More pine cones and sea shells

Each 8 x 10 inches. Smaller than I really care to work but some shows in the NYC area during the holidays require "small" to be no larger than an 8 x 10 image.

Helene Balzarini

Another artist in the Portrait Project: Helene Pinnisi Balzarini. If artists could choose their names I would gravitate towards names like Pinnisi or Balzarini. These names just sound inherently artistic, right?

This is not finished but fairly far along. She put her left hand on the wall as I took a reference photo. I asked her to move it up slightly to better fit the composition. She left her painting apron on, which I like for the color element. Helene wears glasses but took them off. This was a good move. The glasses have a very distinctive look and I suspect in a few years a picture of her in those glasses would look dated.

Work in Progress - Kevin

This just goes to show you how ghastly things can get in the underpainting stage. Night before last his face was green. It all gets better in the final stages. Honest!

Progress in the Portrait Project

Top to bottom: Michael Elsasser, Claudia Monaco and moi. Sea earlier posts for preliminary drawings. Obviously I like horizontal compositions for these portraits and I also like side or back-lit light sources. The shadow areas are built up in multiple glazes of alternating complimentary colors Terra verte mixed with a tiny piece of viridian in one glaze and vermilion mixed with a little alizarin crimson in the next glaze.

Meself

At the drawing and under-painting stage.

Another contribution to the portrait project I have mentioned in earlier posts. Tough to look at oneself and acknowledge that I don't look as I did when I was twenty-five. You would think the mirror would do a pretty good job of accomplishing that but we do have a way of deceiving ourselves and, for an artist that doesn't go away until we drag a brush over every square inch of the face.

At that point the tendency may be to go too far in the other direction. Earlier self-portraits have prompted others to tell me that I'm not that gray, etc. Maybe this time I'll nail it.

Mistakes in a drawing

As I look at this now I realize that the perspective for the wainscoting is at the wrong angle when compared to the angle of the line where the floor meets the wall. I also realized that the leg of her chair nearest the viewer was in the wrong place so I re-drew it with my eraser, placing it a little closer to the other leg and in line with the back of the chair.

But I'm fairly happy with my rendering of the figure herself. She's a new model and I don't know her name. She seemed Eastern European or Russian.

Michael and Claudia, drawing and underpainting.

Michael Elsasser and Claudia Monaco are two of the other artists participating in what seven of us have come to call our 'portrait project.' We have agreed to spend a year or so each doing a minimum of two portraits of other artists in our group plus a self-portrait. The end of our year will come in January and at that point we hope to find a venue in which to exhibit our results.

I started my self-portrait and another rendering of Claudia in the spring, but after staring at the canvases for a number of months have decided to start over with entirely new compositions.

Except for Claudia who is a fairly new member of our group, the rest of us met six years ago at the Art Students League in Manhattan in Sherry Camhy's drawing and anatomy class. We have all since moved on to other classes at the League but we now get together for lunch once a month to share progress on our project and swap other stories.

Michael, for example, was just featured in Connoisseur Magazine. An article written by a magazine editor describes first-hand what it's like to purchase a portrait painted by Michael and add it to his collection.

Eva

A new model, Eva. Well, new to us anyway. She is petite and athletic. This drawing took about an hour with a number 4B pencil.

Tyrone at the Art Students League

Tyrone held one pose for the afternoon on Saturday, posing in sessions of 20 minutes each with five minute breaks, seated on a high stool in front of an old plaster bas-relief. James McElhinney's class is focused on drawing, the figure and anatomy. The class runs from 1 pm. until 4:30. These four drawings, each done with a 6B pencil, represent one afternoon's work.

Note: image enlarges if you click on it.

Looking across Oyster Bay from Center Island

Beautiful weather this week and clear skies. This is an abridged and edited view that comes at the top of a small hill on a weekly bike ride I do. I'm not a sailor, so I don't know for sure, but the boat off in the distance looked positively 19th century.

