Portland Head light beak avoidance and obligue form recession diagram

Here is the light house I painted the other day. This photo was taken in the late afternoon and I made the painting in the morning and noon hour but you can get the general idea . Below is my painting and below that a numbered diagram that I will use to discuss beak avoidance. I have written before about beaks here.. The actual site is wicked beaky.


Here's what is going on at each of those numbers.

• #1, is the main beak area, I have minimized it by making it about the same value as the water around it, I dropped the contrast in the area to make the beak shape less assertive. There is also a camouflaging pattern of shadows and accents that break up the form and outline of the beak. There are accent values in the surf at its feet that also draw attention back and away from its sharp point.
  
  
• #2, I pushed this shape up so it overlaps the form behind it, that reduces it's knife edged beakyness, and I also made it low contrast next to the water. The cracks in the rocks are sweeping away from the beaks vector, hopefully again overpowering it's beaky point, and distracting the viewer from that.



• #3, The most distant beak was clustered or paired with the #1 beak. I made them into a single unit, again I downplayed it's value contrast with the water around it. So I could then.....
  
  
• Make #4 a large bright attention getting area that gives the viewer something more assertive inn the area to look at instead of those evil beaks. This is the headliner of this little ensemble, not the beak structures. Again I am calling attention to a different area nearby instead of the beaks, by distraction. This large light area and the light house itself are clustered together as parts of the largest brightest shape in the painting.
  

Something else is going on in this picture too. I have "stacked" all of the receding planes in the rocks back into the picture, at a diagonal starting at #5. This gives me a clear progression back into my painting. This is recession through drawing. Everyone learns about recession through value change, or atmospheric perspective. But often it is a slick trick to establish your recession by bending the drawing a little to tell your visual story. Almost no one ever notices this blatant slicing and dicing, by the way.

Cranford Surf

Here is what I was working on for the quick draw event as Garin painted my portrait. I painted this under the overhanging eves at the entrance to the commuter rail station in downtown Cranford. We were allowed 2 and 1/2 hours for the project.

I don't quickdraw, I slowdraw. I have worked at that. I am rather meticulous, except on a seascape, I can get a rough seascape on a canvas in a couple of hours and so when I do demonstrations I like to do a seascape. I use no references and it is made up on the spot. The painting is not a place I remember. It is not a place that really exists.

I don't go to paintouts, I think this was my first. Maybe I have been to one or two before but it was long ago. But it was fun and I would do it again. I enjoy meeting the other artists.

I have so many deadlines to make around here. All the dealers want their art and I am way behind, I apologize for posting so late in the day but I am harried with travel and commitments.

Bethesda fountain meltdown

Here is the piece I did today at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park. It was 96 degrees I think. I set up out in the sun and it was really hot. NBC news stopped by and filmed me. The first question they asked was "all of the other artists are set up in the shade, why are you out in the sun. I told them that was where the best view was.

I don't usually think of myself as a plein air one shot painter. This 11 by 14 is an actual plein air painting. It will be in the show and sale at the Cranford, New Jersey event I am attending. I will try to get some pictures of the artists who are involved in that for a future post.
I was happy to see several blog readers stop by;

Here's Rae

And below, Stapeliad. Those are both Facebook "handles". I really enjoy meeting the people who read this blog. You all post comments and we chat back and forth, but it is really fun to find out what you look like and who you are.

John Traynor who I have met painted with a time or two was nearby running a workshop, but I didn't get to see him. I am exhausted now and must sleep. Rough day.

A drawing for a painting

Here is a 24 by 36 I started yesterday. The light was watery today, as we had high cirrus clouds. I didn't want top spoil one of my existing paintings by returning to it in anything other than full light, I started a new painting.

This is another tactic I sometimes use, particularly on larger pictures. I spent the entire first day working transparently (no white). Using a brush and pulling back my whites with a rag, I worked out the entire painting. I have tried to get as much pattern into this thing as I could. It looks a little like Chinese brush painting at this point. Scott Moore with whom I am traveling says the Chinese look is coming from the cheapo oil primed linen made by the Chi-Coms.

