Winslow Homer and Prout's Neck, Maine

I recently went on a roadtrip up to Portland, Maine to see the "Weatherbeaten" show of Winslow Homer's work related to his home in Prout's Neck. The museum has just finished restoring his studio building, which they now own, and had put together several shows to celebrate: one of his work, one of his circle of contemporaries and local plein air painters, and an exhibit of commissioned photographs.
Portland Museum of Art Weatherbeaten exhibit

Terrific CBS Sunday Morning segment on the studio and Prout's Neck

I had been studying a monograph of his watercolors from an earlier show at the Art Institute of Chicago (Waterolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light). It was a real treat to seethe watercolors up close (or as close as they'd let me get) and I now have a much better understanding of his mastery.
Link to details of Breaking Waves at AIC

After the museum and lunch, we made the 12 mile trip down to Prout's Neck to see what we could see in the late afternoon light.
Google map of the area

It was a magical day, though a bit gray, and I'm so glad I got to share it with my family and my mother who was in town for a visit.

So far, the experience has resulted in one painting. Though our day was calm, I tried to capture a hint of Homer's raging surf through a bit of artistic license...

Truisms

So far on my watercolor painting journey I think I've learned the following:

• You cannot achieve good painting without good drawing, but you CAN achieve bad painting with good drawing.

• Good paper is more important than good brushes which are more important than good paint

• Eyes make the painter, not the tools; but good tools can sure help the eyes

• Simplify, simplify, simplify

• Do not be afraid to fail, but learn when to stop and how to wait.

• Gravity can be your friend. And also your enemy.

• A "breakthrough" painting can almost shame much of your earlier work, and it can take a long while before it has worthy company.

• Practice does not make perfect. But it sure helps.

Sometimes you have to go for it

Working from a photograph on a chilly day I tackled a shaded hillside in northern Victoria, Australia. Mostly I was trying to catch the shade under the trees, the atmospherics of the distant hills, and to give some sense of the steep perspective as the hill falls away at the viewers feet.

At this stage, I was fairly happy but I knew that I needed to make a few adjustments. The next hill over was too brown and warm for the rest of the painting (especially in this photo). I didn't feel the shadows under the trees were strong enough. And I knew that I had chickened-out instead of including the scattered flock of sheep in the reference photograph.

So after strengthening the shadows I did a bit of research looking at how other painters have tried to show distant sheep with just a few strokes, then held my breath and went for it.

 

I'm still not thrilled with the brown hill... but the sheep seem to "work". They're small.... but they're sheep! 

This is 9" x 12" on Arches 140 lb cold press, entirely painted with an Isabey 2/0 Squirrel Quill Mop brush, except for the sheep which needed something smaller and stiff. A teeny bit of gouche for the sheep whites. This second photograph is more true to the actual color.

Boston from Buck Hill

We had a glorious warm autumn day yesterday, so I packed up the field gear into my backpack and headed off to the Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, MA. This wonderful network of trails, ponds and hills is within a half hour drive and offers surprisingly grand vistas for a spot so close to the city, so close to the coast here.

I chose Buck Hill, taking a brief but very steep and rugged leaf-covered trail straight up from Route 28. Suffice it to say I was reminded of my own sloth, lack of exercise and even mortality on the climb up. At the very least, I was rather grateful the trail wasn't any longer!

I don't have much in the way of photos here: just the painting (9 x 12) and a documentation of what I was looking toward. When I started there was still a bit of haze and/or fog hovering over the city presumably due to temperature inversions of some sort, but there wasn't a cloud in the sky. We're already a bit "past peak" for many of the fall leaves - they came and went in a hurry this year!

Optics

The difference between the way a painting looks at arm's length (the way it's made) and from across the room (the way it is often viewed) can be truly mysterious and sometimes astonishing, even to the painter.

When I stand back to look, I'm often looking for nebulous qualities. Things like "Does the painting hold up?" or "Is that detail lost?" become just as important as judgements about color, shape, composition, emphasis, and whether or not I've successfully conveyed what I set out to convey.

The recent paintings below are deliberately shown small here to give you some idea what they look like from across the room. They're all less than 9" x 12". But if you click, you'll get a better sense of how they look to me when I'm painting...

The bottom one is a first sketch attempt at depicting a complicated and colorful scen along the Charles River in Newton, Massachusetts. Lilypads, turning leaves, reflections, forest shadows... these are all significant challenges for me and up close I didn't think I was getting them down in a coherant way. But from across the room something magical happens - I had caught more than I thought!

Thank you!

Last weekend's debut showing at Jamaica Plain Open Studios was:

1. exhausting
2. fun and exciting
3. very gratifying
4. all of the above

No wrong answers there. Thank you so much to the many old friends and new who stopped by and said very gracious things about my work. Fourteen paintings woke up to find themselves in new homes on Monday, and for that I'm grateful as well as a little wistful. They may have "left the nest", but they will be missed for the joy they gave me in the making and for what they taught me.

Thanks too are due to my battery-mates at the First Baptist Church: our hostess with the mostest and a spectacular photographer Ashlee Wiest-Laird; Ginny Zanger whose monotypes set a great standard; Richard Youngstrom whose mosaic creations made for a lively presentation all weekend. The sculpture studio's terrific Polar Bears, Annie Cardinaux's wonderful patchwork landscapes and Alicia Fessenden's pottery held down the fort outside. Thanks much for the cheerful encouragement and the fine example you all set of "how it's done".

And truly: thanks are due to the frisky folks at Moo.com whose Mini Business Cards were a surefire attention grabber. In the midst of so much larger art vying for attention, something about our evolutionary biology and those cones in our eyes that give us peripheral vision made nearly every passing potential patron stop in their tracks and zoom in for a look at these things, about a third the size of a regular card:

Finally, here is a peek at a last minute effort to create some "smaller inventory" for the show. This scene is from the pond at Forest Hills Cemetery here in Jamaica Plain, not far from the final resting places of playwright Eugene O'Neill, and the poets Anne Sexton and e.e. cummings (among others)...

That half sheet of Arches was cut into nine rectangles for the show. A patron could find one they liked or build a triptych. They look great framed too:

Even the smallest painting can change the course of the future!

Jamaica Plain Open Studios 2012

This coming weekend, September 22-23 is Jamaica Plain Open Studios and marks my debut showing as a painter.

I'll be exhibiting my work at the First Baptist Church, 633 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain from 11am to 6 pm on both Saturday and Sunday.  There is art all over town, and seven of us at this location:
http://jpopenstudios.com/jamaica-plain-open-studios/love-art-see-art-meet-artists

The work I'll be showing includes these original watercolors, almost all of which will be available for purchase:



Thanks for your support,
Clay