Cold Spring Harbor, Dusk, Plein Air Painting

Oil on masonite panel. About two hours.

Figure drawing, year six

Laetitia has turned her back on you.

These were done with a 7B pencil, the top drawing in two minutes, the drawing below it in the course of roughly an hour, in three twenty-minute poses, punctuated with five-minute breaks.

I've been going into the Art Students League in Manhattan on Saturdays or Sundays now for six years. Before that I tried briefly going in one week night each week but it was tough fighting traffic and trying not to get into class too late. Weekends are better.

I drove in for a few years. It was especially nice when I had a Sunday morning class just after the city revoked parking fees under the campaign that people shouldn't have to "pay to pray" on Sundays. But after a year the rest of the world figured out that parking in the city is free on Sundays and now I'm convinced that ghouls circle the city at midnight on Saturday nights waiting for the clock to strike and grab their spaces.

I did take the summer off, although most years I have continued in one class or another.

I'm of a mind to take a sculpture class but the only weekend class offered in sculpture at the League is one in which students work life size. For a guy who lives on Long Island that's a bit daunting. I'd like to bring my work home when it's finished and I'd prefer not to have to contract with a mover to do so.

The sketchbook project

The Sketchbook Project, as it was called, invited artists to fill rather small, modest sketchbooks and submit them to a traveling show. I did as requested and to my surprise the show traveled quite a bit this year. Perhaps you saw it in one of the following venues:

Atlanta, GA, Art House Gallery;
Washington, DC, Museum of Contempory Art DC;
Philadelphia, PA, Chris' Jazz Café;
Boston, MA, Laconia Gallery;
Chicago, IL, Antena Gallery;
Chicago IL, Art Source Gallery;
St. Louis, MO, Soulard Art Market;
Brooklyn, NY, 3rd Ward Gallery;
Atlanta, GA, Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA);

The Art House Gallery is all about staging large participatory exhibits like this. Their current project involves having as many artists as possible fill a handful of tiny canvases which are then exhibited mosaic style in the Atlanta airport.

Fun stuff.

At the end of the day

Progress report

HERE ARE TWO PAINTINGS I started some time ago, paintings on which I just resumed work. The little rowboat is was spotted catching sunlight in late May from between the planks of the dock at Islesford on Little Cranberry Island, Maine.

The young lady is another imaginary beach queen wearing a paper crown. James McElhinney with whom I've worked for several years at the Art Students League in New York refers to this kind of pose as "one of the mud-flap girls."

Exhibiting at the Salmagundi Club

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, the Salmagundi Club is a grand old artists' organization on Fifth Avenue just below 12th Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. It's a couple of blocks north of Washington Square.

The above oil painting of my wife is there in a juried portraiture show along with works by other notable artist members.

Plein Air at the Vanderbilt Museum, Centerport

I HAD A GREAT TIME yesterday afternoon and evening painting on the grounds of the Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium. Heavy clouds and predictions of thunderstorms threatened our afternoon but by 4 o'clock or so it was clear that blue sky was taking over and we'd have a nice evening.

It was fun painting in the good comapny of accomplished painters like Anthony Davis, Jane McGraw-Teubner, Esther Marie Chagaris and David Monteiro.

At 6 pm the grounds opened up for the annual Northport Rotary Club's "Wine in the Courtyard" celebration and 700 paying guests surveyed our efforts for the day. The two images shown here 14 x 11 and 11 x 14 inches respectively were what I had to show for a day spent admiring the view across Centerport Harbor from the bluff behind the mansion, looking off toward Asharokan and farther still toward the Connecticut shore.

Gary Erbe's trompe l'oeil painted collages

I went into NYC Saturday to drop off a couple of paintings for two upcoming shows at the Salmagundi Club. If you don't know this grand old place, you should stop in for a visit. It's one of the oldest art organizations in the country. The club occupies a townhouse built in the 1850s on lower fifth avenue just a few blocks north of Washington Square. The building has been used in a number of movies, most recently the club library was used in "The Good Shepherd." But I'll save all that for another posting.