The beauty of working in a single color all day is that I have separated the problem of color from those of design and drawing. I like to really get my little iron teeth into the drawing before I start worrying about color and handling. It might seem a slow way to go about things, but I make the time back later, and the subsequent coloring up of the painting goes quickly. I have chased down the gremlins that would have been waiting for me with a less fastidious approach and the painting should proceed without any (or few) nasty surprises.

I did this drawing in cobalt violet. That's a good color to have at the root of my shadows, but I could have used burnt sienna or ultramarine. I would never want to do this with a cadmium red or any other color that I would have to fight later at the bottom of my shadow notes.

Above is my trusty Lincoln Continental with it's Live Free or Die plate ( # Stape) parked on the road up the Chisos mountains.

Notes from the desert

I guess I can tell you where I am, so many have guessed. I am in Big Bend National Park in West, Texas. Big Bend is America's least visited national park. It is very wild. The temperatures here are running about 96 during the day. It is also a little smokey here as there are big brush fires burning in West Texas and Northern Mexico.

Although I have been joking about the snakes and javelina's I am actually very comfortable in this environment, as I have painted here before. It is a little like painting on the moon, the landscape is very jagged and fierce. I think Big Bend is one of the best places to paint, but you have to be willing to camp out to do it. There is actually a motel in the park, but it is always full.

Here is another picture I am working on, there is no under painting this time. I am using the "big poster shapes method". Great stretches of this one are only indicated by a tone at this point. I will take it out again and probably finish it tomorrow. This is an 18 by 24.

I am on a strict schedule here. I am working on a morning painting, this one, and an afternoon painting, the 24 by 30 I showed you before. It is not possible to work on a painting all day, as the light "flips over" at about noon and the light is exactly the opposite of that with which you started the painting. So I have several pictures going in rotation. I plan to work two days on each 18 by 24, and three on each 24 by 30. Sometimes I get an 18 by 24 out in one shot and I almost always can do a 16 by 20 one shot. I would rather go back on a painting several times as I am much faster outside, than in the studio.

I intend to ratchet up my schedule tomorrow and work three sessions a day. I want to have three going in rotation. I need to get a lot of work done for a gallery here in Texas. As I don't do much work from photos so I have to make the most of the time I am here. I can count on good light every day out here is desert land though and I am in production workaholic mode. There are no distractions here (other than the blog!) so I am free to just jam out the paintings. I already have about a half dozen, counting those I made in the hill country near Llano, Texas. Great little town that, loved it!
See you all tomorrow.

Casa Grande, day 2

Here are the next several images of the current picture in development.

Below I have worked up a darker sky and invented some clouds as there were none and the painting looked a little empty in the sky. The darker ultramarine and white sky makes the mountain stand out and gives me enough contrast to get the thing to light up.

I continued to work on the entire painting, trying to advance it as a whole rather than finishing one area ahead of the others, an approach called herding sheep, here is a post on that idea.
The darkest darks in this photo are a little overstated, I was unable to correct them without compromising something else in the painting.
I drove through a range fire the other day, one side of the road was on fire, the smoke went hundreds of feet in the air. I had the air conditioning on and I could still fell the heat through the closed windows. Now I am sequestered in an undisclosed location stocked with havelinas, snakes and tarantulas. I am hoping not to see a mountain lion. I have been sleeping in a tent, enduring searing heat (getting in touch with my inner lizard) and getting great drying times.
I have limited access to the net, but I hope I can post again tomorrow.

Just a quick post today! But I am able to get to an internet hotspot and again, I am operational.
I am going to do a step by step of a painting I am working on. The scenery is really big here and I am doing my best to compress it onto a 24 by 30. You can see that I have started out with a sketch on the canvas in burnt sienna. I shoved it around for over half the session trying to get it designed. I care more about the design than anything that follows. If I get the design right I get a good painting. If I don't, no matter of detail or finish will make the thing work.

