Graduation Exhibition!

The Annual Student Exhibition (ASE) of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) has only two more days to run! Last day to see it is this Sunday June 1, 2014. For those who can't make it, here is what I have hanging in the show:

"Presence" oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches 

"Young Man" and "Young Woman" oil on canvas 48 x 30 inches each

"Cheer" digital image 52 x 36 inches

"Signifier" oil on canvas 36 x 24 inches

"Veiling" digital image 18 x 22 inches

"Head Dress" digital image 14 x 20

"Angel Caul" digital image 14 x 20

"Emerging" digital image 14 x 20

"Laptop" digital image 14 x 20

"Push" digital image 12 x 14

"Stamp" digital image 12 x 14 inches

"Witchy Anne" digital image 20 x 14 

"Henry King" digital image 20 x 16

You can see a gallery showing a few pieces by every artist in the show by clicking here. If you wish to make a purchase, you can call the museum at: 215-972-7600

Dawn Brushes Rose

♡Just a typical day at the sink in art school ♡

Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?

YEAR OF THE WOMAN Group Show

I have three new pieces in an exciting group show opening this weekend in Philadelphia:

"Painting Girl"  oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches  2013

"Hijab Me"  oil on canvas on board 16 x 12 inches  2013

"Young painter" oil on canvas on board  11 x 14 inches  2013

YEAR OF THE WOMAN Paintings and Sculpture of Women by Women     April 2013 at Artists' House Gallery April 3 to 28, 2013  First Friday: April 5, 5 to 8:30 PM Sunday Reception: April 7, 1 to 4 PM     The year 2013 seems to be the pinnacle of events in recent years that have culminated in special recognition of the contributions of women in many activities:  politics ,science and medicine, management, visual arts, theater and film, sports, etc.     We three women managers of Artists' House Gallery have designated 2013 as a special year to recognize the "Year of the Woman" in the visual arts.  We present an exhibit of twenty extraordinary women artists, each exhibiting paintings or sculptures of women.   Please join us at Artists' House for our two receptions: First Friday, April 5, from 5 to 8:30 PM and our Sunday reception on April 7, from 1 to 4 PM.     The following artists are exhibiting in "The Year of the Woman" exhibit. Works by these artists are displayed below.  Julie Bell  Kate Brockman Rachel Constantine Saskia Ozols Eubanks Diane Feissel Renee Foulks Katherine Fraser Frances Galante  Leigh Gustafson Hilarie Hawley Rita Klinger Julia Levitina  Amber Lia-Kloppel Jafang Lu Sydney McGinley Nancy Bea Miller   Elena Peteva Carolyn Pyfrom Lauren Tilden  Lea Colie Wight ABOUT ARTISTS' HOUSE GALLERY Artists' House Gallery, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, features the work of outstanding emerging and established artists, frequently from the greater Philadelphia area. Artists' House offers art lovers and collectors the opportunity to purchase excellent affordable works of art.  Artists' House Gallery   57 N. Second Street   Philadelphia, PA 19106 (215) 923-8440  Email: artistshouse@aol.com Gallery hours:  Wednesday to Sunday 12:00 Noon to 5:00 PM, or by appointment.      Click to visit the Artists' House website

Sun Drying Oil Paintings!

Front yard full of wet oil paintings drying (I hope!) in the sun

With PAFA MFA program Final Reviews coming up quickly I have been galvanized into actually trying to finish up a few pieces! Unfortunately, with Henry just at home for a long and late two full week spring break from his special needs school, I found it hard to snatch more than a few hours here and there. I did my absolute best but it was not enough (that always feels bad!)
This week, despite Paul being overseas on business, I did manage to squeeze in lots and lots of hours at the easel (and at the computer! I also have a large term paper and presentation due. OMG. Deep breaths.) Unfortunately, this past week was wet and cold and dark and the paintings have simply not been drying. I am not a wet-into-wet painter, and despite my use of drying medium and occasional sessions in front of hot lights, the paintings are still maddeningly gooey. And yes, unfinished!

Another angle

Today has dawned cool but sunny and I am hoping that although the air temps are not super warm, perhaps the steady rays of the springtime sun will help speed up the process a little! I hope?
I suspect my lovely neighbors are bemused by my family and this front yard full of oil paintings is just one more incident of oddness for them to wonder at. Oh well! Keep shining, sun!

Son Peter gives the thumbs up to the unfinished portrait of himself and Henry

First Day of Spring!

