America, where gimmicks trump genuine achievement

When people talk about artist Scott Wade's dirty pictures they are not referring to the salacious content but to his preferred medium, grimy car windshields. I have to admit this is an amusing idea, particularly when the subject is the reinterpretation of a renaissance masterpiece like Boticelli's Venus.

But browsing through his site, one eventually has to confront a question like this: Aside from the choice of medium, how good is he as an artist? In this country it sometimes appears that we value cleverness over actual achievement, wit over work.

Maybe Marshal McLuhan was right. The medium is the message.

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.

At the end of the day

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.

Are you peeking at my underpaints?

There's a conscious effort on my part here to create some interesting colors and optical effects by laying in some complimentary colors as underpainting. You can be the judge as to how successful this is when I'm finished.

I did this kind of underpainting in the composition at top. You can see traces of the orange underpainting peeking out from beneath the pale blue surface on which the two shells sit.

Ready for Spring

In preparation for the warm weather, plein air painting and, in particular, for a trip we are taking to Little Cranberry Island in Maine at the end of May, I've been priming small canvas and linen panels with gesso toned a neutral gray. The advantage of working with toned surfaces is that one can go as easily toward highlights as toward shadows.

In fact, I found that once I started working this way it was more fun to start with the highlights. If the top two panels look like a different shade of gray, they are: those two panels are linen that came from the art store already oil primed white. Because they're oil primed the toning in gray has to be oil based as well, so that's a different mix.

I still tend to tone these things a bit too dark. One doesn't really want an exact 50% tone. It should be a little toward the light side ideally because all the subsequent glazing later on will tend to darken the canvas anyway. But at worst that will gie it all that warm, old master look.