Morning Glare

This morning I came to the shop earlier than usual and marveled at the orange light pouring in sideways directly through my windows. After working on a framing order for a while I became restless and went upstairs to the studio. Looking southeast at my well worn view placed the sun right in my eyes. I made this painting in about an hour squinting through the dusty old window glass. It is a very difficult painting to get a good photo of. I spent more time tweaking the image in photoshop to get it to look like the painting than I did painting it in the first place. It is 11 x 14 oil on matboard on 1/2 inch paper honeycomb.

Cold Farm Redux

This is shaping up to be possibly the busiest February and March I have had in many years. The government contract maze has been successfully negotiated and I am in the midst of creating Now & Then & Now & When. New Hampshire wants the project completed by March 29, but as there was a delay on their end in signing the contract, (and I wasn't going to work without one) it is not likely that this date will hold. That said, I still want to get it done as soon as possible. At this point I am still going to shoot for March 29, but in all likelihood we are looking at the beginning to middle of April. On top of this, David Brewster has brought me a pile of new paintings to frame. The art moving company will be picking them up on the 19th of March.

Finding time to paint this month has been difficult to say the least. Fortunately I had a part of the day yesterday to make this little painting. The usual procedure is to make larger studio work from smaller onsite paintings. This is an exercise in subversive artistic behavior. I made this little 8" x 12" oil on Dibond directly from the larger 14" x 28" oil on canvas "Cold Farm" painted last winter. This is an experiment in painting directly on Dibond, prepared only by scuff sanding the factory applied polyester paint surface of the aluminum.














It felt and looked a lot like a monoprint, showing the white surface through all the unloaded brush strokes. If the paint adheres sufficiently well, I will be painting on this more often.

I made another painting looking south out my window this morning, directly into the sun. It needs a little fine tuning and will be up here later today.