The Seaside town of

Kennebunkport, Maine

11 x 14

acrylic on panel

Had to do this one. A favorite little port nestled in an inlet on the Maine seacoast. Love this place! I found it challenging, conveying the colorful bustling life onto the surface of my painting. I wanted the salty ambiance of the town to come through. This is the town Popeye would have frequented on one of his shore leaves.

Sometimes I'm glad I paint impressionistically, for it's an asset when trying to capture a multi-eclectic subject matter that won't stand still. ~ Hope you like it!

Country Spring Landscape

11x14

acrylic on gessoed panel

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This painting is from a composition just down the road from me, and I sketched it out rather than taking a picture. I find that sometimes the photo doesn't remind me as much of the subject as does a sketch. Too much information in the photo is more than likely the reason.

This way I handled this painting, is the direction that I am striving for in my work. A free, looser approach, with more emphasis on making a maximum statement, with minimum of complexity in execution. Its not easy, as I am finding out. Saying more with less, is way harder that saying more with more. Simplicity is complex. But thats the mystery and key. It should look like it was done with ease, and yet, the ease is work. The appearance by the viewer should be one of, .. its free, easy going, lively, and they should not be aware of the foundation and work behind the paint. Its kind of like magic. You see it and are engrossed, but not aware of the hand behind the illusion. I hope to maintain this direction as I continue my work.

EXPRESSIONIST PAINTING of sailboats and sunset

16 x 20

acrylic on canvas

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I've been working up enough art courage to get into some different levels of expression with not only my use of color, but subject and composition as well. This is the first of this endeavor I'll be embarking on for a while. I want to explore using color in an uninhibited manner, and let the subject take a secondary seat to the use of shapes, colors and line. Not that I have taken it into the next logical step of abstraction, but it in a close neighbor of it. This being the first, I'm sure I will have a lot to learn as I uncover things that will be revealed to me as I work. Its exciting, and new, and I always feel better about my art, if I haven't been there before. New is good. I'm looking forwards to it. I will include it in my portfolio of art under "it's coming along". But I'm sure I will still adhere to much of my other working procedures and styles that I have come to learn and utilize. ~ Hope you like it.

In case your wondering, .. yes I did some rework on this painting. I decided that it needed a little yellow hue to some of the green as well as a touch of orange. So I did, and now you can see it for yourself. The before and after.

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!