I Will Be Revisiting

Pink Mountain, 2005, Oil on Panel, 8x10




I recently received an invitation to participate in a group show at the Anderson-Soule Gallery in Concord, NH. I was pleased to be invited, they have been successful in selling my work over the last few months, so I look forward to the chance to be in one of their exhibitions.

I have a number of shows scheduled for 2006, and I will be particularly busy throughout the summer and fall. But I have always remembered some good advice from one of the instructors in college. "If it's a good job, take it no matter how busy you already are, because you never know when the next offer will come along." And if that didn't convince us, the next sentence would. "If you refuse jobs, they will stop asking." I don't know yet if it works like that in the fine art world but I don't really want to find out. There is always a way to get just a few more pieces finished if there is a good exhibition opportunity on the table.

Anyway, the name of the show is "The White Mountains Revisited" and the work is to depict the White Mountains region in New Hampshire. I am slightly nervous about this. I usually avoid painting mountains as I am deathly afraid of them looking like mountains painted by Bob Ross, you know, the guy on PBS, with the afro and the "happy little trees?" I watched his demonstration show exactly once, twenty years ago, and to this day, whenever I see mountains, particularly snow-capped mountains, ALL I CAN THINK OF IS BOB ROSS AND HIS HAPPY TREES. This is not good. I think I will focus on "Revisited" and work another angle for this group of paintings.

So we have decided that we are taking a family vacation to New Hampshire early this summer and it will be my goal while we are there to figure out how to paint the White Mountain region without actually including any mountains. Maybe I can settle for a good hill. Hills don't bother me. Or I can do what I did with "Pink Mountain" - crop and use pink!