"YOU CANNOT OBSERVE DESIGN INTO A PAINTING!

Ultimately I pushed the right hand crag over to the right as I felt the painting balanced better with it over there. I want the mountain on the left to read as the subject and "loom" over the rest of the landscape. I have not touched the white at all. As soon as I do that I "lock down" the painting and can no longer easily shove it around. I am using a little violet (transparently) in my shadows to make those clearer.

Here is the start of my lay in. I pushed the sky a little to the right over in that upper right hand corner to refine the shape of the Casa Grande mountain. Then the light failed. I will work on another picture for the morning session, and then late this afternoon I will take this one out again. I am not a plein air painter by many peoples definition, but then neither was Monet. I often work repeated sessions on a painting.

IF YOU ONLY PAINT "THE DAY" ALL YOU WILL GET IS METEOROLOGY.

I will return tomorrow with the next stage of this painting ( if I don't get snake bit!)

A barn demo

Here are sequential photographs of a demo I did for my workshop in Rolling Fork Mississippi this week. It is a 16 by 20. I started out with a few guidelines delineating the major forms. I did these in cobalt violet, my favorite color. That's a good color to draw in, since when you are sketching out a painting you are finding your darks (at least on a white canvas).

I went at this one in a system I call colored rice, that is I am making the painting from little strokes of color. I learned this by studying Willard Metcalf. Childe Hassam worked this way too. It gives a light feathery look that I feel works well for spring scenes.

I rapidly lay my color notes in, leaving white spaces between each stroke, they look like white ricer. Then I come back and hit those white spots with a different color. That gives me broken color. No two adjacent strokes are quite the same color although they are often the same value.

Here is the piece at the end of the session which lasted a little over two hours. I have been beat up so many times painting barns that I sometimes joke I am a barn loser, however this one came of OK.

A trip to Cornish, New Hampshire

Sorry to post a little late today. I get overbooked. Sometimes I just reach a point where I can't do anymore. But here I am rested and playing again.

I spent the last couple of days on Cape Cop for two openings associated with the Provincetown painting trip this Summer. The Cape Museum of art did a show of some of the work produced there and the Addison gallery in Orleans did a show of some of the rest of the art from the trip. I was in Cornish, New Hampshire some days ago, I can't remember which ones. Cornish is where Willard Metcalf worked a hundred years ago. We set up to paint about a mile from the house where he stayed. I don't think this is a Metcalf site, but I expect he knew it.


Here I am working on a 24 by 30. The snow was up to my thighs, so I had to wade out into it and tramp around in a circle until I had beat down an area large enough to set up my easel. This has been an epic year for snow painting.


Here is my friend T.M. Nicholas. We paint together a lot. He keeps me on my toes, what a great painter! I have known and painted with both he and his father for about twenty five years. I think it is really important to hang with other artists who will bring out the best in you. You will become more like the people you paint with, so keep an eye on that, because the inverse is also true.

Here is the piece I made. I seem to be showing you a lot of half finished pieces on the blog. But that may be useful too. Many of you are strictly one shot plein air painters and that is what this is, a one shot painting. I will work this up in the studio next. When I return to it and finish it in the studio I will try to remember to post a picture of it maybe I will do a step by step of that, might be useful.

But first I have a three other projects with tight deadlines in the studio. I am the guest artists for the Northwest Rendezvous in Montana this summer, but I have to have a piece to them for the catalogue, deadline NEXT WEEK! then I have a show in Charleston at the beginning of next month and a private commission I have been working on. Then I am going to teach a workshop in Mississippi.

