Good Bye PEI

I was recently encouraged to revive my blog, being highly suggestible here I go. It's been a year and a half since I posted. At the time I was back to working at a gallery in Minneapolis framing and doing restoration work, and painting very little. The past 6 months or so has been the opposite, I've been painting a great deal, traveling, participating in many events and shows, teaching a lot of classes and workshops.

I'd like to use this blog a little differently than I have in the past. I will continue to post work and share comments on them but I'll also write the things on my mind regarding art, painting, teaching, and the occasional non sequitur. I realize no one is going to read this post after 18 months of dormancy, but it's a start.

The painting above was the last of 14 works I did on Prince Edward Island during a stay at the end of July. I was just reunited with this painting last night, it was too wet to travel with. It's interesting to see your work with a fresh eye. I was a little burned out by the end of that week, and had done a pretty average painting that morning and thought about packing up, I decided to give it one more try and just try to capture the feel of the huge cumulus clouds that seem to be above me all week. Looking at it now it looks like a confection, bright clean colors in a simple pattern, and I'm OK with that, it makes me smile.

Along Highway 29

18x36 Oil

This is a studio painting I started a couple months ago thinking it would hang in one of 2 shows I had opening in December. I got to a certain point on it and I got stuck, which happens. It's not a matter of how to finish it, but the best way to finish it. So it leaned facing the wall of my studio for a few weeks. Then driving back from Michigan to St. Paul I hit a stretch along Highway 29 west of Wausau when the light and scenery was very similar to this painting. I didn't have a camera with me (I know!) so I just kept making mental notes on the color of everything and completed it in a few hours a couple of days ago. It's freeing to work from your memory and painting so much from life over the last 12 years has given me the foundation for it.

Menominee River

11x14 Oil

I did this painting a couple of days after Christmas while I was still visiting my family in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This is the Menominee River which is the border between Michigan (on the right) and Wisconsin (on the left). It was a relatively warm thirty degrees with very little wind so I was able to spend a lot of time on location tweaking all the various shapes locking into one another. A bald eagle was soaring over the river for a while, I did see some tracks that looked canine and a little too big to be coyote, a wolf?

Laguna Plein Air Event

Heisler Park at Sundown 9x12 Oil

Just returned from Laguna Beach, having participated in the 12th Laguna Beach Plein Air Invitational. It was amazing, great to paint with that kind of intensity for a week, and be surrounded by 49 other outstanding painters from around the country. Waiting to get the other paintings shipped back to me, I'll post them next week.

Grand Marais Plein Air

Coast Bones Oil 11x14

Daybreak North Shore Oil 9x12

Birches Oil 9x12

Well summer is seems to be in its final days and I spent a few days last week up in Grand Marais Minnesota, doing a little painting along the North Shore of Lake Superior. The weather was beautiful and the painting went well, I was very relaxed and things just seemed to flow, you can never take that for granted. "Daybreak" won first place, which is always a nice affirmation, and while I was happy with all three paintings, I think my personal favorite is Coast Bones, it was a very complex composition, and I really like the way the debris filled path turned out. Wish I could have painted more but that's life. Starting to teach my Fall classes next week, back to work.

Rust Alley

9x12 Oil

A recently displayed some work during the Tangletown Garden Tour, since I had to hang out and babysit my paintings I decided to set the easel and go to it. The fish on the right is a mosaic sculpture that really caught my eye, so I framed it up against the house to make it pop, it adds a sense of strangeness to an otherwise restful scene. one of my favorite little geeky things I liked about this painting is the sharp pattern of reflected glare on the yellow house on the left, it was only there briefly, but catching details like that are the little things that elevate a painting.

Bluff Cave

9x12 Oil

This is yet another painting mined out of Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary, it's right in St. Paul just a few blocks from my studio and is a subject I return to often. Instead of the temptation to paint the grassy field behind me I decided to try the challenge of rocky bluff wall at the edge of the park. The light effect was fleeting and I was constantly balancing the values on the rock, keeping it dark enough to read as shadow while having it illuminated by the reflected light.