Now THIS is something to stand up and cheer about. My friend Peter, who is already a rock star in the woodworking world…and the most famous 17th Century Joiner in the world…has a video out wherein he demonstrates 17th Century New England Carving.
I haven’t even seen it yet and I know it is a must see…must have for anyone that puts tool to wood.
It is available on the Lie-Nielsen website right now… Order DVD
Spread the word far and wide to all your woodworking pals … it’s a the best stocking gift going !
The Reality Boost Show is running now until the end of November in Denver. It’s exciting for me to be a part of this exhibit and to be showing among such stellar painters. The gallery website has a show preview … and some nifty little red dots !
Kudos and Congrats go out to one of those stellar artists…Bob Jackson, who has just had a painting purchased by the Brandywine River Museum for their collection. A well deserved honor.
And further congrats to artist friend Steve Mills who was also part of that Brandywine River Museum show, Reality Check (show continues until November 18th). Steve’s paintings have received nods from many of the reviewers and his recent show at Gallery Henoch showcases some outstanding new work.
All you who read, write and love to listen to finely crafted and cleverly plotted mysteries…
Most of you wonderful readers of this blog know that I listen to audiobooks while painting…and most of them are mystery novels…and my most favorite writer of those novels is…Laurie R. King. But what you don’t know…yet…is that the diabolical diva Herself wrote to me this summer with a fabulously fun and witty request.
Every year there is a gathering of the most famous and successful mystery writers of our time which is called the Boucheron. This year it is being held in San Francisco and the literary guest of honor is… LRK !
Boucheron By The Bay will take place this October 14 – 17 and, since she is to be the queen for those days, she and her publishers are sponsoring the “Coffee and Tea” table at the host hotel. So…she gets this idea…(may I humbly say a brilliant one)… that it might be fun to have a backdrop to the table… and somehow remembers that I have this Teacup Series thing going on…and one email led to another and …poof !!! This is what will be on the banner hanging over the sippers’ silver services…
My excitement is exceeded only by my gratitude for her generous offer to play along with the gang. It looks like a wild and crazy weekend of literary fun is promised out there and I hope if any of you who read this are planning to attend that you’ll raise a cup along with us to the Honoree !
And the rest of us can at least share in the flavor and find a comfy chair, a good mystery, and pour ourselves a steaming cuppa….intrigue.
Ta L.
PS – you can order your very own print of this painting for your coffee and tea tables …here.
I’m still reeling from a power packed weekend of art and artists and curators and interviews and new and old friends and a studio filled with all that and then some.
The Brandywine River Museum show was spectacular. The opening was mobbed but there were enough spaces in the crowd to get to meet all of my Realist heroes. The museum has put the paintings up on their website in an online catalogue version. It’s a nice way to have access to the images but I long for the old days when you could buy a nicely bound book to bring home and peruse at your leisure and revisit the images over the years.
With gracious appreciation to Bob Jackson, Pat and I were invited to join the artists and museum staff at a dinner following the reception and a luncheon the next day following a panel discussion. Both opportunities were pure gold and I will live on the fruits of those many conversations for months.
It was also a chance to meet many of the artists with whom I’ll be showing next month at the 1261 Gallery in Denver.
I’ve been painting round the clock to have some new works to show them and this morning the gallery director said yes to them all so …. off to the photographers and the framers went Pat today and I’ll be shipping them out early next week.
Here’s a preview of one of the paintings that will be in that show… Oils on Canvas
They too will have an online version of the show and I’ll post that link when it’s up.
The show is titled, Reality Boost and will be featured in the October issue of American Art Collector Magazine so check your bookstores or mailboxes for that…
and….
stay tuned for an artist’s profile on yours truly that will appear in the AAC Mag sometime in the near future… Contributing author, curator and all around man of the arts…John O’Hern… was in town for the Brandywine show and spent the rest of the weekend visiting here in the studio and interviewed me for his upcoming article. It was a once in a lifetime experience to share our space with him and the gift of so much of his time, depth of knowledge, and rapier like wit and charm.
John’s genius is well documented in the years of Re-presenting Realism series of shows which he curated while leading the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, NY. But it is perhaps his current creative incarnation as a freelance curator, writer and consultant that may leave a more indelible mark on the artworld.
His most recent work was to collaborate with EVOKE Contemporary Gallery in Santa Fe and curate the show…Re-presenting the Nude. You can view their online catalogue version by clicking here. It’s a powerful collection of work and I’ve been spinning off of the catalogue to research artist after artist whose work he has now introduced me to.
