on the right.  It seemed disconnected from the rest of the painting.  I tried many times to get it to look the way I wanted it to, but I realized that the problem was in the set up, so I added a big bunch of green grapes which had the added benefit of partially covering the pear.

 
Yes, this was my sad little set up!  The painting was already back in my studio, so I had to fake it.

Here it is on the easel (you can see a little bit of the green grapes over to the right behind the painting).  I'm much happier with the whole painting with the added grapes.  I feel like the flow of the painting is much better now and all the fruit is working together.

Here is the finished painting.  I'm quite happy with it now and it has already been in a still life show.  Working on this was another reminder to keep going until the painting is right.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Ronald McDonald House And The Enchanted Home

Hi Everyone.  I have some big news to share with all of you today.  The Ronald McDonald House of Long Island is having their designer showhouse this weekend and I have two paintings hanging in the room designed by the lovely Tina of The Enchanted Home!

I have been a great admirer of Tina's since I started reading her blog years ago, so of course I was thrilled that she wanted to use some of my paintings in her room.

Fruit In A Blue And White Compote, 9x12, oil

Yellow Roses, 9x12, oil

These are the paintings that are hanging in the show house.  Tina posted a photo to Instagram and the room looks gorgeous!  It's very exciting for me to see my art hanging in such a beautiful room.

Ronald McDonald House Of Long Island provides lodging and services to families with a hospitalized child.  You can read more about their mission here.  The opening night gala and shopping event is this evening, with all proceeds of the sale going to support the house.  The rooms will be open to the public Friday and Saturday.

I'm so happy to be able to support this worthy cause.  Best of luck to Tina and Ronald McDonald House!

Assisi, Italy: Painting the Via del Pozzo Della Mensa

As I mentioned in this post, the temperature was quite hot this summer in Assisi.  Therefore, we could not hang out all day in our beloved Comune.  We had to find alternative places to paint.  This turned out to be a good thing as we discovered a bunch of new places to paint and new restaurants to visit.

We quickly realized that for our afternoon painting sessions, we would have to find sites that were as cool as possible.  After a bit of walking around, we realized that we could paint in some of the many small tunnels that are all over Assisi.  Somehow we missed seeing these last year, but we were so lucky to have found them as having shade enabled us to paint during the crazy heat wave that was engulfing all of Europe.

This was the temp for most of our visit.  102 degrees every day!  It was insane.  Luckily, Assisi is very dry, so we did not have to deal with the crazy humidity that we have here in New York.  But we did have to be very careful to drink a lot of water and stay out of the sun.

We actually found our first tunnel because we saw a sign for an air conditioned restaurant and while walking out of there after lunch, we found ourselves on the Via del Pozzo Della Mensa.

It looks like a small alley, but this is actually a road with homes on each side.  The residents of the street were lovely and they were so excited to have artists painting outside their homes.  One of the many things I love about the people of Italy is how supportive they are of artists.

As you can see, this road is not very wide and we just assumed it was a pedestrian walkway that the residents on the block used.  We were wrong.  Cars, including an SUV and a small garbage truck, came down the street at least once or twice each painting session.   We had to grab our easels and jump into a doorway!  It was actually kind of fun and just one of those crazy things that happen when you are painting outside.  

We painted in this spot three afternoons.  I had no problem getting in the buildings, the tunnel and the shadows, but as you can see, getting the correct perspective of the road took some work.  It was not as simple as just having the lines meet at a vanishing point as the road had to take the viewer into the tunnel.  After a few tries and some help from Gregg, I got it done.

My finished study

This is my finished study.  I would love to turn this into a large painting at some point.  I have never tried that before, but I may with this one.

This was the view facing out of the tunnel.  You can see how hot it was, but we were so fortunate to have the shade.  We had a lovely time in this spot.  I hope I get to paint there again someday.

Brush Making Demonstration By Rosemary & Company

This past Tuesday evening I attended a very fun event.  Rosemary & Company brushes are now being sold at Jerry's International Palette here in New York, and Rosemary herself did a brush making demo in the store.

Rosemary and her daughter Symi came in for the demo, bringing with them a large selection of brushes.  I'm so excited that the brushes will now be sold in the US.  Their online ordering was great, but I like to see brushes before I buy them, so I'm happy to be able to do that now.

