Pat just called and frantically yelled to get my camera and come outside…
Here’s who came to visit the studio this afternoon…
She , or he, sat perched in this hickory for enough time for me to circle around and get the sun in the right angle and then sat long enough for us to call Sue and Zola to look out their windows and then an electric truck drove by and that was time to bolt…
It wasn’t until it had taken off that we saw there were two of them flying around together. When I came inside to look at the photos the other one was there all along…
The whole neighborhood came out to see and it was a wonderful break from a long day of painting shingles…You can just make her out in the upper left corner…my easel window in at the bottom right corner…
Someone told us they are living in a nest down the lane…now that they know their way to the studio I’ll be sure to leave some goldfish out for a snack…
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 !
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 !
I am in a blue February funk today and, as my dear departed friend Polly would say… it’s time to…
“shake yourself together !”
So I’m doing just that…I cleaned the studio office yesterday in preparation for getting taxes ready and I gathered up all the post-its which have been tossed about for months now. When I come across a web site or blog that interests me I jot down the link with the intention of sharing them with you all. Today’s the day.
The site that started me doing this is the Juniper Moon Farm blog (formerly the Martha’s Vineyard Fiber Farm). Susan Gibbs and her team of women are trying to make a go of raising goats and sheep to produce fine yarn and spinning fibers. They have the unique marketing concept of running their venture as a CSA (community sponsored agriculture … I think) so they sell shares in the fiber from each shearing. This way they pay for the caring and feeding of the flock as well as have a ready market for the end product.
Decades ago my dream of doing just this very thing went astray …after shadowing a shepardess and seeing some of the not so pleasant sides of sheep caretaking…but I have been a lifelong knitter and spinner and have become hooked on this blog as I follow the many ups and downs along their journey. Susan is an avid blogger so there is something new everyday. Lots of photos of her flock and free giveaways, and she often has a feature called…something you might like…where she shares links to neat sites or products she has found on the web.
So, for all you knitters and spinners out there… if you don’t already know of this farm…you’re gonna love it !
And here begins this blog’s version of paying it forward…
Links you might like…
This is my bestest pal Peter Follansbee. He has made several appearences on this blog and even if you are not a woodworker you will enjoy reading his… Peter Follansbee, joiner notes . We started our careers together in a tiny frameshop in a closet on the second floor of the Harvard Coop and now we are growing old together each doing the thing we love most to do in this world. In addition to being a devoted scholar, brilliant humorist, master craftsman, and all around brilliant human… Peter and his equally brilliant wife Maureen are raising two clones who have inherited and are surpassing their own spectacular qualities…. Rose and Daniel who make occasional guest appearances on Papa’s blog.
Laurie R. King…can’t say enough about this author and her books. But she can and does in her blog . There is a countdown in progress for the latest in her Mary Russell novels…release date is 27 April. Get all the preview buzz complete with puzzles and artwork and lots of extras and give yourselves a treat and start the Kate Martinelli series. She’s gotten me through hundreds of listening hours at the easel.
Alison Shaw…famed photographer of all things Martha’s Vineyard and beyond. You have to see these images in person to fully appreciate the depth of their beauty but the website is a place to start until you can make the trek to the vineyard. This year we will be sharing the spotlight, together with Carol Maquire at the Granary Gallery summer show… 25 July… and I am honored to be in such fine company.
My all time favorite cookbook is one that Alison photographed and Tina Miller wrote…Vineyard Harvest . We love the lobster maki recipe !
And a shout out to our dear friend Vanessa Earl. She’s a dynamite artist and human who has a querky and compassionate love of artistic expression. She’s an artist to watch and though she doesn’t write on her blog often enough, it is a breath of fresh air when she does. Her photography seems to be taking a back seat to her fiber arts at the moment but anything V lends her hands to results in magic.
That’s just a start. I can throw a couple of those post-its away now. Stay tuned for more to come…
As those of you know who have visited the studio, you will always find an empty chair at the kitchen table but you definitely have to work hard to clear a space to rest your elbows. There are always piles of books and stacks of Gazettes in various stages of perusal. Most are newly collected reference materials, art books, bird books, history books, and some are old dog-eared bookmarked standards that I dip back into often depending on what is on the easel or what is on my mind.