George Inness (1825-1894) Spring Blossoms, Montclair, New Jersey. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1891

Happy Vernal Equinox to you! It was a beautiful day, so warm and sunny that I actually peeled off a layer at some point...a first for this season! In fact it's been so mild here on the East Coast of the US that the spring blossoming trees seem to be  blooming all at once...no slow succession of almond to crabapple magnolia to cherry etc. Just a mad froth of color and petals...like a very big and frou-frou wedding party!

The End of Days

...of my current show at Artists' House Gallery! Exhibition dates May 6-29, 2011, and I can't believe that we are nearing the close of this run. It feels like only yesterday that I was hamming it up at the opening reception:

(Thanks to Elaine Lisle for this strange but interesting photograph!)

Here's a few images of some pieces in the show:

Arrangement for Ukulele, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 inches

Coconut Cupcake, oil on linen, 7 x 5 inches

Duck in a Box, oil on cardboard, 6 x 6 inches

Green and Yellow, oil on Cardboard, 8 x 10 inches

Joined, oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches

Little Crocus (Blue Pearl), oil on canvas, 6 x 4 inches

Open Hand, oil on linen, 9 x 12 inches

Amber Dreaming, oil on canvas, 28 x 24 inches

Mill Pond (Somesville Library), oil on linen, 12 x 16 inches

I'm grateful to the many friends, neighbors, collectors and family members who came to see the work in person! To read a sweet write-up on the show click here. More information, if desired, can be found on the Artists' House website. Any exhibit, even a one-person exhibit, is always a group effort, and my grateful thanks to all involved: gallerists, framers, bloggers, writers, buyers, viewers, visitors, commissioners, encouragers and well-wishers.

My welcome home!

I'm just back home from a week painting on Monhegan Island, fourteen miles out from the coast of Maine. When I stumbled in the door around midnight this vase of flowers was the first thing I saw...very sweet! (I think my guys missed me.)



On the way home in the car my oldest son P, age 16, texted me (I was not driving at that point, no worries) with the wonderful news that he'd just won his latest cross country meet, set a new personal best and a new school record and is now ranked nationally! Oh my gosh. Wow! My husband stitched together these shots of P running then (middle school) and now...how quickly time races by. I was so sorry I'd had to miss this particular race. But what happy news to come home to!




End result: I brought home 14 paintings in various stages of finish. I have two galleries in Maine that show my work and have been asking for more, so this was really a business trip believe it or not! I'm also gearing up for a one person show at a gallery in Philadelphia next spring. My plein air work is not standard quaint landscape views, so despite these being inspired by Maine, the work does not seem to be limited to a regional audience (thank goodness!) Here are all fourteen pieces being shown to the sun this morning. I unpacked the pieces, most still sloppily wet, and took advantage of the brilliant weather to try and dry them a little. The squirrels and morning doves are usually my first audience after a business trip.

Snow Man

Snow Man
oil on gilt cardboard, 8 x 6 inches, 2010

Maybe I will start a new blog category: speed painting. The way I am using this term, it is a subset of alla prima painting and means getting the image onto the canvas in the fewest strokes possible. We are talking half an hour or less! Speed painting was necessitated in this case by the pain of painting while looking into the white glare of snow...excruciating. I wore a hat to cut the glare but even so...ouch. Note to self: no more snow painting midday!



My youngest son took this picture of me as I was crouched on the landing painting (I think he was so pleased that I was painting his snowman!) Very circular..taking a photograph of someone painting a sculpture created by the person taking the picture. Whoah, am I dizzy!

Winter Tulip

In the depth of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

~Albert Camus

Tulip Head, oil on canvas on wood, 3.5 x 5, 2010

Friend Friday

Several friends of mine have been busy recently, and I thought I'd boast a little about their achievements. Above you see my friend Katie, also known as Dr. Katharine Beals, who just had a book come out two weeks ago. Since I've watched the whole book birthing process from idea to drafts to re-writes to actual published volume I feel like a proud auntie. The book is called Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World and is published by Shambhala books. Congratulations my friend!



