Please excuse the mess…My apprentice and I are putting the finishing touches on some upgrades to the website. The big summer show is a good opportunity to refresh and reconnect with patrons and friends and the website is the focus for the launch of the new paintings….soooo it’s time for a mini makeover.
Most of the improvements are happening in the background, thanks to my webmaster Ross ! He’s making it more user friendly for me to load images and select options. It’s making my job so much easier in this season of deadlines. I’ve added a new look to the boring lines of type that provide links to and fro within the site, and we are including some video and revamping a new studio tour…coming soon !
This week it’s all about the show. As of yesterday afternoon all of the paintings are back here in the studio. Half of them are framed and half…not. There are painters notes to be written, files from the photographer to be cleaned up and sized for the website and the gallery’s use, art supplies and equipment to be packed…and oh yeah…the trailer vent which failed and had to be ripped out and sent back to the factory…ugh…has been replaced with a new one which arrived yesterday…in the pouring rain…so that has to be reinstalled before any of these babies get loaded.
But we’re on the positive side of this adventure and …all shall be well.
New paintings will be launched on the website on Saturday…I hope !
There was a major fire in the fishing village of Menemsha yesterday. The coast guard boathouse and several docks burned down to the waterline. It happened quickly and as of this morning there are no reports of major injuries. The other miracle of this story is that the wind was blowing out to sea. Within a few feet of the burning structure on the inland side are the historic fishing shacks that line the basin. They are bare wooden shacks, many of which are simply standing wooden tinderboxes…and most of which are working boathouses for the few remaining commercial fishermen on the island. Had the wind turned, they all would have been gone and with them the history and charm of that tiny island village.
There are reports of bravery this morning of fisherman who towed flaming but untethered boats out of danger and away from the gas station on the other side of the harbor, and firefighters who managed to control and contain the blaze, and townspeople who set up watering and cooling stations and helped to clear the roads for emergency vehicles.
This is the Vineyard. They know how to take care of each other.
Shortly after the fire began there were reports filtering onto Facebook and via local TV stations. Pat got the news and came over to the studio to let me know. Earlier that morning we had picked up the big paintings for this summer’s show from the photographer and I was in the process of framing this…
For most of the winter the shacks and boats and birds and scenery of Menemsha were my companions as I took care to faithfully render the rigging and shingles and horizon full of houses.
Like many generations of artists, I have been drawn to the historic charm and beauty of the fishing village. My own tastes tend to run toward the somewhat grittier side of the working aspects of the place. The way the detritis of the commercial fishermen, their boats and gear and comings and goings, make for a constantly evolving composition. Lobster pots and long lines, bouys and traps, pulpits and netting all get tossed around by the wind, the tides and the human hands that haul them to bring in the catch of the day.
And if you hang around long enough, and show up when the tourists have left for the day…or the season… the light that is so strong and ever changing on that island will reveal hidden treasures of beauty. For the last couple years I have concentrated on trying to capture some of what I see there and have used the challenge of the large canvas to find my way into the corners, behind the boathouses, and between the shadows of Menemsha.
As I look back now, the focus has been pulling outward…
from the closeup of the swordfishing troller Strider’s Surrender…
to the larger view of the boats and shacks Out Back O’ The Galley…
and opening wide up to the basin as seen from the top of Crick Hill just after dawn on a late October morning…
And in all of those paintings the Coastguard Boathouse can be seen. At first just a hint of the end of the dock to the left of the Strider. Then a sliver of white with the famous red shingled roof at the end of the road to the left of the big shack Out back of the Galley.
And this year, sadly the final portrait… it is the first building to catch the full morning sun at the far right of the painting and, weighed down by the gaggle of seabirds, it serves as an anchor.
The second in the series of traveling summer shows is opening this sunday at the Granary Gallery. The theme continues with…Vegetable…
My entry is titled Heirlooms and features some heirlooms from our dear friend Polly Mienelt who graced this planet and the island of Martha’s Vineyard for 95 years. Her husband Ted gave me that photo of her making a daisy chain and a collection of her handkerchiefs. The rest are heirlooms of a different sort that have found their way into my keeping…and the tomato…was delicious !
Can you imagine a better frame shop than one which delivers ?
My pals at Artworks are the best. The very best. And this morning Julie hauled all the frames for this year’s show in the big van and delivered them right to the studio door. Julie is one of the many young people it was my great pleasure to work with over the thirty years that I made my living as a picture framer. I’m so proud of her evolution into a strong, confident mother, business manager, and all around decent human. Good on ya J.
So here we are again… a studio full of frames, most of which are still up at the photographer’s being shot, and less than three weeks before the trailer heads out of the driveway for the vineyard show.
I finished the very last of the paintings late yesterday afternoon. That one will be for the Vegetable portion of the Animal, Veg, Min. show …more on that later but the first show opens this sunday at the Field Gallery…more info here.
There’s a mountain of office work to do and bills to be paid and commission portraits to be started … and today Julie made that list a lot shorter by bringing the frames to me. Big thanks.
On the island of Martha’s Vienyard, one of the earliest signs of spring…is the sound of its tiniest harbinger…the Pinkletink. Known to the rest of the world as a tree frog, the island is the only place you will hear someone call it by that name.
I have just spent the morning packing this little guy up and he’s on his way north to the Granary Gallery for the first of their traveling summer trilogy … Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.
You can click on the painting above and follow the link to see all of the work and where each of the three shows will be exhibiting…
Now it’s back to the easel…one…maybe two ???? more paintings to go.
Noon today… the big painting was signed and declared completed.
Three brutal months, 46 birds, 46 boats, thousands of shingles and one lone fisherman later…
Despite the congestion in the lungs and head, I am breathing a whole lot easier this afternoon. This is one huge weight (literally) lifted off my shoulders… and I’m on to the next ptg…my brushes have hit the ground running as the race to complete as many more paintings as I can in the next two months before the show.
Stay tuned for updates… in the meantime here are some detail shots…
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.
Maybe it’s because I’m listening to the new Mary Russell novel, The God of the Hive , which is rocketing up the Best Seller list – Congrats to LRK ! …. Another brilliantly written adventure with Sherlock Holmes and his irregulars…
and maybe it’s because this aging artist is constantly fighting her bifocals to see well enough to brush in the finest of details…
and maybe it’s because this massive undertaking of a painting, now three long hard months in the making, is straining and stretching the limits of said sickly artist…
but the other day I got to thinking about magnifying glasses…
and yesterday a new magnifying lamp arrived in a big brown truck.
It certainly does make it much easier to see the detail I am trying to render. Even though there is also an annoying shake that happens when I bump it with the other end of the brush…or the brim of my baseball hat…or Finnegan’s tail. But I’m learning its personal space limitations and loving the sharper focus. Especially on this painting with lobster traps that are half an inch long and seagulls that are the size of dimes. Wish I’d thought of this earlier…but there ya go… and here’s the view through my looking glass…
