Back in the saddle with my brush.

It has been a real effort to get back to painting after visiting Maine. Seems I got more painting done on my days off at the Wildwood Stables, driving horses, than I do when I am home. Too many distractions. Remodeling the house, hauling hay, getting the winter wood in and just the daily distractions. My manager/partner has been great about arranging life so I can get back to the easle. I was worried I might fall out of the 'groove'. I have to an extent. I missed the grand colors of fall, of being among the cottonwoods, painting their reflections in the river. I had plans to carry on some ideas I had developed from previous paintings that required big canvases, I even got the canvas but haven't got back in that groove which is disappointing.

To get beyond that I just go outside and find a spot and lose myself in the moment. Sometimes I catch one, like these here. These old trucks are parked out in a field, kind of an old bone yard, typical of abandoned vehicles you find on the rez. I think that is because folks use their vehicles until they just can't go anymore and put them in the back forty for parts. It used to be horses now it is cars and trucks.

If the sun isn't out or it's too cold, I work in the dungeon/studio where I get lost in technique. I'm trying to work from photographs. I don't know why as photos aren't what it's all about. For me, landscape painting is about being there, about the Place and about the Moment. I get distracted by Technique when I have all the time in the world to screw up a painting but it is consistent with a thought I have about the painting as an "artifact", that needs to exist on its own elements. Less about the effort as an attempt to make a statement or impart an observation but to explore technique and the realm of the abstract. I have to admit that it is easy for me to ramp up my painting into realms of the abstract. So far I keep myself grounded by a reference to something figurative but I suspect if I have any response that supports my 'other' work it would be easy for me to pursue that direction. I like color and I like big canvas and I like to paint.

The above painting 16x20, oil is a copy of a plein air painting that came off well. Rather than try to tweak the original I did a copy using the visual vocabulary from the original plein air painting that I had acquired during the 3 hr painting session, and photographs of the site. What I found is that I couldn't replicate the success of the plein air painting and ended up with a new landscape. OK fine. So then I proceeded to the painting below. Using both photos and the previous efforts and got caught up in technique. If plein air is acquiring a visual vocabulary then using that vocabulary to express more than the mundane might be where I am heading.

The 'painting as an artifact',

came to me while looking at paintings in museums which are in effect paintings that have been put aside and archived, which makes them an article of interest because of the singularity which they represent. Whether it is a new fossil or new painting the article has enough significance that it is archivable. Somehow I also view paintings like tombstones which are the artifacts we use to consecrate a persons life, memorialize it, memorialize that moment in time, even if that time spans an entire persons life. Portrait of a moment.

Artist Reception Friday Oct, 26, 4-7pm Arbor Crest, Riverpark Square, Spokane

I'll be having a reception at the Arbor Crest Wine Cellars in Riverpark Square, between 4 and 7 pm, Friday October 26 in Spokane.

We will be raffeling one of my paintings so come on down and test your luck.

I've got some great landscapes of all sizes. The Seasons Series won Best of Show at the Museum at Moses Lake. It's a great piece which includes 4, 3'x4' oils on separate canvas joined to be one single piece.

Come on down and have a sip of wine and visit. Love to see you there.

Granite Sculpture and Steve Hayne's Granite Museum

Picture of Steve Haynes, stonemason on Mt. Desert Isle and curator of the Granite Museum.

Steve is working on a memorial. He was asked to match the granite of the existing cemetary plot. He is so knowledgeable that he can not only decipher the type of granite but what quarry in New England it came from. He obtained a piece from the correct quarry and is working in up with an antique machine that he rebuilt. The machine is air driven but manually worked to bush down the surface of the granite. This work had previously been done by hand. This "machine" replaced the 20 men required to do such labor. Mt. Desert Isle was reknowned for the granite and stone masons there were here. Many large projects in New York and Washington D.C. as well as other famous cities have buildings made from quarries in this area. Steve has accumulated a wealth of information, tools and geneaologies of the men that worked the stone.

After seeing the wonderful granite sculptures created this summer on the Schoodic Penninsula, I went looking for someone to show me how to work stone and have found a real granite guru in Steve Haynes. I hope to get back next year and look over his shoulder to learn more of this lost art.

Communities in the area collected $5000 in matching funds to have the priveledge of having one of these seven sculptures in their communities. The building in the background was constructed for the Navy as an officers' quarters by J.D. Rockefeller Jr. The bottom picture is a sculpture called Rebirth.

Otter Cliffs and Bernard Harbor.