Beth Randall is an old friend with whom I had lost touch till she showed up taking one of my classes at the Main Line Art Center a year or so ago. What a pleasure to renew our acquaintance, and to watch Beth's prodigious talent flowering. Not that I had much to do with it, but nonetheless I was very proud to attend the reception of her very first solo show a couple of weeks ago: the work looks great! If you live on the main line you really should stop in and take a look:
Oil Paintings by Beth Randall
Oct. 2 -- Nov. 1, 2009
Milkboy Coffee
824 West Lancaster Avenue
Bryn Mawr, PA



Blush Roses, Frances Galante, oil on linen, 12 x 19

My friend Frances Galante is having a one-person show too, in Old City Philadelphia. I unfortunately missed the opening reception but I went to see the show last week. The work has a beautiful clarity and freshness that speaks straight to the heart!
Recent Work
September 30 to November 1, 2009
Artists' House Gallery
57 North Second Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106

Short but Sweet

Painting Like the Wind

I was on Monhegan Island painting a few days ago...an annual week-long trip with a group of painter friends. We rent a cottage together, share meals and crits: it's a wonderful thing. However this year one of the group fell ill, and there is no medical care on island (unless you count the sparse rack of Benadryl and Tylenol at the Monhegan Store!) After a few days with no improvement it became obvious that some of us were going to have to take her all the way back home. I, with one other friend, performed that service. It's a very long trip involving packing, walking, taking a ferry and then capped by a ten hour drive...too far to turn right around and go back for the sake of just one more day (although I certainly thought about it!)

Anyway, yesterday I was slowly and glumly unpacking my gear, glad to have done the right thing by my friend but also wishing at the same time that I was still back on Monhegan. I felt a little disoriented, along the lines of "What am I doing here?" I had been so set, so ready, so primed, to be on my favorite island and now I was back home, a little too abruptly for my inner sense of balance. But my sick friend was grateful, my family thrilled to have me home early, and it's not the end of the world. The afternoon sun was brilliant and hot and so I decided to let the wet paintings from the trip catch a few rays (this helps them dry faster.) When I unpacked them and laid them out I was absolutely stunned to find that in the few short days on Monhegan I'd painted nine panels en plein air!

On Monhegan one of my friends commented that I was painting like I was on fire, and apparently she was right. The sense of urgency was so all-encompassing that I had not even realized how many I pieces I'd begun. Of course, they are small pieces, and unfinished, but nonetheless a happy surprise. I'll complete some of the more finished ones up from photos and memory and save the rest for next year's Monhegan trip and finish them up then (if the fates allow!)

Two books reviewed in...

A Tale of Two Art Books
I was surprised and delighted to find that the magazine kept my somewhat facetious working title as the print title for this review! Had I been really following the Dickens formula I would have begun the review with "It was the best of books, it was the worst of books..." but in fact both books are wonderful! Very different from each other, but each is excellent in its own way. Classical Painting Atelier by Juliette Aristides and Alla Prima by Al Gury



This just came out in Fine Art Connoisseur, October 2009, page 38.

I Rented a Lobster

Strange but true. I wanted to paint a lobster, partly because I was invited to participate in a Lobster themed show at gWatson Gallery this summer. I was delighted to be invited, and actually, the idea of painting a lobster had been in my head for some time. Not surprising as I am a food painter, and I also paint in Maine! Kind of an "Oh yeah, duh!" equation. It was just a question of when I was going to get around to it, and this invitation proved the catalyst.

But the obstacle: killing a lobster so I could paint her. Hmm. Lobsters go bad pretty quickly after they're cooked so I'd probably have to work fast and then end up finishing the painting from a photo: unappealing! I only paint still life from life. Plus, in any case very likely the lobster would spoil and have to be trashed, uneaten. What a waste! For all kinds of reasons I was balking.

Then a friend who is a set designer for commercials told me about props rentals! Wow, what a revelation! She took me to an amazing warehouse stuffed floor to ceiling with all kinds of props: furniture, musical instruments, stuffed animals and of course, fake food! My lobster is extremely realistic and comes from the Japanese faux food industry..verisimilitude is paramount! He costs 10 cents a day to rent, and I have become very fond of him. I am feeling reluctant to "throw him back" althought the painting is not only finished and framed but I delivered it by hand to the gallery in Maine on Friday! (I put the trip pictures in an album on Facebook: email me if you want an invitation to view!)

Lobster with Brioche, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

In the bag

Last night was the last day of an Intro to Oil Painting class I was teaching at the Main Line Art Center. It was a talented and dedicated class and as a goodbye treat I decided we would have a *gasp* live model! We'd been working from still life set ups the rest of the class. People were nervous but intrigued by the idea! An artist friend of mine, Eliza Auth, kindly offered to sit for us: payment in chocolate and a little sketch or painting of herself.

