It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

Here is a new painting I just finished. It's called "Home before Dark". 7 3/4"x 9" on wood panel. I think I am going to do a few more on this theme. This could be anyone waiting for someone to come home. I like the point of view of a parent waiting for their child to come home. There is always worry. The light is on for them and it is nearly dark........

The Visitor

The next piece in the series. I have called it The Visitor. It's title again refers to the transitory nature of things. We are here but a brief time and then just a memory. It is an actual place as well. You are looking down the tracks in Winter Park, FL. On the left is the Winter Park Historical Society and Farmers Market and on the right is the actual Visitor's Center for the City of Winter Park. This painting will be going to Dallas for the Dallas Art Fair and showing with Tanner Hill Gallery. It is 7 1/8"x 9 1/8" on wood.

New Direction

I have been painting for many years now and I wanted to start moving beyond just pieces that were beauty for beauty's sake. I am sure it has to do with getting older. I notice the temporary or transitory nature of things. It seems melancholy but it is the most real thing there is. We are only here a little while.

Hurricane Katrina came ashore near Waveland, MS. I wanted to see it right after, but only managed to get there 5 years later. Last summer, coming back from Denver, I stopped by. It was early in the morning, just as the sun was rising. It was dead calm. I made my way directly to the beach and as I got closer the homes began to disappear. On the shoreline, where once many large and beautiful mansions sat, now appeared to be a park. Nature had taken back the land. It was extraordinary. My painting is looking east. The gulf is on the right. The beach line had clearly been altered and a temporary road through the sand was made. On the left there was only a few signs of what once was, in terms of people. The trees mostly survived the storm and were thick. Grasses were tall and lush. It really did look natural. Nature does what it does. It doesn't know we are there and doesn't care.Without the human markers its not really a disaster at all. And yet there were many signs along the road we were moving back in, although slowly.

My first notion, in terms of a painting, in human terms, was to make the tragic look beautiful. Retain the idea of a Hudson River School painting. Have all of those elements there. I think I did that. But make it clear life is temporary. We are always in transition of some kind. The painting has a driveway, broken docks leading out into the gulf, and a fence from a prior home. There is a Port a potty that represents that lack of permanence. Seems to me a perfect object for that. The streetlights represent time for me. Time is something I think about alot. There is no past. There is no future. There is only the present. Now. Everything exits in the present. The past exists only in our memory. Regardless of age, all things are in the present. The universe does not keep time. It just is.

God's Country

This is a painting I just finished. 10"x 10", oil on wood. It is the same creek as in "Low Country", but from a slightly different view. I have since made a few adjustments to this. I made the mud area in the left foreground a little less red and it seemed to help. It's an area of South Carolina. I love the South. I love driving around a finding new things. It's the discovery for me that gets me excited. There is so much history, so much beauty to be found on the back roads. The real America is there. It's God's Country.

Morning of Discovery

While perusing through Dan Sprick's website and such, I came across a blog called Open Museum. It's a great blog for Museums and artists and anybody who wants to write about and show their work. In it I found a great artist I had never heard of. His name is Martin Greenland. He is a painter from the UK. Exquisitely invented landscapes. SO beautiful. His comments on his blog are great, too. martingreenland.co.uk

Back from LA......

Well, we are back. 3 day LA art blitz. I am already back to working and we have been home only an hour..............I am a sicko.

This was a great trip. The images above are from the Museum show. My painting was front and center and the first one you see when you enter the building. My smaller piece was in the second larger room. Had quite the shadow on it. It was very well attended. I took pictures when we arrived and it was 30 minutes before the exhibit was to open and there were many people there already. I am very happy to be part of such a great show.

The LA Art show was humming. The first image is of the Arcadia booth. It was also opening night and all the stars were there....We just didn't see any. It was packed with a lot of activity and a lot of posers. People try so hard to be noticed. But it is LA. Arcadia did great, selling many paintings. Mine were not among those, however. I have confidence, though, considering they always sell my wave pieces. The show runs until Sunday.

Go west young man....

Here is the painting, with its frame, I am bringing to the LA Art Show. 24"x 30". Oil on canvas. The opening is Wednesday night. I am excited, but tired . I have some new ideas I am going to pursue when we get home...............