"Otter Cliffs" 8x10 oil
Pleinair painting at Otter Cliffs is an experience of a life time. This little study shows Sand Beach and Mt. Champlain in the background where Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole and Fredrich Church painted in the 1840's. What is so wonderful is the location.
I try to get to this sight as the sun rises above the atlantic and lights the granite cliffs with an orange glow.
Lobster boats work their traps at my feet. I can see right into the cabin and watch them pull the traps up with the winch, toss the reject lobsters back into the ocean and the keepers into the lobster box.
The ocean is calm this time of year and the constant wash of the waves against the cliffs is soothing and mesmerizing. The occasional cruise ship comes in like an alien space ship and I am grateful as it rounds the bend out of sight but I think about the guys back at the stables and they busy day they and the horses will have hauling people around Day Mt.
Those thoughts change as a beautiful sail boat comes into view. I watch the cormorants dive for fish and study them as they dry their feathers in the sun. Evidently they can't allow their feathers to stay wet as they don't have the oils ducks have to keep them afloat. They do swim like ducks but have to return to the rocks to dry off. They look like prehistoric creatures with their bony wings and long petrodactyl like beaks pointed to the sky.

"Bernard Harbor" 8x10 oil
This is a quick sketch done while the sun was just setting. It took about 30 minutes while painting with fellow artist Hugh Grant that has a summer home here in Bernard Harbor. It is a real working lobsterman's town with many lobster boats filling the harbor as well as the reknown Thurston Lobster Pound that offers lobster right from the boats.
The maples are beginning to change color. I'm excited to have the opportunity to paint the fall colors.

Driving horses, painting and new friends at Acadia

Here I am driving Wildwood's Barney and Charlie to the top of 580' Day Mt. We head to the top of Day Mt., to catch the sunset. The view is fabulous looking out over Seal Harbor and the Cranberry Islands. Day Mt is only 580' above sea level but it is so close to the coast that it is like being on a 50 story building. We see whales off the coast and beautiful sail boats.

Bernard Harbor, ME

I did a painting of the Bernard Harbor Lobster Pound. I got permission from 85 year old Irving Silverton to paint from his lobster dock. Irving has a Light House chapel that he marries couples in memory of his departed wife. He always wanted to be a lobsterman but ended up marrying people instead.

Lobster boats unload lobster here and you can buy them right off the dock or go to the famous Thurmond Lobster restaurant and have them cooked with an ear of corn. There was a long line so I went across to Bass Harbor and traded a watercolor for dinner at the Mainly Maine Lobster shack.I keep forgetting to take pictures of all the paintings I've done and some have been sold or traded. I've got to watch that and try to get them recorded.

I thought we were busy driving carriages before but now it's Cruise ship season and we will get waves of riders.

I've met lots of great people, the weather has been choice. I'm coming to terms with maritime landscapes enough that folks are buying them. The hardwoods are starting to turn. In a few weeks I should be painting waves of color.

I met another pleinair artist Grant Hughes and plan to go out painting with him.

I missed our Ferry County Fair for the first time in 20 something years and feel pretty down about that but I went to the Blue Hill Fair here in Maine to see one of our teamsters compete. I saw some of the biggest horses and oxen I've ever seen. A couple Belgians weighed over 2700 lbs. and some oxen were as big as draft horses. Unfortunately I didn't get to see the oxen work and would have liked to have seen the National field dog trials.

eclipse of the moon over Seal Harbor, ME

Update, I've been driving horses from dawn to dusk, picking poop from paddocks and roads. Painting on my days off and eating lobster when the opportunity arrises which is quite often. I've traded paintings for lobster many times because I'm usually painting down at the docks where the lobstermen work and they like paintings of their boats. Sold a painting today at Penny Chau's and altogether am having a great time of it all. I've been invited back next year and look forward to becoming part of the Wildwood family and explore more of Maine.

more from Mt Desert Isle and Wildwood Stables

It's a pretty intense time driving horses on Mt. Desert Isle. There are 6 teamsters 12 teams and 8 wagons.

We're out in the paddocks by 5a.m. and bring the horses in to feed them oats. Then we go clean the manure out of the paddocks and then we get to go eat our breakfast and start our day.