Well, so I was pretty busy helping out my students and only had time to start a very quick oil sketch of Eliza. I was a little disappointed with it and was not even sure it looked remotely like her: some payment! I told her I'd finish it up at home, and after class I brought my painting bag into the house and left it in the hall. I was pretty beat, and that's where it stayed overnight.

Well, this morning I was in the kitchen when Paul called out to me from the hallway "Hey, great painting of your friend Eliza!" He had not even known I was planning to paint her (in fact, she was substituting last minute for another friend!) I was absolutely thrilled that there was enough of a likeness for verification by an independent source...you just never know! Of course, about three seconds later young H chimed in with "No, that's not Eliza, that's her daughter Emily!" So, okay, I got to enjoy the pleasure of a big head for about three seconds, and at least I am in the same family likeness-wise! ;-)

Today is World Autism Day!

And the whole month of April is National Autism Awareness Month. Last night I mentioned this to Paul and he laughed and said "I'm already all too aware of autism, thanks." So yeah, for those of us who live it, maybe it is not so exciting and uplifting. But here is a little tale:, I was hanging a show at The Episcopal Academy a couple of days ago. The work is mostly my Genre of Inclusion project, paintings which include people with disabilities, inspired of course by Henry having "low-functioning" autism. One of the art committee helping hang the fifty (!) pieces turned to me at one point and said apologetically "I really don't know all that much about autism." I was touched by her shy honesty. We autism parents forget that not everybody shares our total immersion in this mysterious condition.

So I think it is a good thing to spread some information around and make a little noise about it. Do I feel like blowing joyful horns and waving exuberant "I LUV AUTISM" banners? Sorry, no. As study after study has found, autism parents have the highest rates of depression and associated troubles of any other group of special needs parents. This condition, in its more pervasive aspects, is incredibly difficult to handle, and because there is no easy way to understand it, there is not much in the way of practical or emotional support for families struggling to cope with its wide-ranging effects.

How about in honor of World Autism Day, be kind to everyone today, okay? The scowling clerk at the checkout, the impatient driver behind you, they could all be carrying some heavy load, the like of which you could not imagine even in your wildest dreams.

For an excellent short but informative piece on What is Autism, click here. And Happy World Autism Day!

Henry in the Kitchen, oil on canvas, 18 x 20 inches

LOU, IN MEMORIUM
This is from the beautiful funeral of my teacher, Louis B. Sloan, who died last week. It was amazing to hear his family and other friends testifying as to his rare character and the huge impact he made on their lives. He was such a wonderful guy. I was too shy to seek out a mentor among my teachers when I was a student, but Lou often reached out the hand of kindness and encouragement to me in a way very few of my other teachers did. It's a difficult business, being an artist, and learning to be an artist is also fraught with peril. People who go out of their way to be kind and helpful appear in memory like angels of light. Such was Lou!

I transferred to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) after a semester at another local art school. At that first place, I asked my painting teacher to show me how to set up my palette and he looked at me and said "Just FEEL where you think the paint should go, m'dear. No need to get too technical." Same for stretching canvases. "Oh just buy them ready-made. We are artists, not artisans!" After less than one month of this gruesome regime I'd had enough, and I secretly sent for an application to PAFA.

Lou was my very first teacher, on my very first day of classes at PAFA and thank heaven for that! Maybe I imprinted on him or something. But he was such a godsend! This was a still-life painting class (landscape came later) and when I confessed very little prior experience of oil painting he calmly took me under his wing, showed me how to set up my palette and clean my brushes and how to stretch and prime a canvas. He recommended books, and places to buy art supplies. And showed me how to accomplish dozens of other such small but important things. He also cheered me on and encouraged me, in his gentle way. I will be forever grateful to him.

My first class with Lou was that still-life painting class, and only a few months ago I myself started teaching a still-life class. It feels like some part of his spirit is with me, or within me, as I teach. Thank you dear Lou!

NEVER ENDING

Painting in the graveyard,
overlooking the busy town
and the endless sky

I heard today that my first (and only) landscape painting teacher, Louis B. Sloan, died just a few days ago. Although Lou was getting up there in years (I think he was 78) he was as active as ever. In fact, I was told that he died very suddenly as he was preparing to go out for a day of autumn painting with students. What a wonderful man, gifted artist and devoted teacher. I can just see Lou settling down before a canvas in heaven with a happy sigh. "Now that's beautiful!"



Louis B. Sloan, Self-Portrait in a Field of Flowers, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches