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Blog
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Wine Festival
A harvest dance in a vineyard breaths the scent of wine, apples, summer air in this atmospheric oil painting. It is a gathering of people who are living in this moment of completion, united in their bond with the land and each other. The feeling of swaying movement of the dancing woman and violin player is such that we feel we can step into their rhythm and dance along with them. “Wine Festival” is in a private collection, but it is available as a print in our print shop.
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Courthouse mural progress
The Kennebec County Courthouse mural is progressing swiftly. About two and a half weeks of actual work on the wall…following months of research and studies…and the mural is flying along. 12 hour days with brushes will do the trick.
Here my seamen in the rigging are going in well above the doorway. Couldn’t work on them most of last week as they were moving in office equipment into the adjoining rooms and needed this doorway. For some reason they didn’t want me hanging around on a ladder right in that doorway.The middle seaman is looking a bit more piratical than I intended. He looked good on the sketch pad but up on the wall, larger than life, he is a bit too swarthy. So I will give him a shave on Monday.
Here are a couple of dock workers just started in one section. Happy with the light coming in, peeling things out of the shadows. (the grid is from the initial enlargement from the studio rendering.)
and a few more figures on the busy dock…these obviously show early stages but I like the energy at this point. These early stages of paint have to have the right life, spirit. If these stages are dead then no amount of polish and detail will hold a chance of resuscitation.
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Logger from the Courthouse mural, part 2
Today working on the Kennebec Courthouse mural I did the initial block in of the logger. I enlarged and transferred the drawing to the wall with the traditional grid method…drawing a grid on the drawing and then drawing a larger grid on the wall and using the grid to reference where the parts of the drawing go. I have been drawing the larger grid on the wall with light colored pencil and then just drawing the figures in charcoal. Then I proceed to the block in of the paint.Also worked on trees, ship rigging, an 18th century musket and some mist today. A good day of brushes. I am not the tidiest of painters but I like the feeling of planning very well up front with drawings and studies and then working loose on the final canvas…pulling things from seeming chaos. Rough scrub-ins give much more energy underlying the final paint.
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Logger for Courthouse Mural
For my Kennebec County Courthouse mural I have been finding models all over the place. After lots of research about logging in Maine I had narrowed down the type of pose I wanted. This taught me the tools and how they were used. How the men moved and pried logs, and maneuvered logs in various currents. So I worked up a dynamic posed I liked but then I needed a model.Then doing a bit of shopping in the grocery store I found him. A great guy, a great face, and a good model who fell right into the right pose. This is a man who has done a lot of outdoor work and it makes a difference in the posing. People who have done physical labor can pose much more naturally than trying to pose someone in a more sedentary job.
Here is an interesting old film about logging I found on youtube. From stump to ship: A 1930 logging film
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Reluctant Patriot
oil on canvas illustration for a book cover, novel of the same title, published by Down East Books.
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Mural research at the Maine Maritime Museum
Yesterday I spent the day at Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine, doing mural research in the photo library. It was a fascinating day looking through hundreds of vintage photographs. This kind of research is enjoyable but is also essential for this type of mural.I need to make sure that I am getting details historically accurate. What does a schooner shipyard of the time look like. What kind of jobs are going on. All this is very important. To the right is a nice clear photo of the tugboat the Seguin. This tug was built in 1884 and towed schooners down the river for many decades. I needed a clear image of its structure so I can find how to draw it for the mural. With a clear enough series of photos I can ‘learn’ the ship and then draw it from any angle I need.
There is another aspect that, as a painter, and a story telling painter, that I find very important.
While some photos are of important events in history, a lot of the type of photos I learned from yesterday were the snapshots of the day. Just someone with a camera. In these I often look at the main event but I can also find out essential story telling details by looking a tiny corners of the photos. Someone bending to pick up a tool. A woman with a basket of bread. Little things that take time to see and decipher but that will flesh out the daily lives of the people I am trying to portray.
While posed photos of famous people may tell me what that person looked like. Other photos will tell me how people lived, worked and played.
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Cinderella
Theater Playbill for Cinderella Enchanted, the musical by Rogers and Hammerstein for a production at Gaslight Theater in Hallowell, Maine in 2011.
