Halfway

Ok, here we go. The first body of work I began when I arrived here in Vermont two weeks ago has been really exciting to me. I decided to step back from full on abstraction and I have been making these paintings that have very definite landscape elements, mostly the horizon line and in color choices. I have been playing with a border, which at first felt like a window to me, but it also has a very frame like quality as well. I like the ambiguity of that. I am also doing a lot of scratching into the top surface of the paint, which is barely visible until one is quite close to the piece. The marks are somewhat random, although many of them evoke things like roads, houses, windows and power lines. As of today, I have 10 finished paintings, they are all on 22x30 gessoed paper and I think most of them are pretty successful. Two or three of them are a bit iffy, however if one of the visiting artists were to come in and rave about any of them, I could change my mind. Heh. Me fickle. I only have five more pieces of paper left and plan to do three more of the landscapes and two more Black Paintings. Here are some images of the color landscapes (hmmm, need a name for that series too, I guess). I apologize for the rather bad photos, I haven't yet set these up to take better images and anyway, I didn't bring my good camera, so the 'official' photos may have to wait until I get home. Anyway, here are some images of these paintings, along with a few close up shots:













The landscapes have flowed out of me and so far I usually have a good idea of what and where to go with the next few pieces as I am finishing up the current group (I have been working with these mostly in groups of four). Making those paintings has been a peaceful process; with enough new elements to be challenging yet they are still relaxing to me. Not so with the other things I am working on which all seem to be trying to kill me, or at least maim me. The Black Paintings are in the latter group. Again, I backed up from full abstraction and decided to include barn like shapes in these. I am very happy with what I have done so far, but I have no clue as to what I will do in the next one. I keep hoping that I will wake up in the morning, knowing what I should do but that hasn't happened yet. So I start each one blind, and the images forms while my hands are actually in the paint. I know this is good but it is also a bit unsettling to me. It's not like I am rigid about planning out what is next, but I do like to have some sort of plan that I can either follow or veer away from. However, overall, I think these are successful and I have gotten quite a lot of positive feedback AND one of the visiting artists called them 'powerful'. I have five finished Black Paintings, and three more that need just a bit more work. Those three are nearly entirely black or they have very little contrast, and I am also focusing on scratching into the black, which is a much stronger element in these paintings than in the others. And here are a few images which are are even worse than the others. Pretty much just black!






And the 'People You Know' series is definitely trying to kill me. I haven't done any for about six months and am finding it difficult to just dive back into them. I brought the last few that I did so that I could refer to them, but so far the pieces I have done here are too low key somehow. I can only do one or two underpaintings at most in a day, they are much more intense and I am just wiped out afterward. The color is a bit less energy sucking, but is also the point where everything can go horribly wrong so that stage of the painting is also a minefield for me to navigate. Currently I have five underpaintings, one is finished, one has color on it but is pretty blah. The drawing in the underpainting was lacking and since that really drives the painting, it can be hard to recover....



BUT. The last visiting artist was veryveryveryveryvery encouraging about the 'People You Know' series and told me that I should definitely be showing them. So even though they suck the life blood out of me, I am feeling a renewed energy about them and I plan to focus on them for the next two weeks.

And my last little project here, which is a good one to work on while other things are drying, is all about process. I brought like a million 4x4 inch gessobord squares, well ok, actually a hundred and twenty, but whatever. It felt like there were a million when I did the underpaintings on them! I am feeling like I need to work on my scratching technique since it is becoming a much more integral part of my paintings, so the plan is to make a variety of these small surfaces and do a lot of experimenting with scratching and drawing on them. I will be working on them in between the portraits over the next few weeks.


Even though I was pretty close to burned out on everything when I arrived here (December was SO hectic!) I have managed to get back my painting mojo and have been in the studio every single day. I am really feeling re-energized about my work and where it is headed which is really nice after being in flux for the last year or so. And now the real crush is on, I realized last night that I must do all the underpaintings by Wednesday so that I will have enough time to get paintings finished by the time I have to start packing up (sob).

