Tag: Menemsha
Sad day in Menemsha
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.
Sadly today there is a new horizon…
FINISHED !!!!!!!
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…
Pilgrimage
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.
A closer look…
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…
It’s my birthday…
and I’m taking the whole day off… from painting that is…
the easel chair is empty…
The daffodils are in bloom…
Finnegan, Pat and I have taken the first walk in the park of the season…
and there is a stack of wood in the driveway that wants to become new garden beds…
and the promise of sushi when the sun begins to set…
a fine day to turn 52.
No stopping it now…
Spring is here and the studio is hopping…
Week three and I finally got a decent nights’ sleep and the long slow climb out of pneumonia is trending upward…
Creeping out of that fog it feels like the world has spun into high gear and I am a bit dazed. After the long cold months of dreaming my way through the winter… every corner of the studio has a new project calling…in some cases screaming…at me.
The new printer has arrived and we are preparing to launch the sale of prints published in our own studio and sold exclusively on our website next week. Emails back and forth with Ross, the webmaster…and testing of the new machine…and producing an announcement to be mailed out have the office hopping…
Outside the next phase of construction is underway in the studio garden… we’re going greener with some new raised beds in which to plant veggies to replenish our weakened immune systems…
Back inside the easel has this year’s mega panel endeavor waiting patiently for my energy level to return to normal. The panel is ambitious and I can’t wait to tackle the intense detail…so far it’s been weeks of building up the ground work interrupted by weeks of crawling back to bed…today for the first time I feel that tide turning.
And then last week my share of the Jupiter Moon Farm fall shearing arrived… this time I ordered raw fleece rather than the processed yarn. It is glorious and I won’t have to wait now until the May Sheep and Wool Festival to sit and spin my cares away. I am going to try and use this as a great big carrot to lead me back to the easel and only after a good days work of painting…allow myself to sit at the spinning wheel and let the healing fibers fly.
Through it all, right at my side, has been my little apprentice…
Finnegan is the healthiest of the bunch around here. She has both of her legs back under her now and is rehabbing nicely. She is more than ready to run with the big dogs again but it will be 6 more weeks or so of restricted exercise before she can really let loose. While I was writing this blog she decided that box of fleece left on the floor in the bathroom should be rearranged… the trail leads through the kitchen, down the hall, and right to my easel chair…
I get the message…back to work !
Stay tuned for updates on all these projects and more… H
Thanksgiving Special
With thanks to my patrons for their support…
We are offering 25 % off of all
Strider’s Surrender Prints !
These limited edition prints are available through my website as well as at the
Granary Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard.
All prints, both framed and unframed, will be on sale now through November 29th.
A portion of the proceeds on the sale of each print is donated by the artist to
The Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society
and to
Granary Gallery Show
Well it was a wild week up on the little island of Martha’s Vineyard… the show was a huge success, there were many new adventures, new vistas to investigate, a little bit of poison ivy, lots of early morning walks on the beach, many evenings of friendship and fine feasts, way too many kudos and not nearly enough sushi…and now that we’re home again I am rejuvinated by the enthusiastic response to the new paintings and ready to dig deeper and take the work to a whole new level.
Here is a gallery with some of the highlights of the trip…
check out our little apprentice as she visits the island for the first time…from the big boat to the bigger ocean she was a trooper… she left the last of her puppy teeth there and is now settling in to her cushy day job here in the studio…
another new adventure was being interviewed for Plum TV which has stations in lots of fancy vacation spots…they followed me around for a day with cameras and two delightful cinematographers…and our friend Barb followed them…very much looking the Annie Lebowitz part…
we had our usual techno breakdown on the night of the opening so there are only a couple photos… but I went in the next day and got some shots of the gallery to give you a feel for the place …just imagine a few hundred people milling about with mixed beverages and kind things to say and you’ve got the rest of the picture…
and then there are a few shots of good times with good friends and some views of the pond house where we whiled away the week that was… and of our visit with Ted to Menemsha and a stop over to Jane Slater’s, my teacup muse, and a chance for Ted and Herbert to catch up on some laughs…then, finally, a tight squeeze on the new ferry back over to America…
I’ll let you check this out while Finnegan and I get back to work…
be well, Heather
Painting Finished !!!… and Finnegan’s fence progresses
’tis DONE !!! … though I’m going to have to wait for the photographer to do his magic in order to get a good reproduction, here is proof that the panel is off the easel and I am moving on…
The last few days involved cleaning up the detail on the remaining boats and making sure all the shadows were correct, then glazing in several more layers of water and reflections. Varnish will make a huge difference with a painting with this much contrast. The van dyke brown and olive green dark dry with a dull matte sheen and all subtleties within those dark areas are lost until the varnish pops them out. Imagine a beach rock which is transformed from a dull grey when first you pick it up on a hot and dry summer beach…and then comes alive with color as you let an ocean wave wash over it.
With that major project completed…and before I begin the whirlwind effort to paint the rest of the works for the July show…I treated myself to a rare morning of carving. In the midst of the pile of sticks, which Finnegan and I have been collecting each morning for her fence, I found a honeysuckle branch that decided it would rather be a walking stick. The wood is wonderful to work with. A slow growing hardwood that has a beautiful heartwood of purples and reds. Finn worked on removing the bark while I whittled away at the knot holes and we created a right fine pile of shavings…
It does my soul good to spend a morning listening to the birds, watching my sweet puppy play with her new bone, and working with wood.
We’re making good progress on the fence as well but were up too early to start hammering so here are some shots of yesterday’s work…we were running out of fallen branches so decided to get some fresh meat and trim out the honeysuckle and take down a couple saplings that were too close to the power lines.
After all that work…it was time for a break…
and then over to the fence to say hello to Jed and make sure Zola doesn’t miss her school bus !
Now… back to work !