All Rosemary & Co. brushes are made by hand by Rosemary and her team.  She demonstrated how to make a few different kinds of brushes and showed us the whole process.  Rosemary said that filberts (the brushes that I use) are the most difficult to make.

Not only is Rosemary a very talented brush maker, she is also quite funny.  She told us that she started out tying flies for fly fishing because she wanted to hang around with her brother and his cute friend :) She realized she had a talent and turned that into brush making.

The white object on the right that looks like a water bottle is actually a big spool of white string.  All the brush makers use a different color string so if a defective brush gets sent back the company knows who made it.  When Rosemary remarried and took a two week vacation, she came back to find that her whole team used her white string while she was away!

Did you notice the Chanel No. 5 bottle on the left?  Rosemary uses talcum powder to keep her hands cool while making the brushes.  She said it's like making pastry.  Everything has to be cool.  I was laughing to myself about the Chanel, but Rosemary said anyone who gets a gift of talcum powder and does not use it passes it on to her, so she gets all kinds of posh powders.

We also learned about a new brush line, the Evergreens. They were artist tested and the response was great, so they made them available to everyone.  Personally, I'm thrilled with this new line.  I'm vegan and don't use animal hair brushes, so I was very happy to find out that there is now a second synthetic line available (the Ivory brushes are also synthetic).

Thanks to Rosemary, Symi and everyone at Jerry's for a fun and informative evening!

Still Life Workshop With Gregg Kreutz At The Art Guild Of Port Washington

If you're thinking that I have been spending a lot of time at The Art Guild lately, you would be right.
There have been a bunch of fun events happening, and this past weekend they held a still life workshop with my teacher, Gregg Kreutz.

 We had thirteen still life set ups to create, so we spent the day before the workshop getting everything ready.

This was a massive undertaking that required lots of time, schlepping, trips to the grocery store, and moving things around, but we got it done and everyone loved the set ups.

The workshop started off with Gregg giving a demo for us.

As you can see, he started by just getting the composition and then blocking in the shadows and color.  This was the painting after about 40 minutes (!).

After the demo it was time for everyone to get started.  The group ranged from beginners to experienced painters, but everyone did a great job.

This was my set up.

This was my painting at the end of the day.  I just managed to get it blocked in.

Day two began with a continuation of the demo.  Everyone was anxious to see how the painting would go on from the initial block in.  Many of the workshop participants also wanted to see how Gregg handled painting grapes as some people found them quite difficult.  Personally, I was in peach hell, but that is another saga all together.

This is the painting at the end of the demo.  All this done in about 90 minutes!

At the end of the workshop, everyone gathered outside with their paintings so we could all see what had been done.

As you can see, there were many beautiful paintings.  Do you know who did not have a beautiful painting to display?  Me.  My lighting was not great so that hampered me a bit, and for some inexplicable reason I chose to work on a 16x20 sized canvas.  Why I did that I will never know as I am the slowest painter in the world. I should have known there was no way I could finish, but it will be fine.  Luckily, all the objects I was painting belonged to me, so I will simply finish the painting on my own.

Everyone had such a good time that we are talking about having a second workshop in the spring.  Thanks to Gregg and The Art Guild for a great painting weekend!

Still Life Show Reception, The Art Guild Of Port Washington

In my last post I told you guys that I had three paintings hanging in the still life show at The Art Guild Of Port Washington.  We had the reception Friday night and I'm very happy to say that I won honorable mention for my painting, White Pitcher With Fruit.  Artist Leah Lopez was the juror for the show, so this was quite an honor for me.  I have been an admirer of Leah's art for many years and it was great to see her at the show and hear her talk a bit about art and her thought process on choosing  the award winners.

My painting, White Pitcher With Fruit, 16x12, oil

Not sure what my deer in the headlights look is about, but I was thrilled to see the ribbon by my painting. 

We had a great time at the reception.  So many people came to see the show which always makes it a lot of fun.

The co-president and co-executive director of The Art Guild

Me getting my award!

Juror Leah Lopez speaking to the audience on her choices for the awards

This is Leah's painting, Peaches.  I took this photo, but it is difficult to get a good shot as the juror has their own space on the wall and there is a spotlight shining on the painting. But it is an incredible painting and I urge you to click over to Leah's site and have a look around.  Her paintings are amazing.

As usual, thank you to everyone at The Art Guild for putting on a great show and reception!