I’m thrilled to announce that my paintings will now be exhibited in the Sugarman Peterson Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico… Here’s a link to their website…Click Here
It is fitting therefore that, among the first group of paintings, they will be showing Bucket List. Thanks to gallery owners Michael and Christie Peterson I can now cross one more thing off of my….bucket list !
We have a visitor in the studio yard…
She was spotted in the hedges near the road last week. Poor little dear had hurt her front paw and was favoring it gingerly as she hopped to a safer nesting spot.
The boys down the lane saw her next, and then the n’er-do-wells next door to them. Then yesterday, after the ambulance drove down the lane and Pat went to find out what was going on…the rest of the neighborhood came out for a gossip and everyone was talking about the baby raccoon.
Finn got her first look late the other night when the flashlight beam caught them a foot apart .So I worried, because I do, and I called the game warden. He said, matter-a-factly, that it was the time for the babies to be kicked out of the nest and she probably wasn’t rabid since she didn’t try and attack me and that she would just find her way in the world.
Harsh natural truths.
Pat sees her every time she pulls in the drive now and I’ve noticed that every car, every one of the previously obnoxious daredevil speedsters who flew in and out of our lane with completely reckless abandon…well they are now all slowing down and looking for a glimpse of our baby.
When Pat looked it up last night, google told us that they eat berries. So that is probably why she is sticking close to the mulberry tree.
And that is why, after the traditional three day waiting period…during which any animal that crosses my path has the option to disappear…but if they choose to stay longer than three days…well I am obliged to name them. And woe be tied to anyone who messes with her now…because the muses have spoken…
and she shall be called…
Mulberry.
It’s a steamy July afternoon and the weathermen say it’s the coolest day of the coming week. So I am particularly enjoying the air-conditioned studio and I plan to stay right here at this computer for the next few days getting all the behind-the-scenes work done in preparation for the big Granary Gallery Show.
Only a couple weeks away now and I am easing off of my manic pace which has been sustained, with the help of caffeine and Tylenol, for the past several months. Those 12 hour days at the easel were intense and I’m kinda floating around in a daze without that extreme focus.
The calendar says tomorrow is the 4th of July. 150 years ago, this very afternoon, in just the same kind of suffocating heat and humidity that blankets the valley today, Gen. James Longstreet had ordered Gen. George Pickett to lead an assault on the Union soldiers holding their line on the hilltops of Gettysburg. The “high water mark of the confederacy” would be reached by softening the line with heavy batteries of artillery and sending in Pickett’s men. They did reach the Union soldiers and a few Confederates broke through… but the line held… Pickett’s charge proved to be the final battle in the bloody three day slaughter, and it turned the tide of the war.
I’ve been listening to the local NPR radio channel as they have broadcast live from the battlefields each day for the past week. If you’ve never been to Gettysburg, history buff or just tourist, it can be a very moving place to visit. Today, as the culmination of several days of re-enactment, the participants, and visitors, are lining up on opposite sides of the battleground. Then, in a solemn procession, they are walking across the fields to meet at the line where the original soldiers stopped that assault and there are meant to come together and shake hands.
When the crowds clear out, and the weather cools down, and both my knees have been replaced, I’m going to throw the traveling easel and the paint box in the truck and take a road trip over there and see if I can capture some of the spirit of that hallowed ground.
Happy Independence Day to all.
Please be safe out there.
On newsstands now…
It’s a thrill to be one of the artists featured in Cape Cod ARTS magazine’s 2013 issue. Here is a link to find out more…click here
It was one of the top five best days of my life when I first walked into the Granary Gallery…and after 12 years of partnering in art… the depth of my gratitude for the fine work that the entire staff knows no equal.
Congrats to you Chris and Sheila on being chosen, once again, as the Best Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard…and beyond !
