Three Houses, Winter

Three Houses, Winter

8x10, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

Here's the latest. I had trouble photographing the sides of the white houses because the small amount of yellow kept coming out mustardy. Finally had to add another layer of yellowish-white, and then I was able to photograph them properly. My camera is very picky about certain colors, especially yellow. Sometimes, even if there are several layers of another color over the yellow, what the camera picks up is that yellow underpainting. It's very strange.

Canton Morning

Canton Morning
9x12, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

I've painted this farm before, because I can't seem to resist it, sitting against a sturdy row of trees at the end of a long field near the highway in tiny little Canton, Maine. No matter what time of day I drive by, the sun is always hitting the house and barn at an angle that makes for fascinating geometric shadow shapes.

Morning Light, UMA

Morning Light, UMA
16x20, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

This is a painting I did a couple of years ago and I decided it needed revamping. The sky was a wishy-washy shade of blue, so I repainted it with brighter, more vivid colors. I think it greatly improved the painting.

Munjoy Morning

Munjoy Morning
9x12, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

The latest. A typical scene on Portland's Munjoy Hill, as the morning sun rising out of Casco Bay just begins to illuminate the housetops.

Homage

Homage
11x14, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

I stayed up way too late last night finishing this one, and today I'm paying the price. This is a story from my past; when I was five years old, I lived in the little red house. My mother's dear friend, Mrs. Dorr, lived in the white one. It was an odd friendship; they were dear friends for many, many years, yet they never called each other by their first names; they always referred to each other as Mrs. Dorr and Mrs. Runnells. They would sit together at the kitchen table on hot summer days, drinking tall glasses of unsweetened iced tea and smoking cigarettes. Mrs. Dorr smoked Salems, filtered; my mom smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. Both women are long gone now, but I like to think of this painting as homage to a couple of pretty amazing ladies!

January Sunrise

January Sunrise
8x24, acrylics on canvas
AVAILABLE

Another new one, this painted from a photo I took earlier this winter as the sun rose over the UMA parking lot. I'm tired of winter, tired of snow (we got more than a foot last night), but I have to admit that winter scenes have a certain charm that's missing from summer paintings.

Winter Dusk

Winter Dusk
11x14, acrylics on canvas
AVAILABLE

My latest. Snow day today! So I came downstairs early and painted this before breakfast. I caught this big old farmhouse on Route 3 somewhere between Augusta and Belfast just as the last light of day was tinting the windows.

Back Bay Sunset

Back Bay Sunset

16x20, acrylics on canvas
AVAILABLE

A sunset view of Boston's Back Bay from the Route 1 exit ramp that winds in a terrifying circle between I-93 and the Tobin Bridge. Note that the old John Hancock building is reflected in the mirrored side of the Hancock Tower.

Road to UMA

Road to UMA
11x14, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

My latest. I'm getting tired of painting snow scenes, tired of the cold wind and the sloppy roads. I'm ready for summer, and this is my ode to summers past. I painted this in a slightly different style than my usual, with the light and shadow flowing in a loose and more watery manner. I wish my digital camera did a better job of displaying color properly; in real life, the bright and dark contrasts in this painting are so intense they just pop. It jumps off the wall at you from all the way across the room and beckons you to come closer.

Munjoy Shadows

Munjoy Shadows
9x12, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

I took a trip to Portland yesterday, and spent some time exploring Munjoy Hill. I love the neighborhood, with its old houses crowded so close together. It was mid-morning, and the sunlight was peeking in around all the wonderful geometric shapes. It made for interesting photos and, I believe, an interesting painting.

Downtown With School Bus

Downtown With School Bus
9x12, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

Here's how I spent Valentine's Day. I took this photo more than a year ago, and I've been wanting to paint it forever. I decided today was the day. This is early morning light in downtown Augusta at the intersection of Water, Bridge, and Cony Streets. We have such a beautiful downtown area, with all those nineteenth-century brick buildings, that it's a real shame that so much business has moved away from downtown and out to the malls. When I was a kid, downtown Augusta was thriving.

SOWA Art Walk

I just got some good news. My daughter and I are both participating in the SOWA Art Walk in Boston on May 16 and 17 (she's a photographer). It will be our first art show, and they told us we could share space, so we'll be able to keep each other company and provide each other with moral support. We first heard about the show last year from an online artist friend, J.J. Long, who lives in the Boston area and is an amazing painter. If you get a chance, you should check out his work! Jen and I drove down last year to see J.J. and check out all the amazing art. The Art Walk is held in Boston's South End. SOWA stands for South of Washington Street, a growing arts district where a number of old mill buildings (and a few new buildings) have been converted to artist studios. The artists open their studios to the public, and other artists from all around New England are given space in the public area to display and sell their work. There are of course, visual arts (paintings, photos, etc.), as well as glass art, jewelry, textiles, ceramics, leather work, and pretty much any kind of art you can imagine. The only downside I can see to participating is that we won't get to spend hours going through all those studios, looking at the art! But I'm really excited about it.

