Exhibited: Sorelle Gallery, Westport, Connecticut
My thanks to the purchaser of this oil.
About this oil:
This is an oil I started a number of years ago as a compositional sketch. The challenge was to make a line of green trees all the way across the canvas. It sounds simple enough, but once I began to move beyond the sketch, a number of problems began to present themselves and lacking any immediate solutions, I stored it away… for years.
For whatever the reason, I saw it in the racks recently and it became the most compelling piece for me to work on. Typically, I have 10 or more canvases in progress and this canvas was added to the mix as first in line.
The original composition had a lot of power so more was added with the bright, hot colors at the top and bottom, making the greens brighter. That is a good start, but it didn’t make the trees more interesting. After a lot of strokes, trials and errors, the trees began to take on a life of their own and I happily followed along.
By increasing the darks at the bottom and using lighter blue tones at the top, the trees began to take on considerably more mass, perfectly setting up the different greens as they flow across the space.
The entire oil is alive because I allowed the painting to take the lead.
Friday, November 26, 2021
Grateful Notices: Greens Moving Across, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches
Winter Contrasts, pastel on Sanded Paper, 15.25" x 19"
Exhibited: Sorelle Gallery, Westport, Connecticut
Thank you to the collector that purchased this pastel.
In this work, I was attracted to the bands running horizontally in this composition. The colors are much exaggerated and that is what made this scene more interesting.
The vertical trees provide a vertical and chromatic counterpoint, particularly where they break the plane of the bright colors in the back.
This was an enjoyable puzzle to solve!
Thursday, November 25, 2021
November Newlsetter
|
|
|
|
|
September Newsletter
|
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Grateful Notices: Yellow to Orange Sunset, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Exhibited: Saks Galleries, CO
About this oil:
Sunsets, those really good ones, are remarkable playgrounds. For this oil, I set out to make a work with bright orange and yellow and to do it without using bright whites to indicate the sun burning through in an obvious way.
Lacking that singular, bright source, I had to come up with a way to make the color combinations provide the intensity instead. The yellow and orange tones create movement and an internal radiance.
Contrastingly, the darker areas have their own glowing qualities as well. Every part of the painting was created to project light in some way.As the painting was developing,
I was experimenting with other colors and rejecting most, but when those etheric, light blues and purples came in contact with those hot clouds, the solution for the upper part of the oil fell into place in a magical way!
Grateful Notices: The Light in the World II, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches
About this oil:
It was a great honor to recently have toured the Holy Land with a group from Steamboat Springs. An exception to the daily travel photos was an evening in Jordan at a nice hotel on the edge of the Dead Sea
I was sitting alone with this long, unobstructed view across the water to Israel. It was a quiet evening before sunset and I had the long promenade to myself. As the light was changing, I began to shoot the scene. There may be art in this....
Once the painting began, the land mass became the compositional anchor and the place where the colors started to flow. As the painting progressed, the flow became an important part of the sea and sky as well. I didn't catch it at the time, but my insistence on this limited group of colors and movement in every part of the scene is what made it all come together in an interesting way.
As I was adding the last brushstrokes to the work, a title came to me, something that touches us all, "The Light in the World."
Monday, November 8, 2021
Grateful Notices: Forest Haze and Clarity, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 inches
Exhibited: Merritt Gallery, Baltimore, & Renaissance Fine Arts, Chevy Chase, MD and Haverford, PA
About this work:
In this oil, I made an early effort to create a piece with a more ‘organic’ feel. There is a lot more openness to the composition in way the trees are spaced and there is more depth compared to my other works like this.
I love these forest ‘slices’ and the endless possibilities they provide me. This particular oil began with my putting in a variety of colors to work out later. There wasn’t a color plan, only the start of a painting with a loose arrangement of trees.
After the second session in the studio and a couple of days of not seeing the oil, I was very surprised to find that the oil had come together very nicely. It was far beyond a start. The painting was very well-developed and was almost finished. It was as if someone had been painting on it in the night when I wasn’t around… a studio rarity.
I left the raw look, not going for polish. The far background needed more work. The light behind the trees was crisp in some places and hazy in others, giving me a choice of how to go forward. After some deliberation, the haze won out, creating more depth and a very nice counterpoint to the clarity of the foreground.
The painting titled itself as well. Nice.
Sign up for my monthly newsletter