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.

Plein Air at Beaver Farm in American Artist

Wow!
Many thanks to Steve Doherty and the other folks at American Artist magazine for giving this wonderful shout-out to Plein Air at Beaver Farm. I love the way they arranged the many photos (and am thrilled to see Garth's photo of me painting the pigs made it in!) As always, if you want to zoom in and read the text, click pix to enlarge.



American Artist
November 2009
page 8
Photo credits: Carol Goetz, Garth Herrick and Nancy Bea Miller

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!)

Plein Air at Beaver Farm!

Art for a Good Cause
I have been busy organizing a plein air day to benefit my son Henry's wonderful special needs school, Camphill Special School. Specifically I am aiming to raise funds and awareness of their program for the 18 to 21 year olds who require special skills and training as they make the transition from school to adult programs. This what is called the Transition Program, and the school recently bought a neighboring property to house it, Beaver Farm, which is wonderful and beautiful but needs some renovation and construction to enlarge and expand.

On August 8th, 34 artists converged on Beaver Farm in Phoenixville PA for a wonderful day of painting, delicious food and camaraderie. The weather gods cooperated and so did everyone else. Joyful reunions were happening all over the place as old friends saw one another again, and many new friends met for the first time, too.

Of course the main attraction was art-making. This working biodynamic farm is a place of such quiet but intense beauty many of the artists felt almost overwhelmed by choices. However this is a nice problem to have, and everyone got right to work (usually after a brief period of helpless gaping in all directions!) I invited all kinds of artists, from realists to abstractionists, photographers and printmakers, oil painters, digital artists, encaustic artists: all people whose work I admire and whom I respect as artists and human beings:


Rachel Constantine in the kitchen garden


John Sevcik tackled the big old farmhouse


Stuart Shils at work under the tall trees


Eliza Auth worked both in pastels and in oils


Nancy Bea Miller by the wildflower bed


Marianne Mitchell stops to take a look at her piece in progress


Jeffrey Reed contemplating his next piece


Al Gury and Nancy Bea Miller


Rebecca Thornburgh, Jo-Ann Osnoe, Dianne Morrow, David Lee, Mary Walsh, Elizabeth Wilson, Alex Tyng et. al.



Aina Roman breaking in a new french easel and experimenting like crazy!


Ellen Cooper painting through the roses


Paul DuSold faces the paparazzi with good grace


Giovanni Casedei was so absorbed in his work he didn't notice


Suzy Schireson tackled the silo


Elaine Lisle got some canine companionship


Alex Tyng painting by the laundry line


Ellen Cooper, Laura Kaderabeck Eyring and Frances Galante, hard at it


Fred Danziger and one of his miniatures, with Stuart Shils


Sarah Barr and her big ass big old large format camera


Garth Herrick out sitting in the field


Betsey Batchelor and "her" tree


The stragglers pose for one more shot at the end of an utterly amazing day! Participating artists not previously mentioned include Michael Bartmann, Joe Sweeney, Lynne Campbell, Dale Roberts, Fay Stanford, John Ennis, Valerie Craig, Carla Tudor, Elana Hagler, Jon Redmond, Mark Bockrath and Mary Hiltbrandt. Thank you so much everyone!

A one day exhibit and sale of the work to benefit Camphill Special School, will be held November 3, reception 5:30-8 pm at Rosenfeld Gallery, 113 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106
All are welcome!

For more information on the event, just click Plein Air at Beaver Farm!

A WEEK'S WORK

I came back just last night from a week of painting on Monhegan Island, Maine. My friend Mary W. who was part of the group of painter friends renting the island house with me, pointed out that it was really a business trip, and of course she is right! Lots of hard work: hiking around and painting like mad. I was out working from first light to last light most days (we did have a couple of foggy/rainy days thanks to the tail end of a hurricane or two but I painted inside then.) I did not keep track of how many pieces I was doing while I was there, but today I unpacked the pictures and set them all up on my studio easel to have a look and see that I have fifteen studies. Stalin was referring to Russian tank production during WWII when he said "Quantity has a quality all its own." but I think it applies equally well to plein air painting!

THE FAME BOAT
My art group recently had a day of painting at a beautiful old farm near Frenchtown, New Jersey, courtesy of one of our members whose family's place it is (the talented and generous and well-known poet Cathy Cohen!) While I was perched pondside trying to paint a dinghy moored to a post, two art group members climbed into it and rowed merrily away! Their high spirits were contagious. Renee Daily (in the hat) just had an article written about her stunning murals, and the oarswoman, Alice Dustin, is also enjoying a spate of fame, for her work not as a painter but as an aerialist! I thought it was fitting that these two were the ones in the boat, and it gives me an opportunity to link to their recent press. Congratulations everyone! What a fun day.

PAINTING IN THE COUNTRY

Glossy horse trots by,
muscles rippling and bunching:
my brush hesitates

BLUEBIRD
I was painting yesterday in the Brandywine River Conservancy. Without realizing it at first, I had "set up shop" just across a dirt road from what turned out to be a Bluebird nest box. I have to admit, the birds were very distracting. I'd be painting away when a flash of vivid blue would catch my eye and I'd just have to look at what Bluebird père was up to. Bluebird mère was less flashily attractive, in fact she looked pretty dull and bedraggled, but her actions were equally interesting as she was engaged in constant defense of her nest. Dozens of small birds (martens?) were making multiple attempts to enter the nesting box, but to no avail. The bluebirds were obviously a united couple in defending their young. It looked pretty exhausting, but I guess that is parenthood for you!

I also have a new appreciation for bird photographers. My Nikon ran out of battery before I'd gotten a good descriptive shot of the birds, and this one was taken with my little purse camera. It was so blurry I had to put on a few art filters. But that blue of the bluebird's back! It is like nothing else on earth.

AUTUMN PALETTE

painting by the creek
on a windy, autumn day-
leaves on my palette

GONE PAINTING
But now I'm back. I went away painting in Maine with a bunch of artist friends for a week. It was incredible. I feel that I am still trailing garlands of pine needles and peering through veils of salt fog, as I re-adjust to life back home.

Good thing I wasn't gone for for two weeks, I guess!

Nancy Bea painting at Long Pond, Maine photo: Alexandra Tyng

PLEIN AIR
After a summer of almost no oil painting I found myself doing four paintings in two days! Admittedly, they were very small and quick. This one is only 4 inches high by 6 inches wide. A friend invited members of our art group to paint at her family's vacation house near the town of New Hope. It was so beautiful and peaceful...the perfect way to sink once more into the bliss of painting after a summer of near abstinence.

And today, another painter friend and I tried out her plan to go sketching in the woods with her dog along. It worked beautifully! It was odd for me because when I was a child I had imaginary dogs that kept me company on the long lonely walk to school. I was always a little nervous about the half mile trek alone through the silent backyards and creepy cul-de-sacs of suburbia and so I invented a trio of canine companions to help me feel safer. This experience of painting with a real dog in tow was so much like my childhood imaginings that it actually felt a little surreal! But pleasantly so. Here is the handsome Attila guarding our artistic endeavors.