A new home for my brushes

In happy news, I'm soon to be a member of the Waltham Mills Artists Association, and the proud new occupant of a beautiful studio space. I'm so excited about the space and all the work I will be able to do there, I can barely contain it.

On an unrelated note, I will also be teaching painting classes at the Boston Center for Adult Education, starting in September. You can still enroll!

And as a third, and final, note, children are tricky subjects. And so I continue to practice:

finishings

I've been working on finishing things lately. I'm due to move, again, at the end of the month, so set-ups must come down, paintings must be dry, brushes must be packed away, etc. etc. Today I worked on this fellow:

I think it's nearly done.

Posies

Today I did a little study of flowers.

My favorite part is the top, right hand corner:

That is all.

Portrait

I've been working on my self portrait lately. I can't say it's been going terribly well. Every time I set out to work on it I'm hit by an overwhelming desire to move everything, i.e. change the position of the head, the hands, the shoulders, etc. And I've yielded to the desire, starting each day as if from scratch. I like to believe that it was at least a good exercise along the way. For a while it seemed I was inadvertently channelling Pontormo or Parmigianino, giving myself an absurdly long neck. I also toyed with poses that left my hands out of the frame, as hands are hard enough to paint when they're being held still and not in constant motion. I've decided, however, to stick out the current pose, as the realization that this painting could very well continue forever has sunk in. It has a long way to go yet, but hopefully, now that I've stopped changing things around, it may progress at a normal rate.

So here it is, version five-hundred million, give or take:

Next session I tackle the hands.

Studies/sketches

I went landscape painting this afternoon with a friend in Cambridge. The weather was odd for landscape painting, as it was rather hazy, and the light bright but not consistent. But it's good to be painting landscapes again fairly regularly, as it's been awhile and I definitely feel out of practice.

Here is my study of the end of the Weeks bridge:

And here's a sketch of a pond I did the other day:

Weekend on the beach

I spent this weekend with friends on Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod. It was sunny and warm and about as near perfect as a few days can be. The Cape part I spent in the company of friend and fellow painter, Christie Stewart, and this morning we got up early and walked to a lovely little pond and set up our easels on the beach.

My set up

(Here you can see me working very hard, clearly laying in front of my easel, feet up):

Here's the study of the lovely little pond (which I jumped into as soon as I cleaned up my paints):

I find painting still water with reflections particularly hard, because it's so easy to make it look cheesy. I also find it particularly hard to paint big clumps of trees where the individual silhouettes of the trees are not visible. So, brilliantly, with this painting, I set myself up with a subject I find doubly tricky. But for a study, I do not think it so terrible in the end.

Scrolls, continued

Day Two: