Paintings and Prints available

7/30/06

Deer Park Paintout

Shucks! I sure have been having fun painting. What a great way to make a living.
I met some great folks that love to get together to paint and draw. They have a workshop every thursday that I'm gonna try to make. It's only 100 miles from the studio instead of 150 or whatever to Couer d'Alene, Id. Might not make all of them but I'll try to make a few. I miss figure drawing although I'm always painting horses in the pasture and working.

Robert Stem organized a Paint Out in Deer Park. About 9 or 14 artists showed up that had been invited. Sponsored by the Deer Park Arts Commission we painted in the morning then set up a display in the Park where the last Concert of the Summer was going on. We didn't make any sales that I know of but we had fun and I got to Paint a new landscape.
We went out of town to a young lady's farm. Melda is 90 years old and sharp as a tack. "She's only lived on the place for 43 years."
I went up to a nearby Pioneer cemetary that was a hill in the middle of the valley with a great view of Mt. Spokane. There were some tombstones with dates as early as 1851. I liked how the farm land was laid out in strips. Below me was an old dairy with metal roofs the morning sun glinted off of. Later in the day I introduced myself to those that lived in the old dairy and and did a painting of the old barn and unique silo. The old girl that lived there came out to visit and reminisce of milking 50 cows and packing the milk to the house. Terrible amount of work for little pay. Her grand daughter who must of been 4 yrs old and shy as a church mouse brought out her paints and I set her up with some paper. She didn't like what she had done because she wanted it to look like mine. She ended up out in the barn where I could here her beating on a set of drums.
Robert had this quote of Pablo Picasso. I haven't ever read anything he has ever said. I didn't know he could talk except with his art.
"I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted..........Today.Iam rich. But when I am alone I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown - a montebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest." Pablo Picasso, 1952

In one regard I believe PP was a little hard on himself. He might have been going through another divorce or love affair or he just might have been depressed towards the end of his productive life. One thing about him, he lived the life of an artist and although he might not be comfortable with himself, his art or his life he changed the world we know.

I like the little painting I did in Deer Park if only because I had fun with it.

I've got more comfortable with working values out of color and now am discovering the relationship of temperature in color and how to work with that. Like Robert Stem said, "Painting is a juggling act, the more you paint the less you have to think about what you are doing which allows you to control what the outcome is." My exception to that is I would hope to "loosen up" and still be able to control the outcome. I like the happy accidents and try to 'see' the possiblilities they present to what I am doing.