Nantucket

We went to Nantucket this summer to drop off a large wave painting at Quidley and Company, a gallery right on the main street in the middle of the only real town there. It was quite lovely and we stayed for 3 days thanks to a B&B called the Century House. They have a program where artists can stay there and work on the island. We went out to the beach near Siasconset and I did a painting from some photos and notes I made. The surf was very dramatic that day. It was so exciting being right there and it reminded me why, again, I am drawn to painting the ocean in the first place. This painting ended up being part of a show at Quidley and Co. in Boston during December. We went up for the opening and I actually sold it to gentleman who is from Winter Park here in Florida. He still has a home near the Polasek Museum, where I have painted a number of times. Small world.......this piece is 8"x 12", titled "Siasconset".

Hudson River School

This is not a very good reproduction of a painting I did last fall. I didn't have time to take it to my photo guy and I needed to get it out to the gallery so I took this image on the floor of our living room. Nice glare. A little blurry, too. It was purchased by a great collector of the arts who lives in Boston. The piece is titled "View of the Hudson from Olana". It is, of course, the Hudson river from Frederick Church's home. I was literally standing right next to the house. Some of my work is influenced by the Hudson River School, no doubt. I can't say that it has been a defining factor in most of my work, though. With this painting, however, I wanted to make a piece that was clearly influenced by them and notably Church, while using his property as the subject matter. I figured what a better way to celebrate this type of American art than to paint the master's property. He and his family had quite the view. I wonder how much different it looked when they lived there. I made almost no adjustments. This is pretty much what it looks like.

LA Art Show...

Just finished a wave painting going to Arcadia for the LA Art Show. 24"x 30" on canvas. This should be the last wave painting for a while as I am doing a few smaller paintings and then starting a whole new series of works for a show in Dallas. Rachel and I are going out for the opening in LA. Should be good times......

Museum Show

I have been invited to participate in a Museum show at the Long Beach Museum of Art in California. I am very excited about it. The show is called Influential Element: Exploring the impact of Water. For a state like CA, it is clearly important and water has certainly been a dominating subject for me and my paintings for a long time. They have requested two paintings. Genesis II (That is me above pretending to work on the finished painting) and Low Country. The show will run from Jan. to April of next year. We hope to go out for the opening, because it is the same night as the opening for the LA Art Show. I will be sending two large paintings of, you guessed it, water, to Arcadia gallery, who will be attending. Should be an interesting night. I went to college at Long Beach State and lived in LA for about 6 years. I have hardly been back but just a few times since. I don't really miss it. The traffic was just unbearable, but it was a really great town for a young person.

The Purple Painter

It seems most of my pieces, as I see it, venture into the realm of purple. I have no idea why. Just various shades of purple. I actually don't really care for the color. It must have something to do with the lights in my studio. Or maybe my rods and cones aren't firing like they used to. The painting above is a recent one and although not nearly as pink or purple in person, this piece is exactly where I seem to go. I wonder if other artists have tendencies that seem to have a mind of their own. I really don't notice it at first, but by the time I am done, it is real obvious. I am not saying its a bad thing. This piece turned out very well. I am just wondering when I became the purple painter.....................side note.......I saw a painting this summer of a nude by Daniel Sprick that was part of a figure show in Santa Fe. It was simply miraculous. I looked at it for a long time. I even stayed a few extra hours so I could go back and look at it. Thanks Dan for showing the rest of us what is possible. And it wasn't at all purple.......

ALONE ON A WIDE WIDE SEA

Here is a painting Arcadia Gallery sold at the USArtists show in Philadelphia. Its called Open Water, 24"x 30". My wife and I attended and it was nice to enter the show and see it hanging front and center with a beautiful red dot attached to it. Thank you Steve Diamant. I put alot of effort into it. It is one more in a series of wave paintings that have been very good to me.

I am still attracted to the ocean. I have a new series ready to be painted and I am very excited about it. We went to the New England Coast and I was very inspired by what I saw. I plan on pushing the abstract quality of the breaking waves. Up close, they become other worldly, almost like melting butter. The shapes and patterns are beautiful, surreal and terrifying all at once. More than 10 years ago, I took images of waves at night with a flash. It changed the way I looked at waves. It was phenomenal. I still have some of the images. I would really like to move some of my work away from straight realism into a realm between opposing worlds of abstraction and reality. This is not a novel approach. Dan Adel, who is also in Arcadia, has done just that. With waves no less......But I have many ideas.....Narrative rural landscapes of the south, incorporating history, both past and present. I am excited about that, too. That will be for next spring. But first I gotta..............

