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Here on the Connecticut shore we have views of gorgeous salt marshes on every turn. I most love them in the early morning when the mists have not quite lifted
Archives for category: Garden art
Whenever I return from a vacation, I feel eager to start a fresh panel. ( I don’t use canvas) We just returned from our fourth trip to Martinique and I was so psyched I finished this little 8 x 10 in a single day. Well, that’s a little bit of a fudge. I don’t count blocking out basic shapes and toning the panel but the truth is that is usually just a half hour task, as important as it is. Painting directly into white makes the job too hard. This will be my 4th painting of Martinique but my first in 2018.
I have the tools, but not the patience (or, dare I say it?) time left to cultivate true bonsai. Maybe none of us has. However I must concede that Jade Plant gives us the option of faking it because of the gnarled and easily manipulated trunks on even the youngest plants. Still, painting a bonsai takes less time and discipline. What’s more, any damage resulting from my less-than-green thumb is already done.
Early on, I learned that painting anything “white” should never mean squeezing out a dollop of paint from a tube of flake white, or titanium white and going to town. Some day I’ll have the courage to challenge that rule in a landscape or figurative painting (I’m sure I could pull it off in an abstract work) but not today. For now it is too much fun creating the illusion of snow using reds, blues, greens and even black. This little 9 x 12 winter scene involved the whole color wheel and was a joy to do. The hardest part was choosing the mixtures that contrasted snow with water.
Spring is here and with it comes the start of the May to October art show season. Juices are flowing and I’m alternating between land and sea.
For the last three years my work has been exclusively collage. Recently, though, I have focused more closely on my old love of landscape with the result that the collage aspect of those paintings has been limited to foreground grasses which do tend to add an element of depth and perspective by creating for the viewer the illusion that he o she is in close proximity to the image looking far into the distance.
Depending on the nature of the scene, however, and the size of the piece I am finding that adding plants is not a requirement to achieve the desired result. Hence my last three small works (the largest is 6″ x 6″)
While I have no intention of abandoning my work in collage, I did enjoy allowing the paintings to stand on their own.
Suddenly, the signs of spring I have been looking for. Yes, the snow is melting and the days are longer but more importantly, Im feeling the energy that flows when my email starts filling up with show invitations. Today I had my first meeting with the president of the Artists’ Cooperative Gallery of Westerly which I was recently juried into. Their next scheduled show is themed “Views from the Street” so my landscapes will work there.
Meanwhile my daughter, Shelley who is a talented photographer with a studio at a nearby converted velvet mill, has invited me to join her for a pop up show at her studio in two weeks. She has chosen some of my abstract botanials for that.
Finally, I plan to introduce a new series of abstract paintings featuring various sizes of metal washers (no plants) and want to produce enough pieces for a meaningful launch of the series at the spring shows.
That means multi-tasking. This week, these are three of five pieces that are in the middle of the process of soaking up their resin baths. By the time they are cured and ready to show, I hope to have many more of all three series waiting for their resin treatments as well. Somehow I’ll have to make time to produce more plants, but with a good foot or more of snow still on the ground, I’m guessing I have some leeway there.
Until now I’ve mastered my resin-pouring skills on little wood panels ranging in size from 4″x4″ to 8″x8″ and I’ve learned a lot. Enough to brave a large 16″16 piece. Not exactly a piece of cake, but in the end it worked. For future pieces this size I may make life easier by using a larger squeegee tool than the playing cards I set out when I resin groups of smaller pieces. Maybe a deck of kid-sized Go Fish cards from the toy department will do the trick. Inexpensive sponge paintbrushes work well for smoothing out the drips on the sides of the panels in the first hour of drying. By then the resin has set enough to stay put during the rest of the cure time.
I made this background wash by dropping well-diluted acrylic paints into a thick wash of water. I allowed most of it to dry at it’s own rate but created some interest at the corners by blowing stronger colors toward the center with a drinking straw. I tried out a burst of dramatic papyrus but, in the end, settled on the smooth curves on nasturtium leaves which nestled naturally into pools of color. These washes are a test for my patience as I have learned that only slow unaided drying of pooled water yields the thin filaments of deep color that I love against the transparencies.
The holiday art and craft show season is upon us and I am getting ready for four of them. On December 7 and 8 I’ll be at Briggs Nursery in North Attleboro Massachusetts. If you haven’t been to this fabulous venue you should make a day of it. It’s that good!
After that, on Sunday, December 14, I’ll be at the indoor Providence Flea whose founders have just been recognized among he best entrepeneurs of the year!
Meanwhile, I’m working on pieces for two season-long shows in Rhode Island. One is at Chapel View, Rhode Islands’s newest high-end gallery. The Chapel View complex is adjacent to Garden City in Cranston.
The second, Peckham’s Greenhouse Local Handmade Holiday Show, begins November 18 and runs through Christmas at Peckhams’s Greenhouse in Little Cranston, Rhode Island. features the work of some 20 Rhode Island and New England artists and artisans.
Once the season is over, I’ll be free turn my attention to new work for May. Meanwhile, hope to keep in touch through this blog and through my Etsy shop. Happy Holidays everyone!!
This 12″ x 6″ resin-coated piece features several plants I’ve used before and one I haven’t — bald cedar. The long cedar leaf spans all three of the rectangles in the painting and ties the whole thing together, I think. Compositionally, it serves almost the same purpose as the garden asparagus I’ve used in some of my works on paper, but is sturdier and easier to deal with at the stage of adhering the plant to the support. Once the resin is poured, any leaf or part of a leaf that is not firmly attached to the wood panel tends to float to and through the surface–a problem that no amount of poking with a toothpick is likely to fix — so proper attachment is critically important.
When using white backgrounds, I don’t always leave the cradle sides white as well, but it works well in this case.
My Stonington Garden 