Here’s a look at what’s on the table for this winter’s reading…
While on the Vineyard my friend Ted gave me his library copy of Vanity Fair magazine to read. He said there was an article about a new Rockwell book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera by Ron Schick, that Ted thought was sorta fun which shows the photos Rockwell took for some of his paintings. It was the first book ordered when I got home and, as usual, Ted’s right on. I brought out the magnifying glass for this one and keep returning to certain images finding something new each time. It cleverly illustrates the subtle choices that the artist made to go beyond the photograph changing color, expression, positions and backgrounds to enhance and often change the narrative.
While reading Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine I came across a review of the new Rembrandt book by Gary Schwartz and so that made it to the pile. As my friend Peter will tell you I’m more interested in the pictures than the scholarly text but I’ve forced myself to read a bit of it and have learned a thing or two.
In keeping with the Dutch theme I picked up a little book on Bruegel, the elder, Bruegel: The Complete Paintings by Rose-Marie Hagen. It has good reproductions and an easy to read bit of background prose and I have spent hours already with the magnifying glass studying the detail.
At first I was paying attention mostly to the landscapes. I’ve been watching the winter come onto the farm across the street and as the trees lose their leaves and the field corn dries to a brittle umber, the stone barn, farmhouse and outbuildings are revealed. With the raking december sunlight in the early morning the colors reminded me of the Bruegel palette. Now that the storm has passed and the whole scene is blanketed in a foot of snow it has come alive like so many of his little dutch villages. I decided a couple days ago to paint the view outside of my easel window while that snow is still here…and now when I dip into this book it’s all about the red that he uses. Like the cardinals at my feeders.
And no table of mine would be complete without a couple of Wyeth references. I picked up a new one on our trip to the Brandywine River Museum last week but it didn’t have enough going to keep it in the top ten stack. Instead I reached for the richer volume of Andy’s work, Andrew Wyeth, Mystery and Magic .
The Muses led me to a previously overlooked little gem of a painting, Baron Philippe. Within a few minutes I had gathered some dusty props and the sketchbook and come up with an answer of sorts…The Baroness. Stay tuned for that one.
The other old favorite that has been moved to the top of the pile (no pun intended) is the museum publication, History and Romance, Works by Howard Pyle. Moonlight on a snowy lane…he’s got it down.
I’ve linked the books and images here to the Amazon site and the BR Museum site, not as a promotion but to make it easier for you to get more information. Of course in doing that I have come across two more books to add to the collection. It is Christmas eve after all …
Merry winter to you all from our studio kitchen table…
A calm between the storm of fun as the Follansbees make their pilgrimage to Country Workshops where Peter will be giving a workshop in joinery and box making… it is our great fortune to live halfway between MA and NC and so we get to be the watering hole at both ends of their trek.
Rose and Daniel are blossoming into spectacular little humans and as much as I want to stop and document the magic… I would rather not have the camera stopping my eye…there’s simply too much going on to capture.
I did get a couple shots and in between finding long lost fairies amongst the zinnias they planted the last time they were here…and swimming all morning in the lake…and drawing pictures of Finn and alligators on the porch…and telling story after story…Papa and I brought out the spoons bags to compare and take notes and see what each other’s spoons look like now that we’ve been a’ carvin’ for almost thirty years. A fair pile of shavings gathered at the foot of our rockers and mingled with the sidewalk chalk and our conversation seemed to pick up right where we left it …with three year old stories woven through the thin bits…while Mama sat near by knitting and Pat smiled on.
Now this artist heads back to the easel and waits to catch them on the way back through in a few days… ahhhhh.
We’re in full tilt show-prep mode here in the studio and our young apprentice has been keeping a tight schedule. I’m trying to make up for lost time and get a few more paintings finished and this next one has been rumbling around inside my head since it came to me in a dream last winter. The stars aligned and the rain went away and the model was free so Finnegan gathered the boots and teacups and headed out for the pool early this morning .
As prop assistant, she is in charge of making sure the set up is complete…
I have been using her pool lately for everything but swimming…besides the mosquito factory, it is now a staging pond for spoon blanks that I split a couple days ago and am carving up when there is an extra hour in the day… it’s all Follansbee’s fault… http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/ …but Finn’s job is to keep me focused and to make any adjustments needed in the setup… like pushing the model a little to the right…
It’s exhausting work, and she’s nudging me off of this machine so she can take an afternoon nap.
I’ve got the panel oiled out and the sketch done so it’s time to lay down some paint… catch ya latah.
one thing I have come to know for sure is that every painting evolves in its own time.
There are some which have been incubating on the back burners of my mind for years, nay decades…and others that literally awaken out of a night’s slumber and push all other work aside and in a wild impatience are painted in a flash.