Sunny Delight

Today was the first sunny day here in Vermont since I arrived last Sunday. Of course it was about 7 degrees, but whatever. There was bright shiny sunshine!!!!

And as an added bonus, the late morning sun does some very interesting things in my studio.....

Color, Finally!

Another look at all the black paintings I did the other day:


After looking at them today, I think I will go back into a few of them and reduce the contrast a bit. I think these should be softer, with more greys instead of whites. Still struggling with what the next step should be. I can't seem to sketch or even really picture what I have in my mind. Maybe I will wake up knowing what to do tomorrow morning.

Toady was a really good day in the studio. Still working on prepping paper and just start gessoing some 4 inch square panels for another project that I will discuss once I get it going. But mostly I worked on the first four landscape/abstract paintings that I did on Monday. I added the color and am quite pleased with the results:


And here are some individual shots:




I apologize for the photo quality. There are fluorescent lights in the studio which does very bad things to my color and also I did not bring my really good camera. I should be able to take the tape off on Sunday or Monday and will hopefully be able to get some better shots during the day.

The other underpaintings I did are almost ready for color too and so this weekend will be very colorful in my studio, I think. Might help to balance out all the white going on outside: I do believe it has snowed every single day since I got here on Sunday......

Pictures, Finally

I am in a different house this time and I like my room much better, even if it is a bit Caribbean-meets-70's-style-princess-bed:


This is the view from my window (there has been a bit of snow here):


I liked my studio in the Wolf Kahn building, so I requested to be in the same building again and I am in the studio right next door to where I was last time. And this is how it looked on Monday as I was getting settled in:




The bridge is being rebuilt so it's a bit of a mess out there right now, but this is the view from my studio windows:


And I also have a good view of the Red Mill which is where the gallery, resident's lounge and dining hall is:


So on Monday I did these four underpaintings:


All are on 22x30 watercolor paper that has been gessoed and taped onto a board. They are part of the abstract series, but I have backed up a bit and am keeping a few landscape elements, most notably the horizon line. Don't ask me why I am going back a bit, I have no good reason other than I just feel like I should. I am also adding a border to some of them which is an indication of a window, of looking outside. I am quite excited about this direction! And tomorrow I will be doing the color on them.

Yesterday I did the underpaintings for two portraits for the 'People You Know' series. I am hoping to do at least ten more while I am here, but they are pretty intense and I can only do a few of the underpaintings at a time.


These are 14x18 and are on birch panel.

Today I did five black paintings and again (also on the gessoed paper), backed up a little bit and decided to include the barn like structures. I intended for them to be more abstract than they turned out to be, but luckily I have a lot of paper and can try again. I actually like these though and think they are a good starting point to somehow express the images that I have in my head.


This is my drawing table, which unlike the one I have at home, I am actually using. I have been making sketches of the images of what I would like to paint, which is also not something that I normally do. Not sure if making sketches is affecting the paintings here one way or the other, but I certainly am enjoying the process of making the sketches. I do not draw with a pencil near enough anymore.


And this is my studio tonight:


I am quite settled in and am heartily wishing for vertical walls to miraculously be in installed in my attic studio while I am gone. Heh.

More soon!

Off I Go!

Well, I do believe the phrase 'insanely busy' could apply to my life for the last few weeks. Not sure what I was thinking when I scheduled a month's residency AND a solo show for the same month, not to mention the one right after the holidays.

But it's all done now, the show at The Harrison Gallery is up, the opening is tonight and I am all packed and ready to go to Vermont. The holidays were great, I managed to get all the important stuff done (baking cookies!) and the kids had fun. I even spent all of Christmas Day reading and sleeping on the sofa! VERY decadent.....