Saturday was the last day of a wonderful retrospective exhibit by Gary Erbe, an artist one might describe as a hyper realist, in the tradition of William Harnett and John Peto. But unlike those 19th century masters Erbe often works quite large. You can see a great many of his works on his website but there's nothing quite like seeing them in person. Some are very large indeed.

One theme that fascinated me was a series of paintings of abstract collages. The textures of papers overlapping each other are minutely examined and delineated in paint. But what makes these works unique is Erbe's reverence for the abstract, perhaps a rather unusual quality for one who works so hyper real.

I was fortunate enough that when I saw this exhibit that Erbe himself was there and we chatted for a few moments. I told him that I was flattered to see two newspaper front pages done long ago at Newsday (where I was director of design) were included in one of his largest paintings ("Subway Series"). I assumed that he had included the Newsday front pages because he lives on Long Island where the paper circulates.

"No," he said. "I live in Hoboken."

He had simply included those newspaper front pages because he thought they were particularly graphic. And so I was flattered all over again. Erbe may be as charming as he is talented.

Erbe's website: http://www.garyerbe.com/

Finished... Again

This little yard-side scene was up the road from where we stayed on Little Cranberry Island in Maine at the end of May. The top image is a reference photo I took for this painting. The finished painting is 24 by 30 inches, oil on canvas.

Although I signed this painting and considered it finished more than a week ago, I just went back into it and added a bicycle to the porch. It's an illustrative detail that may not add anything aesthetic, although I like the way reds and greens play off each other in this painting, along with the complimentary relationship between the maroon and the yellow. But I liked the addition of the bike for some sort of story-telling quality that the detail adds.

And as you can see from the reference photo, I chose to change the color of the shed in the background and lose the bush in the center.

Movies about artists... waiting to be made into films

Here, again in no particular order, is a list of artists about whom interesting movies could be made. In one or two cases, it's really surprising that we don't have movies given the colorful details surrounding some of these artists.

Whistler was such a flamboyant character and his famous lawsuit for slander would make for fun cinema as well as his notorious painting of Madame X (in which he portrayed her with the strap of her dress fallen down her shoulder only to repaint it with the strap up after enormous public pressure.) Wouldn't all this have made for a great film? Where are Merchant and Ivory when we need them?

Salvador Dali. I mean, really, the old boy must be squirming in his grave knowing that after all his publicity stunts, his weird behavior, bizarre relationships and influential art, mugging thousands of times for photographers with that ridiculous mustache, nobody has bothered to make a movie out of his life. It's not like there's a shortage of material here.

Joseph Cornell. If you've ever read Deborah Solomon's wonderful and cleverly named 1997 biography, "Utopia Parkway," you'll know that the weird banality of this man who lived with his mother and his sickly brother might make a movie very different from the kind we wish for from Dali's life. Cornell's surreal (some would say creepy) boxes, tacked together in his Queens basement, were part of a very different life punctuated with visits from other, younger adoring artists or chauffeur-driven visits from people like actor and collector Tony Curtis who enjoyed taking Cornell out for rides in the limo. Think Grey Gardens focused on a hapless but successful artist.

Andrew Wyeth and the Helga paintings. The secret paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Was this a great marketing ploy played out to gain enormous publicity? The almost reclusive Wyeth found himself on the covers of Time and Newsweek the summer this body of work was revealed. But if, as Wyeth himself declared, the paintings were about "love" and the whole decade-long depiction of Helga in these images had been a secret kept from Betsy Wyeth, then how is it that Helga was retained as part of Betsy's staff for so long after the revelation of this work? (Betsy Wyeth oversaw the licensing and archiving side of the Wyeth image empire.) Was the secret aspect of these paintings a case of marketing hype or was this a case of one woman who knew that you keep your friends close and your enemies closer?

