Shifts of Focus

During the class that I'm currently teaching ,I learned something very interesting about helping my students and myself find something that can help satisfy us with our painting . That thing is FOCUS, not just" focus on what your doing" that's to easy. What I'm talking about are things like color, edges, light effect, line quality ,paint quality, brushwork,etc. I believe that if you focus on any one of these or combo of them you will come up with something different then usual, different then the last and next painting you do, if the next focus is different. This is only to help you learn who you may be and to coax out what will start to satisfy you . This is helping me quite a bit lately ,I'm not saying I'm satisfied by any means but I am starting to realize what I love and what I hate . In this post I decided to give the penguin center stage and since I was talking about teaching I figured I would show this weeks in class demo ." Chilly Willy" was about 20min and I focused on not messing up my demo . HAHAHA :)

The King of Round Pond

This is a portrait of my favorite lobster boat in Round Pond. The name of the boat on the other hand is my least favorite ,"R 2 Sons" awful huh? anyway this was from a day of two other smaller paintings a 6x8 and a 11x14 this one was the second one done and "for me " its a good balance of warmed up and energetic, sometimes you get out there to paint and your first attempts show more energy then thought and reverse for the last ones. In the middle "the sweet spot " of Plein Aire readiness is the place to be .Usually I start going downhill when my eyes start telling me to hold my blinks for a few seconds or I say to my self "why did I do that " at least a few times in a row. On another note I must thank Colin Page for pointing out just how much beauty these donkeys of the sea possess and for helping to push me along with the inspiration his paintings provide. If any of you have not seen his work ,get out from under your rock and type this in, colinpagepaintings.com and hit search you wont be wasting your time ...I promise!

Well you cant fly either

OK I didn't get a good photo of my lobster boat paintings so here is one of my still lifes to check out. I found these two guys at the local Big Al's (that's a dollar type store ,a Maine fav) and thought to myself "that has to be the fattest piggy bank I've ever seen " so I bought it and the foam rubber penguin. not until I put them down when I got home did I see the composition what had to be and the title...

Occupied

I painted this recently and entered it in the River Arts Annual Member show. so if you are not local and wont have a chance to see "Occupied" in person ,well this awful photo should get the point across(sorry I'm working on the camera situation). The subject is about a mile down the road from me and is a pretty significant port-a-potty around here, its the only one and when tourist season comes around things can get messy. no not like that :) to the left is rt 130 and to the right is a very popular swimming spot in the summer ,Bristol Dam. When the painting I did today dries I'll post it. I went out to Round Pond (my favorite place to paint) to paint some lobster boats...

First Post

This is a painting of the south side of a north bound rocket,my Toyota echo aka "the silver skittle" aka Mr Biscuit . Its no rocket and I barely fit in it , but it does get a freakish 44 mpg on a good tank. For my first post I will keep the boring "my life" stuff to a minimum I will say that I currently and have never had gallery representation ,I am now trying to "get out there" so maybe this blog will get interesting .?. I do paint everyday but I'm not sure if I will post everyday ,but I will try. Thank you for checking me out