This will involve spending two nights in Boston. I went online to look for hotel reservations and discovered that the average prices for that weekend were in the $350-400-a-night range. Even for Boston, that's ridiculously high. Then I realized it was because this must be college graduation weekend, when a deluge of parents and friends flood the city to attend all those commencements (the greater Boston area has a trillion colleges and universities). So the hotels jack up the prices because they know they can get it. What a racket! Even the dumpy place we stayed a couple of years ago (for $99, I might add) when we went to see Bon Jovi (the bathroom didn't have a real door, and the headboard was falling off the wall) is asking $255 a night for that particular weekend! So I booked us a room at a Hampton Inn north of the city for $129 a night. Quite a difference! I had hoped to be in the city, but I suppose we don't have to spend time at the hotel except when we're sleeping. And it's a decent place for the price; we stayed there last summer for another Bon Jovi concert, and the hotel had a gym and an indoor pool and wifi and a buffet breakfast, all of them free. Now I have three months to paint like crazy so I'll actually have something to take with me. And I'm hoping to sell enough paintings between now and May to cover the cost of the hotel, as my credit card balance is already higher than I'd like.

Can't wait for May!


Here's a link to the Art Walk site: http://www.sowaartwalk.com/

Chinatown Shadows

Chinatown Shadows
8x10, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

Another new 8x10. I really like doing these smaller paintings because I can finish them in a single session, and they're small enough to fit on my scanner, so the images are much more accurate than the ones I get with my digital camera. I saw this scene in Boston's Chinatown last Sunday when Jen and I were down there for Chinese New Year. I loved the way the afternoon sun on the yellow building made it pop against all those shadows.

Maine Farmhouse in Winter

Maine Farmhouse in Winter

8x10, acrylics on canvas
SOLD

Here's the latest, a small landscape painting of a Maine farmhouse in winter. I don't remember the exact location, but the photo was taken on a trip to Bangor about a month ago. I think I like painting these little guys!

No New Paintings Today

No new paintings today, but I thought I'd put up a new picture of David, which as usual I stole from his mom's MySpace page. He's getting so big! Standing up in his playpen, crawling all over the house, sitting up, and getting into everything in sight. He's even starting to eat some regular people food along with his baby food. They grow so fast, I wish I could have more time with him.

I think I'm going to take Debra's advice (I suspect Debra is the only person who reads this blog, but I'm going to pretend that there are more of you out there) and start doing smaller paintings. See how they sell. If I want to stay in business, I need to be flexible, so I'm willing to try something new and see how it flies. Time to make a visit to the art store!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

It's been a rough start to the year. I lost my sister two weeks ago, unexpectedly, although she was nearly twenty years older than me and in poor health, so it wasn't a total shock. But losing someone is never easy, even when it's not totally unexpected. We hadn't spent as much time together in the last couple of years as we used to. I've been so busy, and she had mobility problems, so getting together took more effort and planning than it used to. But when we did get together, we always had so much fun, taking long drives (especially to the ocean) and eating out. She was one of a kind, and my life won't be the same without her. I miss you, Sis!

On the painting front, I'm starting to feel a little bit discouraged. Sales are moving slowly. As in, pretty much not moving at all. I have a number of paintings listed at Etsy, and I've had exactly one sale there (Hi, Deb!) in the last sixty days. I've been listing new items and re-listing old ones, but no bites. I hadn't listed at eBay since before Christmas, but I moved four items over there from Etsy a few days ago. All four auctions ended this morning, with several watchers but no sales. I'm spending more money in eBay fees than I'm making. So this morning, I cancelled my eBay store. I still plan to sell there, but I can't justify paying the monthly fee for a store when I'm not bringing in any money from it. The listing fees are bad enough with no sales, but adding the store fee on top of those makes no sense. No matter how you look at it, that's a loss. I know it's this lousy economy. So I decided to slash prices in my Etsy store, and now most everything there is listed at half of what I was trying to sell it for before. We'll see if that makes a difference.

I'm so torn. I can undervalue my work, sell it so low I'm pretty much giving it away, and I'll have sales. Not a lot of sales, but I'll have sales. But if I list it for anywhere near what I believe it's worth, the sales just aren't there. I don't want to give away my work. On the other hand, if I want to keep on painting, with the cost of supplies and the lack of space for hanging them in my house, I have to sell. So I guess for the time being, until the economy improves, my philosophy will be that selling anything, even at a low price, is better than selling nothing. At least my work will be seen, and I'll continue to build a following.

She said hopefully.

The good news is that I did sell a painting this week to a local chiropractor and his wife, and they plan to hang it in his downtown office, plus they want me to do a commission of downtown for them, also for the office. So I'm not at a standstill, just a slowdown. This past Sunday, my daughter Jennifer and I went to Boston for Chinese New Year. I took hundreds of photos, and I'm hoping I may get a painting or two out of them. It was a nice break from the usual humdrum winter routine, and both of us needed the lift. We don't get as many days together as we'd like, because we're both working full-time and we live sixty miles apart in snowy Maine. But we try to always make it to Boston for the Chinese New Year celebration. It's the highlight of my year, with the dancing dragons, the bright colors, the firecrackers, and all the commotion!