Robert Henri. An artist with a made-up name he acquired because his father had shot a man out west, fled to the east coast and gave everyone in the family a different alias to protect them from the scandal should he ever be caught. Henri was THE influential teacher of so many beloved American painters and yet his own art was only of moderate commercial success. His little sayings and quips in the art schools were collected by Margery Ryerson, one of his students, and have never been out of print even though Henri died 80 years ago. He loved painting portraits but did not have that many commissions. That left him free to do things like paint portraits of Irish urchins that charm us to no end today. A list of his students and followers reads like a Who's Who of American Art: Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, Bellows, Prendergast, Lawson, Davies...

If you've read this far, you're probably the sort of person who has his or her own list of candidates for bio-pics.

Movies about artists

I took a summer course in July, here at Hofstra University where I also teach. The course, was taught by Professor Alexander Naymark and met four days a week for 2 hours ten minutes each afternoon. The curriculum examined how artists' biographies are portrayed in the movies. For 16 days we watched a lot of movies about artists. Most were made for entertainment, not as documentaries.

Some, like The Girl with the Pearl Earring, are largely fiction because in the case of Vermeer, for example, we don't know much about the artist and we know even less about his family and life. So when the film imagines him with a shrewish wife and a controlling mother-in-law, we are left to wonder how likely that really was. We do know that his Catholic family had eleven children. It wasn't easy being an artist, even in Holland's so-called Golden Age.

In other cases we have a great deal of information about the artist portrayed, particularly artists of more recent history. Basquiat is a wonderful film made by another artist (Julian Schnabel) who knew and exhibited with Basquiat in some of the same galleries, at more or less the same time.

Here is a list (in no particular order) of some of my favorite movies about artists:

Rembrandt (1936) Charles Laughton in the title role and Elsa Lancester as Hendrickje Stoffels. Laughton seems to have had a great time with this role and, judging from recent Rembrandt bios and research, his portrayal may not have been far off the mark.

Basquiat (1996) Jeffrey Wright in the title role and a youthful Benicio del Toro as his close friend, David Bowie as Warhol, also Willem Dafoe in a cameo of sorts, Christopher Walken, Courtney Love and Tatum O'Neal

Goya's Ghosts (2006) Milos Forman's movie was around for about ten minutes when it was released in 2006. Like Girl with a Pearl Earring, it is a piece of fiction using some historical figures. Stellan Skarsgard is endearing as Goya. Randy Quaid is a delight as the oafish Spanish King Carlos IV. Natalie Portman is the beautiful young woman tortured by the Inquisition. Javier Bardem is the evil and powerful cleric of the Inquisition.

Moulin Rouge (1952) If you can get past the corny device of having Jose Ferrer simultaneously play both Toulouse-Lautrec and his disapproving father, the count, and if you can get past a lip-syncing Zsa-Zsa Gabor as the chanteuse, Jane Avril, then this is a fun recreation of the time and place. The causes and details of Toulouse-Lautrec's early demise are conveyed in a simplified Reader's Digest style.

Surviving Picasso (1996) This was Merchant-Ivory at their best and although I don't think Anthony Hopkins was the obvious first choice to play Picasso, he does a terrific job. (Who else could credibly portray figures as disparate as Picasso and Nixon in one acting career?) Based on Arianna Huffington's book, the movie focuses on Francoise Gilot's ten years as one in a parade of wives and mistresses who had to live with this monster and creative genius.

Modigliani (2004) I'm not sure this film, which was written and directed by Mick Davis, got much exposure here in the U.S. when it was released but Andy Garcia does a great job of capturing the essence of the tragically creative figure. His no-less-tragic lover, Jeanne Hebuterne is played by Elsa Zylberstein. A beautifully sad story, well told.

