Central Lovell, Maine

8x10 oil on board

This is a painting about the light.  It's early fall and the sun is setting.  We were visiting a friend who has a house.  It's the same place that the country fair was (see below)

Maine County Fair

9x11 oil on board

I learned a lot about farm animals at this fair like the difference between steers, oxen, and bulls. An oxen is a 4 year old steer. A bull has not be castrated. I always thought steers and oxen were completely different species.

Painting the straw was an interesting example of how you have to conceptualize something as having layers which actually doesn't. If you paint what you know the straw is, a chaotic mixture of many thin straws, it doesn't read right. You have to first paint a solid layer as if the back part of the straw piles were flat and then paint a few straws that catch the light to create the illusion of depth.

The Squash Lady's House

8x10 oil on board

sold

In Maine there a woman who only sells squash and only in the fall.  This is a view of her house with a pile of pumpkins.  On the other side were many piles of different pumpkins, squashes of all types and varieties.  

In this picture I decided not to be frightened of thalo green and blue pigment.  Someone said that these pigments were "weapons of mass destruction".   They have a very strong tintorial power, meaning very little goes a long way, and tend to get into every other pigment and dull them because they stay on your brushes, particularly at the base of the hairs, probably because of the particle size of the pigment.  They are hard to get off your hands.   They are hard to use and hard to clean up, but there's no other way to get that bright green except thalo green and cadmium yellow maybe killed a little bit with cad orange.  The blue is unique also.  It helps to use pure turpentine to clean up and not odorless mineral spirits (OMS).  Turpentine has much more power to dissolve pigments.  Solvent power is measured by something called the KB value (Kauri-butanol value).  OMS's KB value is 28 and real turpentine is twice that.  Turps  evaporates fast into the air causing harmful vapors and also is absorbed through the skin whereas OMS isn't.  So it looks to me that, if you are going to use thalo pigments, you use turpentine.   So you have to use careful procedures like gloves, ventilation, etc. which many people do anyway even with OMS and not turps.    I only use it to clean the brushes when I'm done, swirling them around in a fairly narrow necked jar and then putting the top on fast.

looks like a bluefish, only smaller

8x10 oil on board

I think this is the last beach painting of the season. The light on the beach is counter-intuitive, at least to me. You have the feeling, since the sun is overhead, that you are completely "in the sun". In fact, when you are standing, you are perpendicular to the sun, and only the top of your head and parts of your body sticking out are hit by the sun. The rest of you is in rather deep shade. Of course, ultraviolet light bounces around and you get sun-burned everywhere, but like trees which also are perpendicular to the sun there a lot of dark. Painters are familiar with back lighting, called countre jour ("against the day") in French, but this is top lighting. Moon light is often portrayed like beach lighting, but I don't think there's a name for this light on the beach. It's seen in beach paintings because people are out only in the middle of the day. Most painters don't like to work at that time of no cast shadows and not much value contrast in the landscape.

The guy is overly proud of his little fish, and I tried to get the slightly revolted gesture of the polite little girl -- head back and tucked in, arms held carefully away from the fish.

Snow Leopard

30x24 oil on canvas

The Bronx Zoo has an astonishing exhibit of snow leopards. They have closed off a rocky outcropping with a net that is almost not noticeable, so you seem to be creeping up on these creatures. Behind you is another netted off area with their prey. It's netted off from them as well.

I did this from a photo taken on a cold winter day and the light looks to me just like that. The blue I used is Prussian Blue. His tail and right leg look like they belong to a stuffed animal, but that's the way they look!

Fashion shoot, Central Park, Golden Hour

oil on board 8x10

I really like my technique here which I shall continue to explore. I'm leaving a lot of black in the background as if we live in a dark world with the images and forms coming out of the darkness. I've even left a dark line around the photographer. The Central Park Boathouse (see below) is in the same technique. Leonardo, I think, also had this kind of view of the world as a dark place. Not that this is painted with his sfumato (smoky) handling of the edges. Click on "smoky" for a link to James Gurney's remarks about it. The impressionist technique would be the opposite of my painting. They never used black in the shadows and thought of the world as a light-filled colorful place.

boat house central park

8x10 oil on panel

Officially called the "conservatory waters" but referred to by most of us as the "boat house lake". The inside of the little house is just for storing fancy model sailboats mostly owned by adults.   The acid green copper roof is fairly rare in New York these days because pollution turns copper black not green anymore.