The oversized ambition of this current work is certainly in the first category and I’ve recognized the slow and steady pace of bringing each square inch up to its own level of detail as the perfect challenge for a time in my life when I am forced to slow down my usual chaotic over-drive mode. Nice slow sessions at the easel with frequent breaks to stretch out the otherwise atrophying post- surgery muscles.
After weeks of that rehabilitating pace I am almost completely recovered … and almost completely behind schedule. Yes, the twins arrive tomorrow. Yes, the puppy arrives on Saturday. Yes, as you will see, I still have almost half of the canvas to render. And yes, I decided to add two, or three, or more new boats into the harbor…just to up the ante. But ya just can’t rush this level of detail.
Here’s a look at the progression this week…
And here we start this morning…which, after paying the taxes and sorting through emails and …blogging…is dwindling away and rapidly becoming noon. The toughest part of this last week was making decisions about the dock area in the foreground. I have so many different references with an amazing array of ropes and chains and motor parts and bouys and traps and anchors and did I mention ropes ???? And in each scenario there are gems that I want to try and incorporate in the final image. But that empy blob to the right of the big shack turns out to be a floating dock. (Took me days of analyzing the photos to figure that out…land lubber that I am. ) So matching the positions of all the items to the correct line up of the tidally influenced dock…well I do love a jigsaw puzzle now and then.
And the other such area of indecsion is the dock area on the right. I can’t count the number of boats that called that home in the last 5 years worth of photos I took. Here again I want to pick and choose remembering always and forever my High School art teacher Jim Gainor’s advice…paint the air and not the chair. Especially in this large of a composition, the negative space plays a key role. The viewer needs a place for the eye to pause and rest before moving on to the next wave of detail. It has to work first and foremost at the 16 foot just walking into the gallery distance.
So, I’ll ease up on my self imposed deadline of ….tomorrow…for completion and go with the flow…which for the next week will have more to do with animal crackers, coloring books, bedtime stories and …..PUPPY KISSES !!!!
In a little over a week our little family of 2 will triple… and then some. The Follansbee Family will be arriving for the better part of a week so Papa can give his lectures at Winterthur Museum Furniture Forum and so that we can have our much needed fix of hugs and giggles from Mama, Rose and Daniel.
And …at the tail end (pun intended) of their visit…we bring home our new pup Finnegan !
My goal was to get this mammoth painting finished by then … sooooo brushes up !
Here’s where we stand as of 8am this morning…
After days and days of rendering those tiny little shacks I have enough detail on them to move over and get some paint on the right side of the panel. It’s amazing to me how much harder it is to get a building to appear convincingly ( jury’s still out on that ) real when it is an inch tall vs. 6 inches tall.
The line of buildings in the distance will be partially obscured by boats and pylons and loads of nautical detritus in the middle and foreground …you can see a piece of the sketch taped to the easel which I will have to re-trace on top of the foundation work I’ve done…so I’m holding off of the final details until I see what will be revealed.
But I needed to see some real progress… so last night I blew in some vegetation and roughed in a few more of the houses on the hill. I have one good reference for the late afternoon October sun that I am striving to portray…Menemsha is a popular place for islanders to come and watch the sunset and pick up their fish or lobsters for supper at Larsen’s and the quality of the air and light makes the autumn sunsets particularly magical…but when I took those photos in 2004 I was concentrating on the fishing shack and I did not pan over to get shots of the houses on the hill or the buildings in the distance. And almost all of the several hundred other shots I took in the ensuing 5 years are in vastly different lighting conditions. So I am using that age old artistic license to render a continuity of light…and throwing in some clouds to suggest that one could be blowing over at any moment and throw a house or two in shadow.
One part of sharing the process of painting something step by step that I don’t like is that you don’t get to watch the viewer as they see a painting for the first time and are drawn closer, from the back of a gallery, to discover a whole new world of details and whimsy at the surface level and beyond. Feels like I’m a bit of a spoiler.
One such conceit that I am consciously preparing for them is this tiny little version of the Quitsa Strider…
For last year’s Granary Gallery show I painted an 8 foot homage to this wonderful old swordfishing boat…so it seemed fitting to include her here…even if she’s only 2 inches long. Diminished in size but certainly not stature.
Forgive me if I take this opportunity to mention that I do still have some of the limited edition prints we made of that painting available…
Click on the boat for more information and to purchase a print.