I did slack off on a bunch of things that I meant to do, like cleaning my desk, catching up on the laundry and paying attention to my poor neglected blog here. I had a bunch of posts that I had planned to write but never got to them. I also had planned to gesso all the paper and small panels (for a little project I have planned) that I am going to work on in Vermont, but time ran out and so I will be prepping everything there. A few other things have fallen off my list too and unfortunately Doug has had to do everything in the last week, not fair at all as he will really be doing EVERYTHING for the next month. But he is being a good sport about it and I am lucky that he is completely supportive of my work. I will have to make things up to him when I get back February. Heh.

And right now my plan is to write here every few days or so about my activities at the Vermont Studio Center. I wrote quite a bit about things there when I did the last residency so will try not to duplicate myself too much. Maybe more pictures this time; I will have a laptop that works and it will be much easier to load photos. I am sure I will also be updating my Facebook public page too.

I make no promises though! I might just fall off the internet entirely for a month while I hunker down and paintpaintpaint. Well, probably not but whatever. Sounded good, right?

And PS. For some reason blogger will not load a photo for me today, it won't even give me the loading page. You'll just have to make do with looking at my show preview (link above).

Utterly? Really, I wrote UTTERLY????

Ups and Downs, 2009, Oil on Birch Panel, 8x10

Well, in order to tell this story properly, I must also admit to having signed up to receive google alerts whenever my name shows up anywhere on the internet. Actually this is just for professional reasons. It has nothing whatsoever to do with being self absorbed and wanting to find out who says what about me. Heh.

Mostly though, I get alerts about basketball players (some kid named Travis Helgeson is a mighty fine player) in the midwest, teachers who speak up at their school district's board meetings and then finally the occasional update of a blog who has my link on their sidebar. When it gets close to a show that I am in, I tend to get more alerts; the gallery's press release in newspapers, 'what to do this weekend' bulletins boards and maybe an article about my show. And then every so often I get an alert when another blogger mentions me, which is of course, always fun and flattering.

But recently I got an alert that made me turn about 50 shades of red. Some of you may recall my blathering on and on about Joe Fig's excellent book, Inside the Painter's Studio a few months ago. Which, by the way, I still love and am still rereading sections of it every so often. I wrote this very gushy, oops, I mean enthusiastic post which turned up on the book's publishers website as a review!!!! Good grief! I would have written something much less foolish and embarrassing had I known that anyone out there would be paying attention. And while I do stand by everything I said about the book, I might have gone a tad bit overboard when I titled the post "I Am Utterly In Love". Sigh.

However, I must say in all seriousness, that I am quite happy to have been included in this group of fine reviews. Princeton Publishing has put together a wide variety of reviews including those who can write about art and art books with depth and understanding. Including, hello! Artnews!

Um and then there is me.....

I think I should be putting together a writing resume now. Bwahahahaha!!!!!!

PS. And I am very happy that Joe's book is doing well, it just went into a second printing. Awesome!

A Few More Additions

Barn Near Patterson Road Road, 2009, Oil on Cradled Panel, 4x6

Well, today I got nine unsold, small format paintings back from a local gig, so I just added them to my sales blog. Last ones!

The half off sale was more successful that I ever imagined, in fact I was pretty much totally ill prepared for it! First I messed up the paypal code on all the entries, then I didn't add the inventory section on all of the posts so that some of the paintings sold twice before I caught it. I would like to thank those (and you know who you are) who graciously agreed to buy a different painting than the one they initially chose. But once I got that all straightened out, I think I managed to get the shipments out pretty quickly and safely and hopefully to the right buyer. Heh. Still have a few more in the pipeline and plan to get those out next week. Anyway, thanks so much to all of my lovely readers/buyers/friends, I really appreciate that so many of you want to live with my little paintings.

So it turns out that I also greatly miscalculated just how busy I would be at Christmas, while also finishing up work for a solo show (to be delivered on December 29) AND preparing for the month long residency in Vermont (leaving January 3). Good grief, someone remind me of all this next time I overbook my life, k? I might finish the last of the paintings for the show this weekend, and today Doug is in the city picking up an order of panels for me, which will all need to be prepped before I leave for Vermont. I am also planning to do some work on paper, so I need to gesso those as well. But I am trying my best to at least take a two days off from the studio; tomorrow and Friday (well, unless none of the kids want me around then I might sneak upstairs and apply a coat of gesso or two). Tomorrow is cookie day, we are going bake a zillion cookies and even if it kills me, I am going to sit on the sofa in our living all day on Friday, reading and relaxing!

