She's baaaack

I've been gone for about a month, but I'm back. It drove me crazy not to paint, and I didn't expect to be gone this long but it feels great to be painting again.

I've finally moved on from pears and now I'm into nectarines. I find them easier to paint than pears. I'm going to do the same thing I did with the pears and do a bunch of quick studies and then a couple of paintings that take more time. This is the first study that I did.

I did finish the 3 pear painting (which I've named "Odd Man Out") but I don't have a good photo of it yet. Taking photos of paintings is really hard because of the glare, and the pear painting is pretty dark so I'm having trouble getting an accurate photo that shows the colors and light correctly. You can't use a flash because it just bounces right off the paint.

My Boy

Rather than bore you with yet another version of the 3 pears on a blue plate (yes I'm still working on it) I decided to post a sketch of my son that I did in November.

I won't be able to get to the studio for a while so I may not be able to post anything until next week.

I did get my new pochade box yesterday though - very exciting. I've been waiting 4 weeks for this - they make them to order. It was my gift to myself after one year of painting. A pochade box is a self-contained little studio that allows me to paint outside. It's very cool and you mount it on a tripod. I may be able to do some painting around the house and outside - if so I'll post those. My first attempt at landscapes.

My email subscriptions and feeds

Hi all - I've made changes to the way that the email updates appear - (I think) and made changes to the blog feed as well. Let me know if it is screwing anything up because I'm not clear on exactly what I did, if anything!

Tchotckes

I used to be really into kitchen items from the 30's-50's. It all started with a yard sale at my parent's house in Holliston back in the 70's and one of my parent's friends was selling a Harlequin teapot and teacups (exactly like this one but in a sort of light cerulean blue) I bought them and I was hooked. But suddenly, a few years ago I just lost all interest and sold most of the stuff that I had collected (although I still have the teapot, it's in the studio waiting for me to paint). It was part of getting my house ready to sell, and I discovered that it was amazingly freeing to get rid of all the crap I had everywhere.

But I really liked these salt and pepper shakers and I couldn't part with them. Unfortunately, the salt shaker broke, so now I have another lonely shaker :).

I ended up painting a wierd background because I didn't like it and futzing (is that a word?) with the shaker, so I don't actually have this anymore in this state. Now I kind of regret doing that. Oh well.

I can always paint it again.

The Evolution of a Pear Painting

I've been working on this for a couple of weeks while reading the Kreutz book mentioned earlier. This painting is done on board, and I think it is 9x12.

Here's the various changes over the past couple of weeks:

Phase 1: Scary to say, but I think I might like this one the best. It's scary only because I have spent about 2 weeks working on it since then.
Phase 2:


Phase 3:

Phase 4:

Where I am today - I need to spend some time looking at it and figuring out what it needs.




Here's a photo of the still life. The angle is a little different, but you get the idea of what I was looking at.