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.
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…
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…
When we go to auctions I am notorious for getting caught raising my number a wee bit too enthusiastically. It ‘s just so much fun…and I really, really want that hundred year old pharmacists chest that has a locked compartment and a lost key !
Well, ok, I did go over my budget at the time but that piece of furniture has been featured in enough paintings to have paid for itself many times over…
And today the tables have been turned and it’s kinda fun to see some people bidding on my artwork…and for a good cause. Here’s a link to check out the Westtown School Online Auction where some of our new HN Studio Prints are included … WESTTOWN SCHOOL ONLINE AUCTION