The seascape project again and the passing of a well known artist

Here is the seascape project to which I have returned. I signed it, but there are still a few little tweaks I want to give it before I deliver it to the dealer. I put it aside for a while so I could return to it with a fresh eye. That is often very helpful. The painting is a 26 by 36 and I worked on it about eight days.Plus another day for the field study from which it originated. Seascape is the hardest thing I do and I always feel like I have been beaten with a stick when I finish one. I have done a lot of them, but only recently have I felt confident about what I am doing. I believe I will paint another. I did an 18 by 24 for the show in Kennebunk. I worked on that one day outside and one in the studio, as I said before usually I make sketches outdoors and seascape in the studio, but that one seemed to work.

I am doing a demo tomorrow at the ocean point studio/gallery in East Boothbay, Maine the address is 130 Van Horn road. If you are in the area, and want to come, I will see you there. I am going to do a seascape demo, I hope it goes OK, that's always a gamble. But I like doing that because I use no references. That means people don't get the idea that I copy them from photographs. It sort of proves that I can do it.

I got an e-mail the other day asking me about using cool lights and warm shadows the question was "doesn't that break the rule of warm lights and cool shadows in sunlight?" Yes, it does, generally outside on a sunny day you will see warm lights and cool shadows. And usually that's how I paint it. However it is always useful to have a trick or two up your sleeve, and reversing the temperature of the light is one. Sometimes in the morning or on gray days you will have cool lights, and always in a north light studio. But I have said before in the blog EVERYTHING is a servant of my design, including my color, and if I can make a picture look better by changing this or most anything else I will. This is grad school level stuff though, before you start doing this kind of thing you need to have command over how to play it straight.

I also wanted to mention the passing of William Reese, a well known western artist. I never met him but he was well known and did some fine paintings. Here is a link to his web site

Below is a page from that site.

Born in South Dakota and raised in Central Washington, William F. Reese has been painting now for over 50 years. Like most everyone he started drawing at 3 or 4 but went on to begin painting in oil at 12. After high school Reese went to study fine art at Washington State College and then on to Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles. He worked as a sign painter and a sign pictorial artist for thirteen years, in Washington, Oregon, and California while he was building a following for his easel paintings. In 1971 he left the sign business to work full time in his studio in Bellevue, Washington, where he also taught privately the art of drawing and painting. Currently his studio is in Wenatchee, Washington where he and his wife Frances now live.

His work is basically the diary of his life. Working mostly in oil, but at the same time he has produced a large body of works in other media, such as watercolor, pastel, and sculpture as well as his drawings, lithographs, and etchings. He works entirely from his life's interest and experiences. Working from live models and in the field Reese relies heavily on personal observation, each piece a personal statement from and about his life. Reese's work has been shown throughout the United States and in many exhibitions abroad. His work was included in the first exhibition of contemporary art from the western world in mainland China since China's reopening.

Many art magazines in the last 35 years have published articles on Reese's work, he was the subject of an award winning book by Mary N. Balcomb entitled Wm. F. Reese, American Artist published in 1984, as well as one written by Arlene Kirkpatrick entitled Masterworks of American Art Published in 1985.

He has received many national and regional awards over the last 40 years including the Robert Lougheed Gold Medal from the National Western Heritage Museum, two silver medals from the National Parks Academy for the Arts, and the Best of Show Colonel Smith Award from the National Wildlife Art Museum.

Because of his broad interests, great range of subject matter, and diversified media Reese is a very a difficult artist to categorize and label as to style and school, most will probably label him as a post impressionist with a touch of expressionism.

Seascape progress

Here is the seascape after another days work. I hope to finish it tomorrow. This was again shot in the failing last minutes of light. Its not very accurate, but I will try to get a better shot after I work on it tomorrow. I am hoping that will be last day and bring it to completion. That will make this about a week (7 days) work. That seems about right to me for a project on this scale.
I worked on mostly the rocks today. I have got good color temperatures going in there but it is hard to see in this photo so you will just have to believe me.