Here's a shot of the crew. left to right. Charly from Mississippi (Postal Man), Neal from Tennessee (you can just see his bald head, Randy Money (Mr. Manager a.k.a. coach, cool dude, always laughing, the more serious the situation the more he laughs), Oolah (Danish road apple mechanic), Janey (coaches wife and all around girl friday, vet, emt, cook and office manager), Mrs Bobbi Winterberg, (gracious southern Bell), Les Peters ( expatriat east african who played rock and roll in Rome with 10 yrs after, hendrix and a bunch of other legends, now hunting guide for LL Bean), and Jim Davis (local horse pull champion and all around draft horse expert). Most of these guys have been together for 20 years putting this shindig together. The stories of the past are outrageous. I hope to get some down in print, like the guy who impressed girls by roasting marshmellows between his fingers and bending horse shoe nails into rings for his girlfriends.

I thought I might acquire a down east Maine accent but all these folk are southerners, Yawl!

Plein Air Painting in Acadia

Every chance I get I go painting. It's kind of like fishing. Sometimes I catch a good one and other times I have to throw it back (paint over it).

The colors on the coast of Maine are different than the Pacific NW. More subdued, weathered. The mountains are worn and rounded. Because of feldspar, Pink suffuses the granite, making the sand beaches a warm color, vermillion mixed with yellow ochre. The skies are horizon to horizon without any great mountain range for the sun to hide behind. Pink clouds in a Cerulean sky over a steel grey ocean. Long lines of horizon, islands and headlands.

The lack of wildlife is curious. I've seen only whitetail deer, heard an owl and see the scat of raccoons. Why there are no birds, not even a sparrow is beyond me. Of course there are ravens and seagulls, some terns and I've seen a turkey vulture but as much as I am outside there is a perplexing lack of wildlife.

I'm coming to terms with maritime scenery. I visited galleries in Nw Harbor and was enormously impressed with the quality and quantity of work. What seems to be the significant difference between the NW and here on the east coast of Maine is both the amount of artists there are working here and the sufistication of the patronage. Of course this is the domain of 'old east coast money', so it would go to follow that the market would develop accordingly.

I was greatly inspired by an artist named Farandon who lived from 1880's to 1964. He painted the coast of Maine. His style is representational in the vein of Edward Hopper but less urbane. He blocks in areas of color letting the underpainting become lines, less expressive brushwork, empasizing composition. I'm developing my spectrum of values better, creating new darks mixing french ultramarine blue with umber mixed and either alizarin for warm darks or hooker's green for cooler darks. I have achieved some progress with the temperature of colors which means I think I have resolved values sufficiently although it is always a struggle to coordinate them into a cohesive composition, something that is difficult to pull off in the short time one has, plein air painting.

Plein air painting is a performance. It is like a jazz player's spontaneous interpretation of the moment when a familiar tune is improvised but is recorded and becomes an artifact of time. I am reluctant to develop my plein air efforts because I feel they need to be a record of that moment. It is difficult to not modify that moment. I think it removes the plein air authenticity and changes the painting into a 'studio' piece. The challenge is to focus on the moment yet visualize a finished product executed in such a fashion to not only memorialize the moment but for the effort to look finished and complete, like a haiku or a chinese character that has meaning yet is a visual symbol of substance. It is difficult to leave the piece alone and frustrating to not 'get it right' in one sitting.

I have a couple pieces in a local gallery in Seal Harbor and hope to have more. It is good to have my work accepted and on display.

Daily Grind but fun!

As I was saying befor I was so rudely interrupted by the rain, we get up early, feed the horses, pick the poop up in the paddocks, wash the horses, wash their shoulders with alcohol to make sure they are clean and not sore, go eat our breakfast, harness for the first run at 9 and don't end until 8 or 9 at night when we have dinner. It makes for a long day.I've been driving Rex and Cracker. Rex is pretty high strung but is doing OK since I put a buck strap on him to even him up with Cracker and now Cracker has to work instead of letting Rex do all the work which makes Cracker kind of grumpy. I also drove a team of blacks, Tom and Jerry. They were incredibly slow and you had to stay on them to get them around the mountain in time for the next load. There are a number of routes but mine has been 3 trips around Day mountain per day and a sunset trip that goes to the top of the mountain as well as around the mountain which is a 4 mile trip. We all drive to the top of the mountain for the sunset trip because it is so popular. Altogether 6 teamsters make around 20 trips total.

We have 10 teams so none of the horses has to work all day. We rotate horses to keep them in shape and rest any horse that looks like it needs to rest.Some of the guys have brought their own teams but most of the horses are company horses. They work from May to October. Jim brings 3 of his own horses to keep them in shape for the pulling matches. He's a serious puller and does well. Tehre are alot of pulling contests in Maine so he's gone every weekend to play at the fairs. They are pretty serious about pulling around here and pay as much as $50,000 for a single pulling horse. All glory too! No purse at all!