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Passage of Time, a composition
In the ongoing conversation on composition I thought I would dissect this painting, Summer Entourage, a large oil, 52 x 52 inches. Summer Entourage is about many things, family, friends, summer days of Augusta, and also about the passage of time. Some lyrical moments of summer can seem both timeless and fleeting, beautiful moments, glimpses of magic slipping by and yet eternal. In the painting you feel the haze will burn off, there is a freshet of breeze picking up; the weather will change. The family is heading up the path, the beach adventure done? or off to new things? we don’t know.To tell a story with paint, composition is the most important tool. This painting is a fairly ‘blond’ piece, no dramatic lighting, no strong chiaroscuro effects, so I have removed one compositional ‘punch’ tool of strong contrast. I wanted to portray one of those hazy, sun-bleached days of high summer on the Maine coast, where the light from the sun is snagged in the air and on the water; all are intense and rippling around us.
Compositionally, one thing to remember is that geometric shapes are strong, eye grabbers. Making the reddish parasol a nearly complete circle pulls our eye right away…and the strong points of the parasol structure intensify this. Even though we have a large foreground figure which would normally draw the eye I wanted the action to start at the back and move forward. so we have the solid the round parasol…also note the most saturated color in the painting is the red band on the woman’s white hat right in the middle of the parasol. and her overall reddish block. When I am creating a painting lots of thoughts roam through my head. Remember this is a hazy morning so for me the round parasol, just cresting the horizon is like a big rising sun…as we know red sun in morning means change in the weather. Okay, so my mind wanders all over the place…but it makes for paintings that are not just someone else’s cookie cutter.So the parasol grabs our eye and starts the motion.
A lone figure can be strong but here we have a group…and groups within this group. The two left figures are linked visually with the deeper values and the strong verticals of folds of the parasol lady and stripes on the guy’s t-shirt…and red echoing each other.
The two right-hand foreground figures are tied together with the bunched action or knot of the woman’s hand holding a book and wedged between her braid and the angled pink shirt tail of the woman behind…note the strong red accents. In my initial sketches I had the braid on the other side of her neck but moved it to help tie the visual knot of these two together. The intense red of the braid links us back with the left duo. This is a family, each with her own space and thoughts but happily together as well.To help pull these two forward I stabbed in with pure black leggings against the white sand path. The strongest value contrast of the painting. And form a color block when woven together with the black in the striped leggings behind. Patterns are strong and pull the eye. You will also note the echoes in these figures with the stances and gazes of the left hand pair. Similar tilt and hat to the background figures of each pair. And the guitar guy, my son, and his new wife (with the book) both stride and gaze in the same direction….their arms also mirror images of each other. Is this composition or concept? So you see they are inseparable.
Little things: the guy’s shirt was a problem for a bit. I had it in my head to keep the shirt pale so he would merge with the background…but this was not working…so that is when he went dark and tied in as a visual block with the background woman…that worked much better. The last thing I added was the stripes to his shirt. He is very close to the canvas edge….as close as I could get without losing the head of the guitar. Being this close, combined with his gaze off scene might make him fall out of the canvas. So the stripes echoing the red robe folds and the strong black/white stripes that are tight on the opposite edge of the canvas hold him in.The right hand trio are much ‘blonder’ and are tucked in an inverted triangle.. that echoes the inverted triangle of the vertical parasol, the bent elbow the “v of the white over shirt and green shirt decolletage. I wanted these three to continue the slow walking up the path. Their clothes are very blond, visually merging with the blond grasses. You can create motion with strong contrasts but sometimes you can entice motion by letting shapes slip passed each other.
The painting is full of paced verticals, particularly in the left and right figure pairs. Vertical stripes, arms. braid, beach blanket, shirt tails. These verticals march across giving a slow steady pace.
The other parasol and central figure, (Jen, my wife, by the way), this figure changed a lot as the painting evolved in the sketch pad. At first she was walking along lost in her own thoughts, gazing to the right, her parasol tilted to the right as well…note the watercolor study. But somehow having them all slowly walking made the painting more static. Yes, more static, and interestingly made them lose their own thoughts, they were just cogs in a moving pattern, not what i wanted. I wanted thinking, moving individuals but all part of the adventurous band, my family. Then in one scribble on the drawing pad, I stopped this figure and turned her to look at us. Suddenly the painting had a lot more motion and was much more dynamic. You have to keep pushing a composition until you squeeze everything out of it.
