Bringing Them Home

Bringing Them Home  oil on linen 24x36

One looking back to what was and one looking forward to what will hopefully be a much better life. A painting dedicated to those wonderful creatures, the rescued greyhound

Win This Painting

                            

Win this painting and help rescue a greyhound! I have donated this painting for a raffle to the Greyhound Friends of New Jersey to help raise funds for their Prison Foster Program.

If you have any interest in the raffle you can go to the GFNJ website here.If you scroll down you will see the piece and you can download the raffle forms and mail it in with a check to:

GFNJ

PO Box 4416

Cherry Hill, NJ

08034

                                                

Women Painting Women

The show, Women Painting Women at Robert Lange Studios/Gallery was a success. I am so sorry I could not make it but there is a video walk through of the show for all to watch here.

My two little pieces are at the very beginning. There was a tremendous amount of fabulous work by fifty women artists from around the country.Enjoy!

Wow! Has it been that long????

I guess it has! I have been busy, busy, busy. I don't know how people are able to blog as often as they do because I just don't seem to have the time!

Well, I have a few new paintings and two of the pieces will be featured in a group show "Women Painting Women" at the Robert Lange Studios/Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina. The two pieces are:

Ali's Back

12x12 o/l

Just Another Day

12x12 o/l w/ white gold leaf

This next painting is also of my wonderful model Alison.

I have used her over the years and she is just the best. Ali is a dancer, and a young actress in the theater. She knows how to give the attitude you are looking for!

Ali's Home Again

20x20 o/l

Hope this post turned out alright. I am a bit rusty!

The Head of Bob aka Dutchboy

A very good friend of my husband and I who lives in New Mexico. He has one of the greatest faces to paint and I finally got around to painting it. Not only a great face but one of the greatest people we know! So sorry we are so far away!

This is an oil on linen, 12x12.

A Sister's Path

A Sister's Path   

20x20 oil on linen   

I always start a figure piece by making sure the face is going to work. That is always the hardest part and since my work has very little else then the figure, it has to be a face that is going to grab you, keep you interested and wondering just what is going on.

I can't say how one paints emotion in a face.I think that it is just something that happens through the artists own unconscious ability.

I used in this painting burnt sienna, yellow ochre, cobalt blue, some cadmium red, a blue/grey and cremintz white for the face and hair. Actually I used all those colors plus raw umber for the rest of the piece too.

A painting for all of you with sisters! I am a sister to three brothers but I have none myself and always wondered what it would be like.

Little Davy

                                        

This is one of my mother's little brothers back in what was probably 1955. It is 9x9 and an oil on linen mounted on board.

I plan on doing more of Davy, who is now David, because he was such a strange looking little boy that I just have to paint him for my series of old family movies.

I think it was the glasses that made him look so strange when he was young. He was probably about four here and had these coke bottle glasses that were always crooked or taped up where they had broken. Anyway, he is a treasure trove of work waiting to happen! By the way he did grow up to be a good looking man!

As with most of my other paintings my palette was limited. This time I used yellow ochre, burnt umber, burnt sienna cobalt blue and a touch of cad red medium plus black and white.

The painting always seems to go much faster when you are working on a hard surface even though you are still painting on linen. I also tend to get a little more detail oriented when working on the board.

This series is a bit of a change for me. It is forcing me to put other things in my paintings beside the figure or an animal which I really don't like to do. I love other artist's work that can incorporate all kinds of things in a painting but it always feels unnatural for me to do it. My eye is always seeing less is more in my paintings or maybe I could be just plain lazy!

Now for something completely different....

The Goddess in Green

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This painting is  12x16, oil on linen and  mounted on a board. This is my "breather" painting from the series I am working on. I really need to do a piece or two in between three or four paintings from a series. One, I would get very bored if I did not break it up that way and two, it is great to come back to the series with fresh eyes.

I have entered a prussian blue mode. As with the last few paintings from my series, this piece was painted with mostly prussian blue, yellow ochre, raw umber, burnt sienna and yellow ochre with a little bit of titanium white.

I used bits of stenciling and scumbling for the background and let some of the stencil carry onto the dress. I also intentionally left her dress and arms flat so that it contrasts nicely with the scumbled background  

The World in Black and White.......

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And with only about five stations plus a sign off with the national anthem at about 12AM. Oh, how things have changed!
I do have to say, that it was kind of nice having the broadcasting day end at a certain time. The world was quiet just for a few hours.

This piece is 10x10 oil on linen. I used Prussian blue, raw umber, yellow ochre and a little bit of cadmium red. My black was Mars Black and the white was Titanium.

I also used a very light yellow from Vasari Paints for the highlights. I love their paints it is just so loaded with pigment !

The ground was an oil primer and I put a transparent wash of ochre and black over that. I roughed in the composition with raw umber and started painting when that dried.

Waiting for Miss Nancy

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When I was  very little girl I use to love to watch Romper Room which was hosted by "Miss Nancy".

One of the things I always insisted on was that I had to get all dressed up like the other little girls on the show.

Of Course this was very annoying to my mother.  Changing my clothes a couple of times a day was a chore but I had to have everything just so.

Oh..... how she longed for those days when I turned thirteen and only wanted to wear jeans loaded with patches and run around barefoot.

(How 'bout that TV!)

Waiting for Miss Nancy 10x10  oil on linen

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Not to happy about holding those flowers! It was one picture after another that day and I just about had it.

One More Time 10x10 oil on linen

It's about Time

It's about time I post something! The past six months have been difficult to get any painting done. We had lost our beloved dog, Degas, who I still mourn, and I lost my studio space.

I had to work at home which is not a great thing for me to do. There are always too many distractions. My husband works out of the home, there is laundry piling up, dishes in the sink, people stopping by, dinner to make, etc. I try to imagine Picasso leaving the easel, going past the bathroom and seeing the laundry flowing out of the basket and thinking "I better go wash those". You know that didn't happen. There was always a Mrs. Picasso or mistress around somewhere.

So a dear friend of mine ( I am making a plug for her book on marriage here ) offered me a space in a warehouse that she was renovating for her husband's East Asian importing business, Two Buttons and the Lovin' Oven, a very fabulous and funky restaurant(there are some photos of their new and old locations).

Well, as with most construction it took about six months longer then it was suppose to.  But....it is finally finished and  I moved in here a couple of weeks ago .It is just lovely and I am getting down to business! I will be posting pieces frequently.

I have started a series of pieces based on my early life. My mother had sent me DVD's of our old home movies spanning three decades and there is just so much great material in them that it will keep me busy for a while.

One of the hardest things about these DVD's, is to look at family members( parents, brothers, cousins, aunts, etc.) as  babies, children and young adults, all these happy bubbly beings, not knowing what life had in store for them and for quite a number of them, life has not been so wonderful.

So I will post works from this series as well as "breather" paintings over the next few months and hope you will enjoy them!

The first two are:

Little Red 1 and Little Red 2
9x12 oil on linen