I have received a couple of provocative e-mail questions about realism and photo realism vs. classical realism and impressionism. I thought I would spin out an essay on that in a few days. I also want to return to the subject of mathematical design systems as there are a number of more ideas I want to present. I started with the most philosophical systems and I am progressing towards increasingly geometric means of design.

I am going to be in a paint out event in Kennebunkport this week, At least on the days it doesn't rain. It isn't a wet paint sale per se, I am not fond of those. Maine Art gallery has invited a group of us to come up there and paint and do a group show. I will probably paint on the rocks along the ocean front which is particularly good there.

A Rhode Island garden

Here is a painting I made this week down in Rhode Island. Add another state to this years tally, I was in Connecticut before that......

Because it was spring foliage I changed up my technique a little and pixilated the painting in Metcalf like brushwork. I used to paint this way a lot, but recently I have been painting more broadly with larger brushes. This was all done with a #4 soft nylon brush.

Here is a detail of the tree on the right. This was painted in one go, I didn't want to lose the airy fluttering brushstrokes by hitting them twice. The whole painting is one brushstroke thick. There are little spots of canvas showing between the brushstrokes here and there. The painting is high key enough that they are nearly invisible. I drew a few lines in burnt sienna and then laid it in pretty much from one side to the other. I tried to place each brushstroke separate from its neighbor of the same color. That looks like colored rice and has a quivering look.

Here is a detail showing the trellis and the house on the distant shore. The house was actually a modern octagonal T111 sheathed unit, I turned it into a period cape. There were no roses on the trellis.

Here is the right hand corner of the painting. There were lilacs but they were actually outside of the picture so I cheated them in. I don't know if it is bothersome having roses and lilacs blooming at the same time but I liked the color over there. There is lots of cobalt violet sprinkled around this passage and the whole painting. That's my favorite color outside in the summer. It is an anti green and makes the darks down in the bottoms of my shadows hot and glowing. I use it almost straight out of the tube.This painting was two long days of furious work. I also fooled with it a little in the studio.

I have a nice gold frame for this 26 by 29 inch painting and will now varnish it and send it back to Lily Pad gallery in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

One of my own seascapes and some blather.

Above is a 24 x 30 seascape I delivered this week to the Guild of Boston Artists where it won the Frank Benson award. I worked on it till 3:30 in the morning the night before and delivered it wet, about five minutes before the jury showed up.
It looks a little like the seascape demo that I posted a week or two ago as that was a study for this project. I made about 3 or 4 studies before I finished this. I delivered it in such haste that I was unable to photograph it, so I downloaded this from the Guilds e-mail to me. I then photoshopped ( actually photoshop elements ) it to improve the color a little. I find that very difficult. If I had the capability to work red yellow blue when correcting photos I would be very pleased. Do you use a program that allows this?

As I said before, seascape is always sort of experimental for me and I seldom feel like I have a real handle on it. I do think they are getting better though. I have painted as lot of them but they are by far the hardest thing I do. Maybe I am figuring it out, they are getting better. When I paint landscape I feel like I am in my favored element, and although some come out better than others , I feel confident out there. In any event, I will share with you all what I do know.

One of the commenter's asked what I would add to the lovely photos I have been showing to make them into a seascape. Below is a little section of a photo that is all I might use of any particular shot.

I don't find a photograph and make a painted version of it. I design the seascape and then try to wing as much of it as I can, when I get stuck, I look through my photos and try to find one that show a particular effect I need. I will then have to alter that to fit in to my painting. I may have to change the color of that, or redraw it from a slightly different angle etc. My seascapes are not romanticized versions of photographs but instead, are abstract designs based on the appearance of the sea.

Tomorrow I will begin the next element in play in the seascape, the rocks. They are the foil for all that writhing hissing water. The two elements are opposites of one another. I think that is part of why seascapes offer so many great design opportunities.