Once I had stopped her it all came together. I brought her parasol almost, not quite, but almost to vertical. Full vertical would have locked her in place. I put in the accent of the pure horizontal island so we could see the parasol’s tiny slant. The tiny cant gives her pause in her stroll but she will continue on in just another moment. Then the rest fell into place…merging her skirt with the grasses. Putting her elbow bent and strong against the greens. Her head rounded to echo the round parasol, her body facing right, but the breeze swept hair trailing left to help accent that breath of pause in her walk.
Now one thing to keep in mind, faces are very important in compositions. Very strong…they draw our eye instantly. So I kept Jen’s face softly undefined for two reasons: so that our eyes might not land on her face first…I wanted motion to begin with the round parasol. Also, I wanted Jen glancing up at us but I wanted to leave her with her own space, her own privacy…she has noticed us, the viewer, but we can’t see enough to intrude on her.Composition is all about color, shape, value, placement, pattern, motion line…but that is only part. We cannot escape our heads, our thoughts.
To build the sense of time passing the thought of the internal clockworks lurked in my head, gears and levers slowing, inexorably ticking along. The big round parasol a central gear, the guitar and vertical parasol, levers ticking back and forth around it.
Do people see this kind of composition idea? Perhaps not, on the surface, but symbols are strong in our heads and I think we do see things in the back of our minds. And if not, I like building these thoughts in for my own pleasure.
There is more I could discuss but we both probably need to get back to painting.
This seems a lot packed into one beach painting…but I live and breath these things. Ideas bubble up and get included, intertwined, evolved.
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Mask Maker
The mask maker sits, camouflaged among his wares. It is interesting to note that his own face is hidden, while he shows us many faces in different states of emotion. Is it just a picture of a craftsman and his wares, or does it make a comment on the essential isolation and self protective, secretive nature of the human heart and the disguises we give ourselves to present to the various worlds we inhabit?
SOLD
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The Studio
I have always been interested how other artist’s have their studios. Are they neat and tidy? Chaotic? Eclectic? So, along this vein, I thought I would start a small series of images, when I trip over them, of other artist’s studios.
Here is mine to start this off. I did clean up recently, but I seem to have a lot of projects going at once and this results in, mess…but it is my mess, so it’s okay.
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What kind of paints to use for outside mural?
For my 8 x 32 foot exterior mural, “Dance of Two Cultures” in Brunswick, Maine I used Golden heavy body acrylics. These paints are wonderful. This mural is now 6 and a half years old on an exterior, West facing wall in Maine. There is a small eve at the roof but nothing that shelters this mural in the least. So this means the paint has been exposed to 6+ years of Maine weather 365 days a year. The wall bakes hot in the summer and endures typical winter temperatures 10 degrees Fahrenheit or below . Blizzards, snow flurries, torrential thunderstorms and hot summer suns, Maine weather can be extreme… and the paint shows no signs of fading.I used a palette of 9 or 10 colors. Golden has many technical sheets about their products on their site and they rate paints for exterior use. This palette has the highest light fast ratings, and I can now say I agree completely.
The mural was painted, indoors, over the winter of 2007-08. The paints had rich pigmentation making painting easy and a joy. Opaques easily painted over contrasting value and colors.
The color is just as rich today as day one six years ago. Thanks Golden. And nope, I am not getting paid to say this. It’s just great paint.
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Ghost Story Bookcover
This is another bookcover illustration, watercolor on paper. This one for a book of seacoast ghost stories.
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the pier on the Kennebec
The work on figure studies for the Kennebec Courthouse mural continues. This woman is for the crowd scene on the pier. There will be ships and cargo behind and other pier activity pertinent to life on the Kennebec.The mural encompasses many centuries, the history of the river from earliest days to perhaps mid 20th century. There is a lot of research in clothing styles and details of the setting…even down to ways people moved, gestures and such. Different clothing restricts you in different ways.
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Mural Plan for the Kennebec County Courthouse
The finished full color mural will be called “The River Road” and will be a journey through time and travel on the river. It will be 14 x 30 feet, and will feature boats and people of the Kennebec. For more information and the artist’s thoughts on this ongoing project, click here.
