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.

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."

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.

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.

Half-finished

A gallery in Michigan expressed interest in my work and suggested I prepare a group of paintings for this summer. "Anything having to do with boats and the water," the dealer told me. He had been attracted by the seashell paintings I've done, of which there are many. But I thought about what he said and thought I ought to do more boating landscapes and seascapes.

Somewhat surprisingly I've had difficulty building up a backlog of these kinds of paintings. I had three and was working on this fourth but a friend of my wife bought two of them before Christmas.

This one is 12 by 9 inches and entirely made-up, except for the perspective of the rowboat itself which I took from a photo of Huntington harbor. The setting and background are off the top of my head.

This is a Belgian linen that is primed with clear acrylic so you see the color and texture of the linen as you work the painting. I have no idea whether this has any archival soundness but it makes for a great tone under the painting.

Things I want to do with this painting as I try to finish it: I want to manipulate the color of the rowboat away from the monochromatic sand color that dominates at the moment. I'm thinking an opaque pale bluish gray overpainting with some of this sand color peeking through in places. The weeds in the foreground need to be more specifically delineated but I'll leave them for last.