Look who is back

Ok, so its been a while. I have had huge computer problems. We now have two brand new Mac computers, courtesy of a few sales of paintings. I will try to catch up as best I can. Very busy summer and fall. I will post stories and paintings in the coming days. I am having all of the images I have taken in the last 10 years along with a record of my paintings copied to my new computer this weekend. I hope they make it. If they don't, I will curse these devices forever.

Tempest

Another painting for my show in Santa Fe. Titled "Tempest", oil on canvas, 24"x 51 1/2". I struggled with the notion of putting the road in on the left. Up to this point, I haven't really put any evidence of humans in my paintings, but this was a good balance to the painting and gives it scale. I did a series of storms in pastel a number of years ago and my signature became a little road on the left. I always liked it and figured it might be appropriate here. It also gives anyone fleeing the storm a way out, or anyone chasing, a way in.

Early morning

Very busy getting ready for the Santa Fe show. I have completed quite a few more paintings. Here is one titled, "Wake". Its 48"x 54", on canvas. Its hard to see in this image, but there is a boat wake in the bottom right corner. It is also a painting of the early morning, waking, hours on the sea. Along with "Mediterraneo", I now have two seascapes for the show with a meditative quality that I search for a lot in my work. A simple beauty.

Water everywhere

This is a new painting and one of the largest I have done at 64"x 72. I have just finished it today. It will be part of a solo exhibit I will have at Evoke Contemporary, in Santa Fe, in May. The gallery is one block from the Plaza. What a great place Santa Fe is. I have been there a number of times in the past 5 years and its always such a pleasure.

New old painting

I just received a painting back from a couple with a large family who would like me to try and sell it for them. They are in a financial challenge right now and I would like to help them. This painting is about 10 years old. It was one of the first small, detailed paintings I did. It's strange to see something from so long ago. It is a bit looser than the current small pieces I do, but it is still a nice painting. It is of the beach on the east coast of Florida, somewhere between New Smyrna and Cocoa. If interested, please let me know. It is oil on wood, 6 3/4 x 6 3/4. I am asking $1500 or best offer. All money will go to the family.

Rachel and I went to see James Rosenquist speak tonight. I was never quite intrigued enough with his work to give it much time, but I am aware of his legacy and impact on American art. He was a good speaker and seemed humbled by his success, giving much credit to simple luck and timing. He answered a number of questions at the end, some of which seemed a bit trivial, but what has resonated with me is his response to a question about what advice he would give to an aspiring artist. He said work hard, pay attention to history, but don't try to emulate other artists. Do something no one else has done. Mostly, he said, just work hard. That I can identify with. It is in my family to work hard. The whole Cornell history is about working hard. Its go time.
The above painting I finished a few days ago. Distant Thunder, 5 1/2"x 7". Sending it to Quidley and Company in Boston. Nice people.
I have started my largest piece to date, 63"x 72". It is a painting of waves. It will be a real task to finish it and finish it well. It going to Santa Fe for a solo show in May. A lot to do
Work hard.

Last Light

A few summers ago I took at drive up to Estes Park in Colorado after a show. It was amazing. It was just an afternoon really and I managed to see so much. I took a number of photos, maybe 100 or so. I have done probably 10 paintings from that day. This piece was at the climax of the drive. The light was fading and I was above the treeline at the summit of the drive when I pulled over and hiked up a hill. Just at the crest looking mostly east was this view. I usually change photos I take to make paintings or crop images together, but this is just as it was. The scale is deceiving because the snow was quite large and the rocks were huge. The sky was unforgettable and the wind was howling. The earth can be so beautiful. I can imagine in winter I could get nowhere near here. The snow would be 10 feet deep and the temperature would be bitterly cold.

But that day, all that was left of the winter snows was this long lip.

Earlier in the day I stopped at a lookout over a valley and the clouds broke just a sliver to allow a stream of light to crease the valley floor. Stunning.

A few others stopped also and after a while we all just looked at each other and smiled. We couldn't believe what we were seeing. Almost no words were spoken and none were necessary. But then after only a few minutes, it was gone, cloudy again and obscured.

Just like life.