Frida (2002) Julie Taymor does a pretty good job of capturing the essence and key points of Kahlo's art, career, personality and struggles, physical and otherwise. Selma Hayek and Alfred Molina as Kahlo and Rivera. After seeing this film again recently I went to an early 1980s edition of Encyclopedia Brittannica to see what it had to say about Kahlo. Nada. The artist did not exist for art historians until the mid 80s. In part, we have collectors like Madonna to thank for that.

Artemesia (1997) That would be Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653), daughter of the more famous Orazio Gentileschi. French film with screenplay and direction by Agnes Merlet. With a lithe and tanned Valentina Cervi (photo, above) in the title role. This is a sexed-up version of a story only partly understood by historians. Artemsia studied with her father and then apprenticed with his rival, Tassi, who later finds himself charged with her rape. All the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller. Well done but not without some significant distortions to what facts we do know.

I've left Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy off my list of favorites. It's subjective, I know, but I find those two a little heavy-handed in that mid-20th century Hollywood kind of way.

Tomorrow: Artists whose biographies would make great movies.

My favorite art books

A number of artists I know collect how-to-draw books and books on anatomy for artists. When asked by other students at the Art Students League, I am happy to recommend the books by Joseph Sheppard, an American painter and sculptor who now lives and works in Italy.

If I am not mistaken, Sheppard was a student of Reginald Marsh. (I believe Sheppard is about 79 years old now.) You can see that there is a liveliness to Sheppard's rendering that seems to have derived from Marsh. But although Marsh taught anatomy and figure drawingand painting, he is not remembered today as a great anatomist. In fact, one instructor at the Art Students League recently recalled that Marsh was fond of saying to his struggling students, "When in doubt, add more muscles." That may be apocryphal but it seems like something Marsh might have said.

Sheppard's figures are much more convincing and accurately rendered. In the 1970s he realized that the anatomy that artists need to learn has very little in common with what doctors and biologists need to learn. Sheppard created a number of books on drawing the figure and, in them, he sometimes uses the term "surface anatomy," meaning the visible clues to anatomy that will be most valuable to an artist.

His drawings, some in pen and ink and others in white and dark chalk on toned paper are works of art that are as enjoyable as art as they are informative and demonstrative.

Yet another book by Sheppard deals with the painting techniques of the old masters. In this large format paperback, Sheppard takes his readers step-by-step through the techniques of Durer, Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer. It's fascinating to see how, in each case, the demo painting ends up looking somewhat like the work of the master being examined while nonetheless showing Sheppard's irrepressible animated style as well.

Most of these books are still in print. They are far and away the resource books I value most as a painter.

Well, Hullo, Pilgrim...

I was happy enough with the progress on this to have signed it last night but this morning as I look at it I realize that there was a bicycle on that porch when I first saw this scene on Little Cranberry Island back at the end of May.

Smaller sea shell this time

I fear I may be better at starting paintings than I am at finishing them. Or maybe it's just that I have a tough time starting just one painting and working on only that one until I finish. I like getting a number of them going at once. That way if I stall out on one there is always another work in progress on which I can keep working.

Even when I worked in the much faster medium of watercolor I worked this way, sometimes getting as many as seven different paintings going at once. With oil paintings you can just put them aside, for months or years , before coming back to them.

Sometimes the stalling out lasts for months, sometimes for more than a year. The last large one I did (see post headlined, "Finished") was one such case of stalling out. I got stuck in the drawing stage and put it aside for some time. Begun in April, put aside for two months. Then I was able to move it along but still avoided the most complicated and, I thought, tricky part of the painting (the part where the large shell holds the smaller shells. Once I got down to it, it wasn't so difficult and after drawing that part in monochrome on the linen the painting moved almost too fast.

The above painting is more an interior than a still life, which is rather uncharacteristic for me. But I did a drawing of a similar dining room chair (another dining room and another marriage, actually) nearly twenty years ago when my sons were very small, in part because even then I really liked the curvy lines of such chairs.

The blue under-painting will serve as a complimentary color to the surface and true color of the wood and furniture which is more in the orange/brown range.

