As much as long hours spent behind the easel is an exciting part of being an artist, it's both rewarding and necessary to find joy in all the other different tasks that make a big part of the actual business of being an artist. You have to be willing to wear a lot of different hats.
Over the last four weeks, I have spent long hours in the studio painting to replace sold paintings at galleries and also for a gallery group-show that is coming up quickly.
After being painted, all the new pieces are signed and then they get a title and a list is made. Then one by one they are wired and framed and then carefully packed into several boxes and shipped to galleries. Each task is very time consuming, but it's all just part of another day at the office.
I am excited about the group show. The Laffer Gallery is in upstate New York in Schuylerville. I sent Erik Laffer 17 paintings. The show, 'Common Beauty' is opening on Saturday September 22nd and goes through October 21st.
I've also spent many days recently wearing the web masters hat and I'm happy to report that our website has been revamped somewhat. Pam and I now have our own separate gallery pages, where before they were combined. Our paintings can be viewed easier and can also be purchased right online. We've been asked about this by numerous gallery visitors, as the trend of buying art directly from an artists website is growing all the time. We live in exciting times.
I'm looking forward to going to New York for the show opening with Pam. She wears a lot of different hats too and she's been doing a great job of taking care of things at the gallery during the busy summer season. It will be nice to drive up to the gallery together and both get a chance to wear the 'Artist at the Opening Reception' hat.
Time Does Fly
We’ve all done those menial tasks around the house or waited in long lines that seem to take forever, even if it’s really only been 15 minutes. When I paint, I will work for three hours, before a break and it feels like 15 minutes. It’s hard to get in the zone when we are, say, washing dishes, but if we are doing something that we immensely love, getting in the zone can happen almost instantly. For the past 30 years, I have been immersing myself into painting the landscape. It’s my profession, but more importantly, it’s my passion. I chose this as a career, because I was passionate about it since I was a child. I have a passion for music too and I'll find myself picking up the guitar in the studio almost daily before I paint. But when I stand behind my easel and pick up a brush loaded with paint, that is where passion truly kicks in. If passion has wings, then painting is where I soar.
All these years of painting, have gone by quickly. For instance, I've been teaching my Monhegan Island Plein Air Workshop annually for 19 years. Talk about time flying when you’re having fun. It quite literally feels like yesterday. Pam and I have been blessed each year with a wonderful group of students and we’ve been blessed with a lot of good weather. We’ve had great times on Monhegan and we're thankful for everyone who has ever come out and immersed themselves into painting with us in the spirit of learning and good fun.
My first visit to that wonderful rock in the sea, was 24 years ago, with my good friend Alex Vranos. He called me one day and said, let’s go to Monhegan Island and paint for a week. It was a week of heaven. Each morning we would wake up to picture perfect weather. My first ever painting of Monhegan was done on the back of the island along the path from White Head looking down at Gull Rock and the Atlantic. I still have that painting and I get excited every time I look at it. I also remember the excitement of carrying all my gear and the anticipation of taking in the view from the high vantage point of 150 foot cliffs, rising out of the ocean. After that first trip, I just knew that I would be going back as often as I could. Pam was visiting Monhegan for some years before we were married and so together, we had the same vision. Years ago, when Pam was on dialysis, I trained for 4 months to become a dialysis tech, so that we could do her treatments at home and because it was a portable 75 lb machine, we could ship 800 lbs of pre mixed dialysate to Monhegan ahead of time and dialyze her there too. We could teach and paint and keep our pilgrimage to the island going. It’s like we never skipped a beat. That’s how awesome Monhegan really is. Once you visit, you can’t stop. You find a way to get back.
With 2019 being our twentieth year, Pam and I want to make it a special and festive occasion. Two decades of an annual workshop is worth celebrating! We are offering Monhegan as our usual 3 day workshop, but extending it by 2 more free days for anyone wanting to stay on for the 5 day experience. The cost is for 3 days and the extra days are our way of saying thank you. The add on days will be full days of painting with a critique at the end of each day, with wine and cheese for a festive and relaxing atmosphere. On the very last day, we will hold a drawing for one of my original 9x12 inch paintings of Monhegan. We will also bring back our popular and fun Dueling Demo session, where Pam and I race against an hour glass to see who can come up with the best painting. It will be an exciting and inspirational week of learning, socializing as a community of artists and painting. You can read more about the workshop by clicking here. There is one thing that I can guarantee you about the workshop. Besides being a great week...it will fly right by.
Lessons On The Road
It's been a long time since I posted to this blog. Pam and I sold our house and it took a few years to permanently move ourselves to the seacoast area of New Hampshire. We moved our living space and studio a few times in those same few years. Yikes!