And I actually do plan on posting again soon (well probably) as I have a bunch of links I want to share. In the meantime though, I hope you all have a great holiday!!!

It's a Big Sale!

Ok, here's the thing. I don't have much storage. We live in an old house with NO CLOSETS and my studio is in the attic which has knee wall storage, suitable for packing materials, mouse poop and bins of my kid's artwork, yarn, and photographs. I have one flat file drawer, maybe two tops, to keep the small paintings in that are on my sales blog. Both drawers are now full, and I would really like to clear them out so that I have somewhere to keep the new small format paintings I plan to paint as soon as I get back from my artist's residency in Vermont.

So it's a good time to move these little ones along. And to smooth the way, I have decided to offer all the paintings on the sales blog at half price until January 1. A big discount, it's true, but I really want them to find good homes and I also really want to paint more, so it's a win-win for me.

And if you hurry and buy something, there is a very good chance you will have it before the holidays. Everything is just sitting here, all ready to pack up and ship out. The mouse poop costs extra though. Heh.

The Winner!!!

Ok, so last year Ginger got to choose the winner of the birthday contest and this year I gave the other kids a chance to take a turn. No one was interested, I don't think my little contest here is cool enough for them. Heh.

So the ever enthusiastic Ginger was more than happy to do it again. Clearly she has been working on her presentation skills and here she is posing with the bowl of names:
I am thinking she could be a star! Or at least get a job on a game show!

Anyway, here she is mixing up the names:


No coaching by me, folks, Ginger intuitively knew to look away while picking out a slip of paper:


And here is the winner:

Jamieson5!!!!!!!!!

I am very excited that Shari won, she had her students do a project based on my work awhile back and well, clearly she has awesome taste in art, hehe. The kids did some cool work which you can see here. So I think it is fitting that she is going to be able to receive a birthday gift from me. Email me, Shari!

I would like to thank EVERYONE who left a comment and birthday wishes, especially Gary. By mentioning that I am still "quite a FOX", Gary qualified for TWENTY entries in the drawing, but alas he struck out anyway, hehe.

Also, I would like to reiterate that I am truly not upset or even mildly freaked out about being another year older; it is simply a bit surreal to be this age on the outside (which, except for my hair color, is ALL natural, baby!) when on the inside I feel about 20, at most. My life gets better each year, and I have been incredibly productive for the last 15 years, what with birthing babies and painting and all, so I have nothing to complain about. Just a little tongue-in-cheek joking about the march of time around here, that's all.

I promise.

2nd Annual Happy Birthday to Me Contest

Layer Cake, 2009, Oil on Panel, 6x4

So I decided to have a birthday gift contest again this year and when I went to get the link to last year's post I reread it and well, it was an excellent post and I am not sure I can top it this year. Heh.

There are a few differences this year however; I am turning 45 (bleh) and my crabbiness is not because of that (well, not ONLY because of that) but because I have been so busy the last few days and am now pretty much totally freaking out about how little time I have left to finish work for my upcoming show, there are a zillion events written on the calendar for the coming weeks so I am going to have many interruptions to my studio time. Arghhh!! Plus I had to do a lot of driving today in our first real snow this year, without any warm up for it, like flurries or even sleet; just a full out snow with slippery roads and everything.

But anyway.

This year has been a bit tumultuous but things are really good now despite looming deadlines, and I am pretty sure that I will be having a very nice birthday on Sunday. The snow makes it seem as if we live in a winter wonderland, I am pretty sure I will be getting some cool gifts from the kids and even though I have to work for a few hours tomorrow, I actually consider that a gift as well.