More old brushes

Last week I wrote about the oldest brush I own, a boar bristle brush I bought 38 years ago when I was in college. It's the second from top in the photo. The three other brushes in this picture are actually in worse shape, and while considerably younger, they are still old bushes.

But I don't throw them out. The one at the top in the photo I used as a broad watercolor bush for a year or more before it began to deteriorate. Now I use it for priming canvas and linen. The two brushes at bottom are nylon or some version of nylon which means they're good for oil or acrilic glazing and they last significantly longer than natural sable brushes (which tend to be expensive anyway.) They go by cute names like sablette, but they are versions of nylon.

As you can see, they don't last forever either. The white handled brush is at least twenty years old but I still use it several times a month along with it's younger cousin with the brown handle. In both cases the nylon fibers have broken and splayed so that the brush no longer holds a cohesive shape. But I still use both for glazing large areas in which I've already built up a number of glazes.

Perhaps I should admit here that I also paint pretty actively with paint rags. That is to say that I apply the paint with a brush but then use a decrepit old paint rag to wipe most of the glaze or opaque paint off the canvas leaving only a trace on the surface. I like building up a color in this fashion but the brush is simply the means of getting the paint on the canvas. It's the paint rag that really leaves the 'brush-stroke' as it were.

Next!

And starting another. This one with base color in burnt sienna. This canvas 36 by 48 just like the last one. I like the large scale of these and find I don't have much patience with small canvases anymore.

By the way, there may still be some who don't realize that you can click on most of my pictures here and get a considerably larger version of the image.

The Oldest Paint Brush I Own

I'm pretty sure I bought this brush in 1971 or 1972. When dinosaurs ruled the earth. I still use it and as you can see it's not in terrible shape. As a rule I don't throw out brushes just because they've lost their shape or worn out. They might get demoted to a function that could best be described as scrubber or scumbler, but there is still a use for the old ones.

In the early 1970s I was still in art school at Tulane University's Newcomb School of Art and I was working in acrylic. Soon after I bought this brush I stupidly neglected to clean it after using it with whatever acrylic colors I was using that day. Because it was new -- albeit ruined -- I could not bear to throw it out. So for more than 30 years I kept it with my batch of brushes. Then about five years ago I finally gave it a close look and thought that if I couldn't reclaim it to a useful function I should throw it out.

Today there are a number of very good soaps for cleaning brushes that I'm not sure existed thirty-eight years ago. With patience and repeated gentle washing I was able to return this thing to usefulness.

The brush itself is bristle, considerably softened by repeated washings. Today the manufacturers make a big deal out of boar and hog bristle imported from China. Back then, anything artistic was of enhanced value if it came from France, a land where art was deeply appreciated.

In the intervening decades the wooden handle has mottled noticeably like some sort of tiger-maple. I doubt that Raphael brushes are made in France today and, in fact, I no longer buy 'flats' as these straight edged-brushes are called. But, like owning an antique car, it's still nice to take it out once in a while and put it to work.

Stretching canvas, then and now

I've been stretching my own canvases since the 1970s. In art school back then nobody -- I mean NOBODY -- bought a pre-stretched canvas from an art store. It wasn't some sort of purist philosophy. It was all about money. A pre-stretched and primed canvas was a ridiculously expensive proposition. And it wasn't that we were poor students either. It really was, comparatively speaking, quite expensive.

So we learned to stretch our own. Somehow I managed to get along without a pair of canvas stretching pliers. Because I went away to school I didn't even have a regular pair of pliers at first. For a number of months what I did have were very raw knuckles. Eventually I got a pair of conventional pliers and things got easier. I think the only thing I ever used was good old "cotton duck" canvas which I then primed myself with acrylic gesso.

