Summer Night

Monhegan Moonrise, oil on linen, 36 x 24, 2009

Illustration Friday is running a them that gets my heart pumping: midsummer night! How I long to be visiting the far northern reaches of Scandinavia one midsummer's day eve! Till then, Maine is about as north as I can get. This is the moon rising over the tip of Monhegan Island.

BICYCLE

Portland Delivery, oil & pencil on linen, 9 x 12, 2009

Bicycle is the theme today at Illustration Friday. I have only once painted a bicycle, and here it is! It's very uncharacteristic in style as well as in execution. I was so worried about depicting the bicycle accurately that I traced it carefully in pencil onto the primed canvas before "coloring it in", not at all my usual slap-happy style!

I had been showing at a gallery in Portland Maine (Susan Maasch Fine Art) and was dropping off some work one late afternoon when I saw this bicycle delivery guy sailing slowly past on his red bike. There was something about the light and the balanced motion of the scene that caught at my heart. I happened to have my camera in hand and click: almost unbelieveably I managed to catch the moment. I don't usually work from photos, depict action, work from tracing or even do any drawing at all before painting, but I did this time and was somewhat pleased with the result. Something to revisit in future perhaps.

I felt later, looking at the scene that it had a faint whiff of Christen Købke about it, which must have unconsciously caused the initial attraction. I have had a postcard of this painting on my studio wall for years.

ADRIFT

Adrift is this week's challenge at Illustration Friday. I'm several days late but I suddenly realized this piece, fairly recent too, would fit the bill. I painted this in September on Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. The sun had just set but the afterglow lit the harbor with an eerie cool glow. Rusty Spear's boat drifted, loosely tethered, on the glassy water. I stood there, up to my ankles in beach scum and painted as fast as I could. A local walked by and asked me if I wanted a beer but I declined, too caught up in my painting (and also, truth be told, too shy.)

This was one of the few pieces that needed no re-working later. It is rough, but it expressed how I felt, standing there at dusk at the edge of the world.

Gathering Dusk, oil on canvas on wood, 11 x 14 inches, 2009

Impossibility

Impossibility
is this week's theme at Illustration Friday. My work almost never deals with things that are impossible...I so deeply love the real and physical world that I rarely feel the need to go beyond its inexhaustible inspiration. Nonetheless, I am enjoying looking at other people's flights of fancy!

The tie-in with this week's IF theme is that it is an impossibility to make a dog pose for you for more than thirty seconds at a time! I had to take about 30 photos of this good-natured corgi, only one or two of which worked as painting reference. Thank heavens for digital. (The island referred to in the painting's title is, of course, Monhegan Island: how I love that place!)

Island Dog, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches, 2008

ISLAND
is this week's theme at Illustration Friday. I am just back from a week of painting on Monhegan Island in Maine, so I have a lot of paintings to choose from. I painted this sitting on the highest point of Monhegan (Lighthouse Hill) looking over towards Manana, a small uninhabited island which helps form Monhegan's harbor. It seemed to be hunkering down comfortably, like an animal enjoying the brilliant sunlight.

Landscape is a medium for ideas...the various details in a landscape painting mean nothing to us if they do not express some mood of nature felt by the artist.
~Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Little Manana, oil on canvas, 5 x 7 inches, 2008