With many aspects of life on hold, there is more time than ever before to experiment with art. My goal is to try something new with each painting so I may grow as an artist . Here are a few of the works I have made during the shutdown. Hoping that it won’t be too much longer before galleries reopen but for now creating goes ahead.
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.
This 16 x 20 Winterscape is on the large side for me. Soon I’ll be working on a series of small pieces for my gallery’s November and December shows. I worked on this one for about a week and made steady progress but now I think it is time to make a few other paintings while I mull over what is needed to tweak this to completion. The best thing about painting snow is avoiding white It is so much fun to load the image with blues, grays, greens, pinks, umbers and gold and still have the illusion of white snow!
This month I have strayed a bit from my usual small format panels and completed an 18 x 24 landscape which I then highlighted with some careful scribbling in graphite. Normally, I continue my images on the top and sides of my panels and coat the images in resin. This time, my plan is to frame. Because I am concerned that a resin coating might fight the effect of the frame, I am deciding to leave this one au naturale
Next, I went back into small format for a little landscape which I think prefer to show unframed. Still I don’t think I can resist a shiny coating on this one. It will pop.
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.
Back at the turn of this new century, I made a big series of large works on canvas that incorporated metal washers. For me, they have passed the test of time so I decided to miniaturize the concept and incorporate my current resin-coated works on wood panel – some with pressed plants and – gasp – some without.
I’ll be showing these this season in a number of venues including the Artist’s Cooperative Gallery of Westerly, the Memorial Day weekend VIRTU Art Festival in Westerly, the Providence Artisan’s Market at Lippett Park, and later in the season at the Wickford Art Festival, the Warren Art Festival, the Strawberry Festival in Newport and more. I also have month-long exhibits scheduled at the Green Marble Coffee Shop in Mystic in June and at the Yellow House Coffee Shop in Stonington in July. Hoping to see lots of old friends.
I just finished a small custom piece that included a “palm tree” made from simple ferns and sensitive ferns so took the opportunity to take inventory. Fresh out of Mexican Feathergrass but off to Florida in a few weeks where I will hunt and gather them. For ferns I may have to resort to an off-season visit to my favorite nursery. I see Japanese painted ferns in my future.
Meanwhile I received a shiny new photography tent which makes it possible for me to end my long battle with glare when photographing my resin peices. Hopefully this means I’ll be putting more of them into my Etsy shop.
My Stonington Garden 
