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.
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.
What does an artist do when a still life set up requires a subject that is…out of season ?
When the very name of the island that serves as the backdrop has the name Vineyard in it and… it is June ?
Well, she takes herself to the grocery store…or to her iphone.
Yep, who knew. Way back in April when this painting idea came to me and I went to the new supermarket in search of props only to find that concord grapes are not among the items shipped in to our late winter township from some warmer climate on the other side of the globe. While wandering over to my favorite section…the cheese gazebo…I looked up and poof ! Concord grapes, complete with leaves ! Not exactly what I wanted but in a pinch… !
Now, in the middle of June, as I scramble to complete the paintings for the Granary Show, it is time to pull those photos from the camera roll on the trusty iphone and print them out as reference for the still life that sits before me.
You’ll have to wait a bit longer to see the finished result…but here’s a teaser…
A soft and quiet early morning in the studio. Cool damp air a welcome contrast to the sweltery summer heat of last week. Birdsongs and the first drops of rain. 100% chance of those drops falling all day. My apprentice is nudging at my elbow…
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…
I know, two posts in one day…and after I whined about being so far behind…
but a few minutes ago Pat called and made me come over to the log cabin because tornadoes had been reported from a storm moving in our direction…fast.
Sure enough we got two whopping doses of wicked weather… the skies have cleared and the temperature dropped 20 degrees… and the studio yard is now a carpet of ice.