When I settle in to work on a big painting my focus narrows, the creative energy tightens, and all the weeks of slogging through pondering compositional elements and deciding what to keep in and what to leave out, of sketching and panel prepping, and of reworking those sketches and printing out piles of detail reference photos…it all reaches a crescendo and, like the stretching of a rubber band, it suddenly snaps ! …and the first brushes hit the canvas. So it was, all that creative momentum strung taut, when I began the large painting, Severe Clear, for this summer’s Granary Gallery show.
But now, some 300 easel hours later, I am looking back and see, on my camera’s photo stream, that there were some wonderful moments in the spaces between all those long days of lifting brushes. When I paid homage to my most favorite springtime rituals. When I literally stopped to smell the roses, and to enjoy the first of the fiddleheads, and the first grilled pizza of the season, the annual pilgrimage to the Sheep and Wool Festival, to sit of an afternoon in the studio garden with loving family, and to enjoy this wonderful life we have together.
I’ll be telling you about the rest of the project, of which this painting is a keystone work, in little bit, a series of paintings which feature a Marine Hospital on Martha’s Vineyard that is about to open a new chapter in its historic life, but in the meantime…here’s a sneak peak at the big one, Severe Clear, and some of the studio highlights experienced along the way…
And now, I give you… Severe Clear
What a nice surprise to sit down to lunch today and open the new issue of American Arts Quarterly to find my painting, The Mender, on page 53.
A thank you to Gallery 1261 for all their hard work and continuing support !
I knocked off work early last night and sat with Herself in the studio yard where we sipped martinis and watched the stormy sunset then headed home for a movie night.
We watched an old favorite, Strangers in Good Company.
Neither of us could remember how long ago we saw it for the first time, it was released in 1990, but both of us agree that we can now identify much more intimately with the women who form the cast of characters.
It is a magically artistic look womankind.
You can read about the movie and how it was made by clicking on the Wikileaks link (click on the image above) but there’s not much more than the brief outline…eight women on a bus in canada…bus breaks down in the woods…they seek shelter and tell their stories. Simple. Quiet. Honest conversations.
I want everyone of the grandchildren, nieces, nephews, godchildren and godmoose children to watch it. In fact I insist. With cell phones removed from the building.
They won’t get it…yet…but it needs to be on their radars now. And revisited every ten years until their first grey hairs begin to appear and then every two years after that.
So… Amanda, Ben, Isaac, Anna, Melissa, Neill, Johnny, Abby, Emily, Danny, Sarah, All the Decker girls, and yes, even you Zoe…put it on your netflix queues now.
Gran and I will look forward to sitting in the studio yard, watching the sun set, and listening to your movie reviews.
I thought you would appreciate an update on the Wille Sundqvist Movie project. They received an amazing response for their Kickstarter campaign to help raise money to fund their production of the movie to capture Wille’s woodworking genius.
Peter wrote a bit more about his connection to Wille and his road to being the pre-eminant 17th Century Joiner in the modern world. It includes a photo taken at the beginning of that journey … what a bunch of manly men…reminds me from where my hippie roots were so happily planted.
I’ve still got to resist the urge to pick up an axe rather than these tiny brushes as the Granary Show deadline lurches ever closer…but soon…very soon…I’ll get a spoon carving break and my blood pressure will slow accordingly.
From Peter…
I got a note back from Jogge Sundqvist the other day, when I wrote to congratulate him on the immediate success of the kickstarter fundraising. Here’s part of what he wrote:
“YES.
This is just overwhelming!
I haven´t in my deepest imagination ever thought that we should reach the goal so quickly. Within 24 hrs…
This is so helpful, not just the money, it also strengthens everyone involved in self-confidence and trust in the movie to be something really good.
And everyone involved in the film is full of humility and wonder at the response we’ve had to make the film about Wille.
We have a little way to go before our actual budget… I hope you still want to continue to spread the word about the film, every little contribution is incredibly valuable to make a film of high artistic quality and with a clear content.
