Various things

Baby Goats

OK, here I am at the helm again. I am in my studio and hopefully I can get back into a paint-blog-sleep mode again. I am done traveling for a while, well actually not quite. I will be on Cape Elizabeth for a wet paint event on Sunday, July 17. But that is a one day affair, and not a massive road trip.

Above is a picture of the garden I have been fooling with, I showed in a previous post how I made a little template out of masking tape with pencil drawing on it for a bird house. I managed to throw another afternoon at it the other day and got to this point below.

I have a ways to go yet, I will have to repaint the flowers around the birdhouse and extend the pole on which it stands. Hopefully I can get it to take its place in the unity of the painting. Stapleton Kearns, the artist who actually lets you see the struggle. Everybody else makes it look easy, I pull my hair out and make faces. I am working round-robin on a gang of half finished paintings stacked around my studio, when I get another whack at this one I will post it and you can see my progress.

I got this question the other day;

Dear Stape
Can you explain the ideas, methods and practical
techniques that you think are most important in making a luminist
painting? Any information you give would be well appreciated.
..................Fissure Cutbait

Dear Fizz;
Your question points out a shortcoming of the blog format , at least the way I am doing it. I have written extensively about luminism and tonalism and wrote for weeks on Inness. But only long term and constant readers know that. There is a search box on the upper left and if you type query words into it you will get to lots of material that should help. This blog has grown so huge (933 posts and counting) that even I don't remember all that is on it, or how to find it all. It is a massive labyrinth. I really should figure out an index and make that available somehow, but the thought of indexing almost a thousand entries, while continuing to write others, seems daunting. I need staff.

The first 500 or so posts were almost all art instruction. If you are learning to paint, I suggest you go to the beginning of the blog and read forward. The first half of this blog is like a textbook. After that it grew more baroque and floral. It is now starting to seem more like writing a periodical or a magazine.

I want to do some more of the Encyclopedia of Dumb Design Ideas posts , I have some ideas for those. They are a lot of work, but fun to write and I hope informative. You also get a little story, a soap opera- Pilgrims Progress- distopia on the Zuider Zea.

Tobin Nadeu of Take-it-Easel has a page online now showing the Stapleton Kearns Signature easel here This is an easel tricked out with the improvements on my own. This is the cadilac of landscape easels. The Chi-Coms made a copy but this is on a wholly different plane. Fine Vermont craftsmanship and maple construction make this a lifetime easel. I have used mine routinely for nearly 15 years. I don't make anything on this, like RGH paints, I want my suppliers to stay in business as I need them. I feel good having my name on this easel. It started out as a sort of joke, "The Stapleton Kearns Signature Easel" like a Gibson model with a guitarists name on it, but now it really exists.

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SNOWCAMP

Held in late January and early February Snowcamp is the flagship model Stapleton Kearns workshop. Set in an old wooden inn on a high ridgetop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the views from the property are unbelievable. With the inn there at your back, if you start to freeze, you can run inside for a cup of coffee and a warm up beside the fire. We eat in our own dining room at a big round table and talk about art and our lives in it. These two workshops will fill, sign up if you want to go.