Spinning is indeed the operative word for my head right now…
Add to all of the above a stellar week of sales at the Granary Gallery and we are holding on tight to this wave of positive energy flowing around us… it’s certainly nice to have good things to report on and we’re not taking one second of it for granted.
Now it’s back to the easel for me… and you all get out and take a walk in this crisp clean air !
After a stressful and busy month I am sooooo looking forward to this weekend. Some of my most favorite living artists are being featured in a show at the Brandywine River Museum which opens on friday night for members and saturday for the public.
Bob Jackson has been working tirelessly to help pull the show and the artists to the forefront and the museum is hosting a panel discussion with the artists on saturday. His painting Target the Artist, 2009 Oil on Linen, seen below, is just one of his works that will be shown. The list of other artists is a who’s who of the top realists working today in this country. I encourage everyone to try and get to see the show and my congratulations go out to the museum and curator Audrey Lewis for bringing these works together in such a fine venue.
Congrats Bob, we can’t wait to raise a toast to your success tomorrow night !
It’s a lovely cool rainy day here in the neighborhood and Pat and I are starting to get things in order for our next visitors. The Follansbee family is coming !
Regular readers will remember our adventures with Rose and Daniel and Mama Maureen here in the studio over the years…and the many references here on the blog to Peter’s woodworking and our overlapping interests in all things traditional that produce shavings.
On Peter’s blog today he has the announcement for the DVD that he has been working on with Lie-Nielsen. It will showcase his extraordinary carving abilities and the 17th century techniques, tools and patterns that he uses in his day job at the Plimoth Plantation.
It’s scheduled to be available this fall but he has a preview posted on the blog… I thought you would enjoy it as well. Can’t wait for my signed copy…I’m sharpening my chisels now !
Calling all dog owners…spinners…shepards…hair salons…grateful deadheads…
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a couple weeks…and I mentioned it on our walk this week with the pack, Saren and her three pups Nina, Tallie and Margie…and Susan and her pup Tag, and they encouraged me to put the information up on the blog …
There is an organization Matter of Trust, via Excess Access…that collects hair of all kinds to be used in booms to soak up oil spills. They have been around for a while and it looks like they respond to spills on a global basis…but they have established a large presence in the gulf coast states and are filling warehouses with ready to deploy boom.
FINALLY, something we average citizens can do to help !
It turns out that hair, fur, and fleece is a natural oil magnet. They explained it better so I’ve copied the info below. And there is a video they just sent that illustrates the difference in absorbancy of hair booms vs. conventional booms.
It’s simple…you sign up, free and fast, and then they send you information that is current to tell you how to package the fibre and where to send it. That address changes on a weekly basis and they communicate that via the emails.They are organizing boom barbecues down south where people come and stuff the collected hair into nylon stockings.
It is a great grassroots effort to recycle and what a way for your pets to help out too !
I am collecting all of the discarded fleece from my spinning, and brushings from Miss Finn and getting it ready to box up and send.
I know Finnegan is excited. She’s thrilled to get rid of all that extra hair as the summer heats up !
If you’re interested read below… If you know of any especially hairy furry friends, please pass this info along.
Feels so good to have something proactive to do instead of just blaming and worrying.
If you’ve been keeping tabs on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, you’ve probably been wondering how exactly you can help.
Well, for those of you with furry, four-legged flatmates, it can be as easy as sweeping the floors and collecting all that errant fur and hair.
So how exactly can hoarding pet fur help with cleaning up one of the worst environmental disasters in recent memory? Enter Matter of Trust, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that’s been accepting donations of non-filthy pet fur and human hair since 1998 to craft oil-absorbing hairmats — described as “flat square dreadlocks” — and hair-stuffed containment booms made from recycled pantyhose.
These hairy contraptions are effective at soaking-up oil and they don’t require any new resources … just stuff you’d normally trash (or compost) unless you’re into, umm, stockpiling fur.I must say, sending along fur to Matter of Trust via Excess Access is an eco-ideal spring cleaning mission for folks with critters around the house.
In addition to pet owners, groomers and salon owners can get involved too by sending in bulk shipments of hair/fur. In fact, as of Tuesday, 400,000 pounds of hair was en route to the Gulf Coast.
Did you know that ONE pound of hair can soak up ONE quart of oil in One minute?
Alabama hairdresser Phil McCrory came up with the hairy idea while watching news reports on the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, according to the Matter of Trust website.
Video: Hair being used in oil cleanup
As a hair professional, he knows how hair is attracted to oil– and why humans need to shampoo their hair regularly. The oil clings to the hair but is not absorbed by it. That makes hair a good, natural cleaning aide.