We are happily all settled now and I want to jump back into blogging on a regular basis. The seacoast area of New Hampshire and Southern Maine really inspires and it is my sincere desire to inspire others as we continue to teach and explore all the possibilities and nuances of plein air and studio painting. I hope you enjoy My Painterly Approach. ~David
Lessons On The Road
I first saw the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming at the age of 22 during a cross country adventure with a couple of high school friends. We camped in Big Horn National Park for a few days and I have always remembered vividly, how the Wyoming landscape and sky stretch on forever, and how the mountains rise up majestically and reminds oneself that God really does exist.
This June, I flew to Big Horn for two weeks of painting with a group of artists from New England. I have always wanted to return to the area with my paint box in hand, and so when I was asked a year ago about this trip, I knew that I had to go. It was an exciting adventure and painting Wyoming was a new challenge that I approached with a keen sense of awe and wonder. The hour and a half drive from the tiny airport in Gillette to Big Horn where we were staying, quickly reminded me just how big the west is and how it would take several lifetimes to experience it all and a few more lifetimes to capture just a small amount of it on canvas. My revisit to this part of Wyoming is all part of a bigger plan including a show in the future involving all the artists who participated. I’ll expand on this in more detail as soon as the plans come together.
From Wyoming, I flew into Denver and then on to Boston. My car was waiting for me there and I had packed it three weeks earlier with everything I’d need to compete in the Plein Air Richmond event that would be starting in two days. It is interesting and rather time consuming to prepare and pack for two big painting trips simultaneously. It took almost a week of preparation to have things ready for both trips. Some supplies would be shipped to Wyoming and some would be packed into the car. I wondered when I arrived at each location if I had forgotten to pack something important. After a quick days rest from a rather long day of flying, I began making the long drive to Richmond Virginia. After 13 hours of driving, I arrived in Richmond in time to get my panels stamped at the Brazier Gallery for the week long competition and then met my host family for a wonderful little dinner and some nice conversation.
To go from painting the wide open spaces of Wyoming to painting the urban scenes of downtown Richmond is a rather odd transition and a complete change of mindset. In Wyoming it was a daily occurrence to be painting while deer, wild turkeys, prong horn and the most adorable long eared bunny rabbits, kept watch of what I was painting. In Richmond, I was zooming in and out of heavy traffic and trying to locate parking as I searched out the painting spots. It’s a wonderful location, just a very different environment. Plus now I was painting under the pressure of the event. In Wyoming I was just immersed into painting each day for the sake of exploration, with a ‘let’s see what happens’ kind of approach.
There’s a lot of history and beauty to Richmond that makes it quite special. I don't usually paint urban scenes, but Richmond supplies a lot of great subject matter and it was easy to immerse myself into the idea. The James River runs through the city and with lots of parks and pedestrian bridges, there was plenty of inspiration all around. I found myself attracted to the view at the top of this post. The old Main Street Railroad Station building, combined with a contemporary modern part when it was renovated in 2003, was quite striking. The old train car and the red tenement style building added to the diversity of old and new and I had to paint it. There was variation within all the reds that leaned towards purple in the train car and orange in the roof of the old train station. I found that these slight variations bathed in warm sunlight was integral to the feel of the painting. The transparency and overall blue-green color and value of the sky reflections in the windows of the newer building was super important to the essence of the painting. The heat of July in Richmond reached critical mass during the week of the event and I painted this with the sun at my back in temps that reached 103-105 degrees with the heat index. I was also standing on hot reflective pavement. I painted it from 7:30-10:30 AM, over a two day period. I held a 20x24 inch canvas panel over my head with my left hand to keep the sun off my panel and head. I was thrilled when the painting was awarded second place in the plein air event.
When you're on the road, you do what you have to do to get your work done and you take away what you can from each moment. I try to learn from these moments and with each painting. As the saying goes, nothing learned is nothing gained. In Wyoming I woke up at 5:30 every morning and skipped breakfast and coffee to paint the mountain views by 6:15before the sun came around and lit the mountain in full light. It took a couple of days to realize this. I would eat a protein bar as I worked and saved breakfast until about 10:30. In Richmond, I ate breakfast first so that I'd have the energy I needed to paint in the heat and humidity and I began working by 7:30-8:00 AM. Immediately after Richmond, I met a good friend and painter in Front Royal Virginia, by the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and we explored and painted an area that neither of us had been to before. It was interesting to paint these mountains in comparison to the Big Horn Mountains. Overall, they were far enough away that the atmosphere created by the heat and humidity of July, made them appear as a magnificent blue haze. The lesson on the road here was cemented quickly. We simply looked for scenes where we could emphasize the haze to a great extent and therefore made the most out of our subject matter.