In recent years I have come to prefer linen as a surface on which to work. Many artists say that they prefer linen because it is archivally more resilient. While that is true, I just think most of us artists are more sensitive to some real textural differences that are of more immediate appeal. Linen is less regular; it has little flaws where the fiber is thicker or perhaps knotted. (Experts will have to forgive my ignorance of the exact nomenclature here.) But that is exactly the quality I most enjoy about linen.

With the proliferation of art supply companies, there are quite a few that sell pre-stretched and primed linens and canvases of varying sizes. I took a close look at the pricing and came to the conclusion that if I bought the materials and did the stretching myself I might save something like 42 cents over the cost of a store-bought canvas. Perhaps the art supply companies are making the most of cheap labor in Cambodia or Viet Nam. But there doesn't seem to be a way to beat their prices in any of the mid-size or small formats.

With larger canvases, it's a different story. For one thing it's more expensive to ship larger canvases even if the manufacturing cost is low. Here at least it still pays to stretch your own.

The secret to successfully stretching a smooth canvas is to work from the middle outward, alternating long and short sides. If you do this correctly, your wrinkles will migrate outward away from the gradually expanding taut area in the middle. The linen being stretched in these photos is stretched on a 36 by 48 inch frame that has been cross-braced. The stretchers and cross-bracing came from a company called GalleryPro and I bought them as I buy a great deal of my art supplies online from ASW (Art Supply Warehouse). I find they have a great selection and nearly always the lowest price I can find. And, no, I'm not paid for that endorsement.

I now have honest-to-goodness canvas pliers. It's a very worthwhile purchase, and not just to save your knuckles. By the way, don't bother getting any other kind except 100% metal pliers. Anything else (ie. plastic) will break and you'll need to replace.

Oh, one other difference between canvas then and now. It is, of course, possible to stretch a canvas too tight. Back in the 1970s when you did this it meant that the canvas might suddenly tear on the frame. Today it's more likely that the stretchers might break. The wood being sold as stretchers is not as good today.

Finished

Finished. Signed. Small differences between this image and the previous posted. Are they noticeable? Perhaps only to me.

Progress is our most important product

Glazing underway. A bit more to go. And lighter areas replaced with more opaque mixtures. It's kind of a shame that the most fun part of the painting is the part that goes the fastest. The glazing is far and away the most satisfying stage of the painting but it tends also to go very quickly, even allowing for drying time between glazes.

Some painters seem to get lost in applying multiple glazes. Titian was said to have done thirty, forty and fifty glazes in one area to achieve a single optical color effect, if we can believe stories from his studio assistants. (He is also said to have painted a great deal with his fingers, but that is another story.) I have not found that more glazes are always better. What is true is that the glazes should be whisper-thin and built up gradually. Sometimes I apply the glaze and then take a cloth and remove perhaps 90% of it, leaving only the remnant of the glaze that has retreated to the crevices in the texture of the linen.

There is a temptation to apply all the color in a single glaze the thickness and consistency of the surface of a candied apple. But the end result is not so good. Believe me, I've tried.

New and large

36 by 48 inches -- that's fairly large both for me and for my little studio. On a medium/rough linen weave. I love the texture and the scale. Monochromatic underpainting with color glazes in a glossy alkyd to follow.

Another from the Northport Plein Air Weekend

The 3rd Annual Plein Air painting event in Northport was weekend before last. The drill is that we paint on Friday and Saturday and ono Sunday the finished paintings are exhibited at the LaMantia gallery for a silent auction which benefits the Northport Arts Coalition.

That Friday it stormed and hailed. I had set up my french easel just north of this gazebo in the park, looking out over the water. As the rain came down I retreated to another sort of gazebo with roof and balcony perched over the public restrooms there in the park. Tow other participants including the event organizer, Anthony Davis, joined me. This was the view I had and finally at about 1:30 in the afternoon enough sun came out for me to put some highlights into this painting.

The following day I chose another location and painted the Shipwreck Diner on Main Street. (Shown in an earlier post.)

More from Little Cranberry Island, Maine