Matter of Trust says they’ve opened more than a dozen warehouses in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida where the hair is shipped. Hundreds of volunteers stuff the hair and fur into nylons which are then tied together to form tubes or booms. The booms are used to surround, contain and aid cleanup of the oil spill.
What is needed, how to send it:
• Clean hair from human heads — can be straight, curly, dyed, permed, straightened
• Every type of fur, horse hair, wool waste and feather is fine
• Make certain there is no garbage — metal or paper — in with the hair/fur
• Washed nylon stocking (even with runs)
• Place in separate plastic garbage bag, put inside of separate boxes labeled debris-free hair/fur or nylons
• Check with Matter of Trust website to find out where to ship the boxes.
I’ve spent most lunch hours over the last six months reading through the letters of N.C. Wyeth. The book itself is over three inches thick and, with my increasingly distracted and dissembling attention span, I thought it might be a resource volume to be dipped into at random and occasionally. But I have been enthralled and am enjoying reading each entry in order, living his life along with him and the family, and taking myself back to the early days of Chadds Ford, a place I know well.
We are members of the Brandywine River Museum and when I read that they were showing some of the early paintings that he did for the Philadelphia Sketch Society I was determined to go. The show closes tomorrow and inspite of our both being sick…again…we packed up our lozenges and water bottles and tissue boxes and trundled off to the Brandywine Valley yesterday.
I am only up to the winter of 1910 in the Wyeth letters and N.C. has just gone to NYC to meet Canon Doyle ( love the synthesis there…re the last blog entry ) for whom he illustrated several stories. So too was the synthesis of being able to view paintings that he had worked on during this period while reading about the comings and goings of the young Wyeth family and the back country lives in the sleepy village of Chadds Ford.
Most of the compositions were landscapes which N.C. writes about wanting to focus on rather than the increasingly obligatory illustrations. During these early years he’s been bemoaning the desire to paint “true” artistic works for himself but also for his mother who seems to keep harping on him to paint “nicer” subjects which I read as quaint and peaceful rather than swashbuckling and verile.
And so he did with the pastoral impressionistic scenes of the orchards outside his studio and the almost pointalistic plein air studies. Very far removed from his bold narrative work with it’s heavy but confident brushwork. The contrast fades to misty sun dappled haze and the edges blur away from realism into a dreamy wash. Which does echo the struggles he describes in the letters of this period wherein the pages drip of angst as he searches to define the emotionally charged connection he has with the natural world around him.
But then I digress and descend into the world of the critics and I don’t have the bonafides to pretend to that ilk.
The exhibition was an interesting diversion and I’m looking forward to diving back into his narrative over my salad today.
There were two other treats on our visit…lunch at the Simon Pearce Factory where we enjoyed the plumage of the Red Hat Society Octogenerians…
and the Shanks Antiques Barn in Oxford, PA. Our friend Tom Gilbert told us about this place and it was amazing. We were short on time so we concentrated on the basement which stored the largest collection of old hardware I have ever seen. Wicked cool…
You need it Bill’s got it…including the proverbial kitchen sink !
I highly recommend a visit …I know we’ll be back.
For now it’s the last push to get this Menemsha painting done and then on to some smaller pieces… tick tick tick.
The Two Dudes Painting Company ( founded by our son-in-law Pete Barber and his friend Brian when they were hungry college students…and now a thriving innovative community give back organization in downtown Lancaster, PA.) … is sponsoring an art show.
The Illuminated Image – A photo based installation from the students of Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. Hosted by Two Dudes Painting Company…. Friday April 23, 2010 6-8pm 750 Poplar St. Lancaster Pa.
Contact for more info… 717 396 – 1207
If you’re in the area this promises to be an interesting show…
and their facility is a showpiece of design and function and reclamation of a rundown city warehouse.
You can read more about the Dudes and their road to success on their web site… Good job guys !
When we go to auctions I am notorious for getting caught raising my number a wee bit too enthusiastically. It ‘s just so much fun…and I really, really want that hundred year old pharmacists chest that has a locked compartment and a lost key !
Well, ok, I did go over my budget at the time but that piece of furniture has been featured in enough paintings to have paid for itself many times over…
And today the tables have been turned and it’s kinda fun to see some people bidding on my artwork…and for a good cause. Here’s a link to check out the Westtown School Online Auction where some of our new HN Studio Prints are included … WESTTOWN SCHOOL ONLINE AUCTION