Photos from my recent seascape demo

A student from my workshop in Rolling Fork has graciously e-mailed me a series of pictures he took of the progress of that demo. I will post them tonight. I often see this done with commentary like " and now I put in the wave" I will spare you that. I think you can see the process. I will answer questions though, or evade them and answer them in the later series I intend to do. This is a live demo in front of a class. I think I worked about three hours. I had no photos or reference of any kind and this is an imagined scene and not a real place I have memorized. It was invented using knowledge of wave anatomy and something about how light reveals form. I have also painted hundreds of these invented seascapes.

This is not the seascape chapter I promised, but I thought it was such a good series of pictures I would post them. I have to do some prep work for that or I would start it now. The man behind the curtain is paddling furiously.















And there you have it , my dear.

Ewing farm

Here is todays demo picture, an 18 by 24. It was actually a two morning effort, but I talked a lot as I did it. These old farm buildings are from the turn of the century. The subject matter here is so like that used by the the Dutch painters. The low horizon line and the old buildings really made for a natural design. I wonder who used these buildings? They are all in ruins now.

I appreciate the 30 comments I got on the seascape. I have never had so many before. Whats with that? I will do a series of seascape posts. I will have to wait a week or two to begin them because I am going to have to make a painting and photograph it step by step to do that.
I have taught all day and can't write more. I will be back tomorrow.

Here is a seascape I did as a demo today.It is about three hours work. I also led the entire class through a seascape painting of their own I am exhausted. I am having a great time, but I am pushing really hard. I have a good group as usual. It seems that people who take workshops are a pretty good lot.

I hadn't planned to paint seascape with them, but we had a really gray day and it seemed like a good time to be in the studio. I have been painting seascapes for years but I have never taught it. I did the demo and they all wanted to try it. Some of them did surprisingly well. Seascape is the hardest thing I do.

I guess I could do a series of posts on seascape painting if there is interest out there in that. Let me know. I don't know that I am an expert in it, but I have done a bunch of them.

Lead the Field

Tonight I want to tell a personal story and give a recommendation for Earl Nightingales "Lead the Field". Above is an old clip from when Earl had a television program. I never saw that, and had no idea who he was until...........

I had a gallery in Rockport, a shoestring undercapitalized operation, and I wasn't making enough money to pay my bills., I was making some money, but not enough. I decided I would visit an older and very successful artist who I knew. This fellow had a reputation for advising younger artists and I sought out his help.

His enormous studio was filled with the paintings he was working on for a major gallery in New York . He was one of the best selling artists in that gallery. I arrived at the time on which we had agreed, and he talked to me about painting and some production methods, and ways to get more efficiency in your painting. But then he stopped and asked. Do you know about "Lead the Field"?

I said no, I did not, and he wrote out for me an address, for the Nightingale-Conant company where I could order a set of inexpensive tapes of Earl Nightingale. Ordinarily a series of instructional tapes by some geezer who was the radio voice of Sky King would not have got my attention. But because it had been recommended so highly by this big time artist, I bought it. When it arrived, I put it on , and it changed the whole game for me. I am not the end all, be all in the art biz, far from it, but I can make a living. Here's where I learned a whole lot of the attitude that made this possible. It is a down to earth, no mumbo-jumbo course in sales and self growth for the real world.

My father was a doctor and so were all his friends, no one taught me how the world in general, and the business world in particular, worked. They were all salary men. Others did the business for them, I have had to do my own. Art is a business. If you have a problem with that, maybe you should teach, or work in Hollywood or design things for a company that hands you a check every week. Before Earl, I didn't understand why some guys made a living and I didn't, now I learned the score. If you want to earn more as an artist, start here.

