Storm Along the Coast

16 x 20

acrylic on stretched canvas

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As with a lot of my works, they start out as a sketch, and then translate into a painting. This one was pretty much just a pleasant seascape, when I began thinking about how on a perfectly beautiful nice warm day, a storm can spring up without a moments notice over the water. I love to watch them roll over the horizon knowing that they usually stay out to sea. In the scene are two escaping sailboats caught off guard. I thought, that is how it is. Warm, and sailing along one minute, and making haste to find safe harbor the next.

Seacoast and cottage seascape

11 x 15

acrylic on 140 lb paper

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"What is the Point?"

Sometime, it get to the point where I feel like I've done this before, and I've said this before. Well, that happened the other day as I was working on a painting from a photo. I felt like I was just going through the motions. That I already knew the outcome. Every brushstroke I knew in advance. The painting was done in my head before it was on the canvas. I thought to myself, why am I doing this? What's the point?? Why don't I just leave the whole thing in my head and save the paint? What am I trying to say and why? It was then that I remembered something that Picasso said. That is was okay to try anything in a painting, just never try it again. Sometimes as artists we get into a comfort mode. We have learned to "make art". And we do it over and over again with such ease sometimes. Well, .. to make a long story short. That painting that I was working on? The one that I said to myself, seems like I've been here before and done that? Its now underneath this one. This one is new and fresh to me. The other one, belongs where I put it.

Landscape with hills and clouds

11x15

acrylic on 140 lb paper

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Woke up this morning and looked out the window to see the sun lighting up the barren hills of early spring. Before I even went for my first coffee of the day, I grabbed a pencil and sketched what I needed to remember. I did remove the snow though, and greened up some things in the foreground. But other that that, its a pretty good translation in my humble opinion. The sketch worked well, because I didn't wait too long to transfer it into a painting. Had I waited any longer, I probably would have lost the moment, even with the sketch.

Spring Landscape Painting

11 x 15

acrylic on 140 lb paper

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This is the painting that I did from a photo even though the scene is just minutes from my studio. The reason being, that it's still under a foot of snow in places and since its spring now.. ha ha.., I decided to take it from a photo I shot last year, in the "real spring" like around May 20th. Did I tell you, we don't really get a lengthy spring here, like everybody else. It goes from snow season, to mud season, to "what was that?" season, and then to a kind of summer, and then the ice age returns to inhabit the majority of the years months. So, even though the calendar says spring, it not even close. But if I wait for the real spring to paint this, everybody else is already at the beach, in mid summer. So here it is. Smell those apple blossoms!

Landscape with Farm and Hills

acrylic on stretched canvas

16 x 20"

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Today I painted something in my own neck of the woods. As of late, I've been fighting the winter snows and turning my palette to warmer images and places I would like to be at this time of year. So, I have been busy painting summer seascapes, harbors, sandy beaches, and more. But then, suddenly as I was rummaging through some sketches and photos, I recognize the places as being just down the road from here. I thought to myself, this time I'm not taking the warm and easy way out on a composition. I'm going to see what I can do with what's right under my nose. Damn the snow, the cold, I'm a painter, and I can paint cold and barren just as well as warm and sunny. Not that the neighbors farm house is barren, but in contrast to the beaches of Maui, well,.. you know. So, now I'm back to painting whatever gets in front of me. Be it, warm, cold, animal, vegetable or mineral. That's for now. Who knows where I go from there. For me, the process of painting comes down to more of the fact that I paint, to paint. I don't want to make a picture, I want to make a painting. That to me is foremost in my intent. To paint, to make a painting. Aside from marketing factors, the subject is the vehicle for the painting. It forms the bones for the paint to build up muscle upon.

Today, a landscape, tomorrow, .. a bottle of wine. It doesn't matter, its a painting.

I'm rummaging through sketches I have done in all sorts of places. Coffee shops, on a rock near the lake, in the car, in my studio, on location in some point of interest, wherever. These I will convert into works, .. paintings, impressionist painting, expressionist paintings, abstracts, seascapes, landscapes, animals, and colorful acrylic compositions. Its what I do. I'm not a method painter. I didn't go to the school of "lets learn how to make a painting." I went to art school. That's not the same. Nobody ever told me how to make a painting. They opened my eyes to learn how to see, to absorb life, to purge that onto the canvas with honesty. I still remember some of the students in art class that were frustrated because the instructors were not teaching them how to make mountains, or trees, or horses. They instead were talking color, movement, energy, line, impression, experimentation. This really separated the art students from the illustration segment. Some left the class and went on to become the Norman Rockwell of their time, and others just gave up. But the ones who wanted to be artists, kept on with the pursuit of just working at the canvas, for the sole reason of the creation of something new, something unseen before, and revealing. I'm really glad and thankful, no one taught me "how" to paint.