So same terms apply as last year: leave me a message between now and midnight tomorrow (December 6th is the magic day:)) and say Happy Birthday to me. We'll put all the names in a hat or whatever, and announce the winner on Monday. The lucky duck may choose a painting, any painting, from my sales blog and I will ship it right away. Um, in the US only, sorry (still crabby).

Oh and to all my lovely Facebook friends: ya gotta leave your comment here, not on my FB page. I made that rule up just now!

Pet Picture Day

I was thinking I really should make an effort to post again this week, and since every day is pretty much the same lately; computer, painting, laundry, cooking, driving to town and back again x2 or even 3, I decided that a pet update is always a good diversion from mind numbing sameness. Heh.

So a few months ago, I noticed that our little pumpkin was getting chewed up, and assumed it was some sort of critter that was getting at it at night. Then one day I noticed the chickens were crowded around it and well, duh! They had been pecking at it and we all had a good laugh about it after we realized that carving pumpkins would not be necessary this year:


They didn't bother with the big pumpkin until they had decimated the small one. Now I wish I had charted their progress on it, it has been pretty interesting to see how much pecking they can do in a day.


I am liking these big gaping holes that they have fashioned in our home grown pumpkin:

Nice form, don't you think?

The flock seems to be doing pretty well since our rooster died, and it seems that this scrawny old hen is the replacement 'rooster':
I see her rounding everyone up, clucking behind the stragglers and she is the last one to go into the coop every night. She is always very talkative with me and comes rushing up to me everytime I come outside. No attacking, just chit chat. Still miss the rooster's crow each morning though........

The weather here has been so mild that the dogs are still spending a lot of time outside each day and I got this shot of the dogs just as the sun was hitting the porch the afternoon:



Mr. Wilson is about 2 1/2 now, but it seems like he will forever be a puppy. Even though he only weighs about 4lbs, he is brave enough to pick a fight with any or all of the cats, who each weigh about 15lbs. Mr. Wilson pesters them, they smack him, he whimpers, then starts it all over again. Silly pup.

The cats are just cats. Fat, sleepy, hissy with each other and did I say lazy? I can't get them to do anything around here (although they are good at keeping track of all my shipping supplies):

They do like to find all the sunny spots:
warm places (this chair is next to the fireplace):
and guess who is coming to dinner?

So there you go, folks. Pet update, another post in the can, oh and a gratuitous image of a painting that I just finished for the upcoming show in Williamstown.
Turning At The Edge, 2009, Oil on Birch Panel, 18x24

And PS. Keep an eye out for my Happy Birthday To Me post this Sunday, k?

Crazy December

Good Bones, 2009, Oil on Birch Panel, 16x16

Crazy, wacky, insanely busy week (and month) here. I am really feeling the show deadline looming and am freaking out about whether I will have enough work ready. Three weeks seems like a long time but we all know how fast that is going to spin by.

I am also thinking a lot about my upcoming residency at the Vermont Studio Center in January. The show opens on Saturday, January 2 and then I will be driving to Vermont the next day. Some very precise military-style logistical planning may be necessary for that weekend........

Like the last time I went (almost two years ago) I am planning to work on painting things that are NOT landscapes! I want to focus on the 'People You Know' series, the abstracts, and will maybe make some collages while the paint is drying.

Unlike last time, I have few concerns about sharing a bathroom, meeting people, making friends or finding someone to sit with at dinner. Turns out I am still quite sociable in the right environment and certainly being around other real live artists will help facilitate my chattiness! I still have occasional contact with a few people who work there and I also look forward to meeting fellow artist/blogger J.T. Kirkland, who will be doing a residency as well.

So currently the plan for the rest of December is to have a birthday, paintpaintpaint, have Christmas, deliver paintings for the show, prep all the panels I need for the residency, pack up a month's worth of art supplies and clothing, have a kiss or two with Doug on New Year's Eve, and attend the show's opening reception before leaving for a month.

And that list does not make me feel tired at all. Heh.