Earl laid it all out in an orderly and reasoned, optimistic and nurturing way. So many of the unexamined ideas and preconceptions I had, were discarded as Earl explained what the world was about. I don't know of any book that had the effect on me, of these tapes. I can thank Earl for helping me get my act together and make a living as an artist. It is really all the same you know. Art is a small business, whether you are running a shoe store, or a gallery, or a department store, the principles remain the same. They are also timeless. Every week brings a slew of new business "how to books", and none of them replace anything that can be found in Lead the Field. Today it is on disk rather than tapes. If you want some wise mentor to sit you down and tell you how to make it in the art biz, or any other biz, you need Lead the Field

Item two. I am announcing a workshop to be held at the Sunset Hill Inn again. This one will coincide with the Lupine season there. Artists go there to paint the spectacular flowering fields. Join me this June 19th thru the 21st in the White mountains for a workshop I will call;

LUPINEWORLD 2010

SIGN UP HERE FOR LUPINEWORLD!

Packing for a painting trip on an airplane

Above is another painting I made for the Charleston show, at the Ella Walton Richardson Gallery. This was painted from a beautiful spot on Kiawah island. I studioized it some though.

I was asked a few questions about packing for travel by airplane and I thought that I would write briefly about that. The last major airplane trip I did was to Venice. I took a Pochade (pronounced pochade) box. Mine is an Easy L with which I am happy, but there are other good boxes out there also.

Into my suitcase I packed;

• The Easy L
• A light tripod in a cloth bag with shoulder strap
• A backpack, empty
• I cut a roll of canvas into 20" lengths with my chopsaw. I could then cut 16 by 20s or 16 by 24's out of that. That went into the suitcase. Also about ten 8"by 10" primed Masonite panels.
• two sets of 16 by 20 stretchers and 1 set of 16 by 24 stretchers, also a staplegun and staples and canvas pliers and screwdriver.
  
• A couple of cigar boxes full of paint.I downloaded on Gamblins web site the specs on paint showing that it was not flammable or dangerous I included this in the box with the paints.
  
• Brushes and medium cans.
• No solvents.
• Two softcover and one hardcover book on Edward Seago.

I also carried my small camera and seven days changes of clothes. I wore a light jacket. I did sink laundry with dish detergent and hung my clothes up to dry in the bathroom. One time I went to a laundromat.

When I landed in Venice I found a good art supply store where I bought alkyd medium and more Titanium White. I found a hardware store where I could buy mineral spirits.

I stretched three canvases, two 16 by 20's and one 126 by 24. I used lots of Liquin so I had fast drying times. When I had painted on the canvas I took it off the stretchers and put a new canvas on them. Then I rolled all of the canvasses around the tube on which I had brought them. On the last couple of days I painted on the panels. I separated them with little U shaped metal staple thingies I found at the hardware store, taped around them and wrapped the whole show in paper.Because I painted those panels the last days the canvasses I did were dry and could be rolled. With my Liquin I was getting 24 to 36 hour drying times.

I have a plastic tube made for skis that telescopes. I can use it to take a Gloucester easel on an airplane. There is room in there for a roll of linen also. It looks like a rocket launcher. Security thought it was a gun case. When I opened it for them they didn't know what it was.

I wil probably be unable to post tomorrow as I will be on the road.

I met a great young artist tonight. He is Marc Delessio he opened a show at the Ann Long gallery tonight. He is very 19th century classical in approach, and studied and now teaches at the Florence Academy, that is headed by Charles Cecil, who was a student of R. H. Ives Gammell, although he was there just before me.Here is a link to Ann Long gallery

Fixing a punctured canvas

Here's another picture from the Charleston show, that opens tomorrow night on Broad street at the Ella Walton Richardson gallery. Behind me is Fort Moultrie, site of a revolutionary war battle. And to my left is Fort Sumter, whose bombardment began the civil war, or the war between the states as they prefer to call it here.

I received an e-mail from a reader explaining that he had accidentally shoved a brush through a painting and wondered how he could fix the hole. There are several ways to do it. One is to reline the canvas. I will go into that another time. You can do it yourself, but it is difficult and takes more skill. I will cover the quick and dirty way to do it.