Hi 5. he, he”
So if you are inclined, there’s still plenty of time to donate to this project. Here’s the kickstarter link, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/761142325/the-spoon-the-bowl-and-the-knife-craftsman-wille-s?ref=recently_launched or if you prefer, you can send a check to Drew.
Make it out to:
Country Workshops – Sundqvist video project
990 Black Pine Ridge Road
Marshall, NC 28753
BUT – you might ask: What’s all the fuss about Wille Sundqvist and some wooden spoons? Ha! You’d be amazed.
Wille Sundqvist spoon
As the years keep ticking by, I often think about connections and chronologies. May times people will think about events in their lives, and how one simple happening might turn your life this direction or that…and I think that without Wille, I might not be a joiner/woodworker today. Certainly not a spoon carver. And yet we barely know each other…
I first heard of Wille of course from Drew Langsner, whom I met in 1980. That was the start of my woodworking career, although you wouldn’t have seen it coming then! I have often told the story of how I got to Drew’s Country Workshops to learn traditional woodworking. I was a mainstay there in the 2nd half of the 1980s and early 1990s (til I got a job…).
But how did Country Workshops begin? Drew has told me and many others the story many times, and a while back wrote it down in one of the Country Workshops e-newsletters. http://www.countryworkshops.org/newsletter31/ (scroll down to “CW History” – and if you haven’t yet, you can sign up for their free newsletter. It always has good stuff in it, besides update on classes and tools, etc.)
The gist of it is that Bill Coperthwaite brought Wille Sundqvist to meet Drew & Louise in 1976 or 77. Drew had a couple days’ worth of lessons from Wille, and was wanting more. Thus the idea of inviting him to come teach a workshop, which led to the Langsners hosting woodworking classes ever since.
Drew included Wille in his first woodworking how-to book, Country Woodcraft, in 1978. That’s where I first saw/heard of Wille.
Wille Sundqvist 1978
Then as I became a regular student at Country Workshops, I often heard stories of Wille’s craft and his teaching, and also saw examples of his work. As it turned out, I met his son Jogge first, in 1988. Then a few years later I was able to attend one of Wille’s classes.
Here is a quote from Wille’s book, Swedish Carving Techniques (Taunton Press, 1990):
“Carving something with a knife or an ax is a very tangible way to get a sense of design. Because the object being made doesn’t have to be secured in any way, it’s easy to move it to different positions and see its lines and shape grow out of the blank. A three-dimensional object isn’t just a picture. It’s an infinite number of pictures, and all of the pictures must find harmony within the object. The lines of the object must compose one unit, congruent from whatever direction it is seen. Carving teaches design.”
And that is really a big part of it. Wille’s spoons are very deceptive. Unlike any furniture work I do, these are subtractive woodworking – you’re cutting wood away & leaving just the right bits. You hope. Each cut means something. There’s so many layers to what Wille teaches – the postures, the tools, the design. You learn about wood and how it grows; and its strengths and weaknesses. Also about the tools, the edge and how it slices. If you have ever seen me use a hatchet, that work comes to me from Wille, some of it directly and much of it through Drew & Jogge.
To me, the spoon carving is a revolutionary act. It helps cut through the mass-produced cheap culture that we have absorbed like zombies. Such a simple household implement, taken to extraordinary heights. Why shouldn’t our most basic kitchen stuff be beautiful? Out with plastic! Think about Coperthwaite and his quote “I want to live in a world where people are intoxicated with the joy of making things.”
The kickstarter campaign runs for 4o more days and at this writing is over $7,000. That’s not counting whatever got donated directly to Drew or Jogge. Thanks to everyone from here who helped. If you’re inclined, please spread the word.
More links to some related material:
Ah the rights of Spring !
And the time honored traditions of the favorite meal of my “salad days” back in Watertown…Mussels and Fiddlehead Ferns…celebrated now in my dotage…
I’m still lifting a glass of the bottom shelf chardonnay in toast to the delicacy…
But nowadays I am using my organically home grown onions and garlic from the studio gardens…
Progress