I am assuming that the hole is smaller than a penny, if it is bigger, this method begins to become more difficult. This method will also work on a three corner tear. First smooth out the canvas in the area and clean up any ravelings that are hanging about the hole. Then cut a piece of canvas, hopefully of a lighter weight than the one you are repairing. If you haven't got something lighter use a piece of the same canvas, you may have to take it from that which I hope you are in the habit of leaving turned over on the back. Cut an attractive patch from that, I cut a rectangular patch and then clip of the corners at a 45 degree angle so it looks a little slicker. If you have a pinking shears use those, that gives a nice look too. This is important to do neatly, if someone sees the repair, they will accept it only if it looks neat and professional.

Glue the patch behind the hole. I have used a number of kinds of glue. I have used fabric cement and an industrial glue in a tube. Carpenters glue should work too. Let that that dry completely before continuing with the next step.

Now fill the hole from the front. I like to use a mixture of flake lead and liquin but you can use titanium white or even spackling compound or wood filler, this IS the down and dirty method. When that is completely dry, sand it lightly with a fine paper. If you are sanding the lead filler, wet the sandpaper with mineral spirits so you don't breathe the dust. You may want to don a mask for this.

Don't do this around your kids, don 't do it you are pregnant, don't do it if you are a wellness dweeb or living all natural. In fact, oil painting involves lots of toxic chemicals and you need to be aware of that and exercise caution. Sanding paint can generate aeresol dust and that is never good, So be careful about that. I wet sand for that reason, and I wouldn't sand down a whole canvas, only the ocasional small area. When I do, I breathe through my ears.

Feather the edges well so that the filled hole is level with the painting around it. This must be done very carefully so it doesn't show. You may have to fill and sand twice, try using a palette knife to fill the hole, that works well. When that is done and dried out paint it with liquin ,let that dry and then varnish it, It needs to be completely sealed. Varnish it several times, it absolutely has to be sealed! Then retouch varnish the whole painting to bring your color up so it looks like wet paint, that will help you match the area.

Now inpaint the patched area, If you were a restorer you would carefully match the colors and only inpaint the patched area, but since this is your own painting you will probably find it easier to repaint the entire passage. If you are an impressionist with brushwork, painting opaquely this is not a big deal. If you are painting enameled surfaces in glazes, you are going to have a much harder job.

I have done this successfully many times. If you work with care and precision you should be able to get a nearly invisible repair that will last the life of the painting. Now listen up! What I am about to say next is important. This is to repair your own work or possibly the work of a friend only. Do not do this to an antique painting of value. A real restorer should be called in to work on anything that has age or value. Also you cannot inpaint on an antique painting the same way as you can on your new one, it will darken over time. To paraphrase Joshua Reynolds.........

DO NOT HELP TIME DESTROY EXCELLENCIES WHICH YOU YOURSELF WILL NEVER RIVAL.

Wring out your dead!

Here is a piece I am putting in the show in Charleston. I have been down here painting for several weeks. The show will be at the Ella Walton Richardson gallery on Broad street. I painted this out on Kiowa island. That's about half an hour below Charleston on the coast. It is a beautiful gated community. Lots of alligators. It seems a little odd to me that such an expensive community would be filled with enormous monsters that bite. They would, I think, never be tolerated in New Hampshire.

Below is a tool I keep in my paintbox.

This is a tube wringer. An artist friend I know stopped by the studio and showed me one. I had seen them advertised and never bought one. Well OK, I cheaped out and bought a plastic one. It didn't work and I threw it away long ago. This time I bought the metal one. Its a great little tool. It does a fine job of rolling the tubes and squeezing out every last drop of paint. I go through lots of paint, I think this little gadget paid for itself in six weeks. It also does a nice job of crimping the tubes when I am tubing my paint. Remember how to do that? Tubing paint is here.
I actually keep this in my paintbox and wring the tubes at the end of the day. You don't want to wring em too hard though, if you do it will rip the tube a little at the bottom and they will ooze paint.