I am one of 50 artists invited to participate in the Lee Hansley Gallery's annual "100 Under 1000" holiday exhibition. The show will open this Sunday, November 20 and run through December 31, 2011. The Lee Hansley Gallery is located at 225 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh NC 27603. Gallery hours: Tu-Sat 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (First Friday, December 23 open until 10 p.m.) Phone: 919-828-7557.
This canvas is the most recent large-scale piece I've completed. Like other works over the past three years, it is loosely based on a house I photographed in Cumberland, Maryland. I placed the structure in a dusk setting to heighten the atmosphere and to create a dramatic interior lighting effect.
I have continued working on my "night study" series this year, using source material from my many visits to Savannah, Georgia. This is yet another perspective of the intersection of Bull and Broughton streets in Savannah, viewed at night.
Here is another small study I recently completed based on the Tybee Island (GA) lighthouse. This depicts the lighthouse itself, with a lightkeeper's house in the foreground. I may attempt a larger version of this same scene.
I recently returned from a vacation to Palm Springs, California. While the desert landscape and mountain scenery are spectacular, I was most fascinated with Palm Springs' phenomenal collection of Mid-Century Modern architecture, best exemplified by Richard Neutra's 1946 Kaufmann House (seen above). The clean, sleek linear perspectives of MCM have always attracted me. I could see a new series of work in my future.
This week's painting image depicts a canvas I completed in 2009. I've avoided posting it only because its dark surface has made it difficult to photograph effectively. I tried again last week and this image was the result. Close but still not a perfect representation (a bit gray in the center of the house). "Last Light" was exhibited at my show at the Miriam Preston Block Gallery in Downtown Raleigh in April 2010. It is another painting based on structures I sketched and photographed in Cumberland, Maryland a few years ago.
Yesterday I visited the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. I met up with my close friend, Washington D.C.-based artist Tinam Valk, and we toured the new galleries opened in 2010-2011. It is a beautiful museum and has a wonderful American gallery that includes one of my favorite Edward Hopper canvases, "House at Dusk:"
This small canvas is a second tornado study I completed recently. One of the challenges of working within the palette I prefer is to keep the blues from turning green when combine with my favorite sky color, Naples yellow. This actually worked well in this painting since many tornadoes have an eery greenish tinge to them.
With Hurricane Irene making landfall today here in North Carolina, it seems appropriate for me to post a recent vortex study that I completed last month. I have been fascinated by tornadoes since childhood, and this small canvas is based on imagery I found on the Internet. I'm not sure if I will try to complete any large-scale canvases in this same vein, but I may continue with a series of small studies as an expressive outlet beyond my architectural works.
I've mentioned previously that I have been concentrating on my yard this spring and summer, taking time away from the studio to do so. Well, here are images of the results. I had new front yard sod ("Compadre" zoysia) laid in late April, and I've been babying it carefully ever since. Combining its needs with my flower gardens, well...it takes a bit of work (especially under the glaring North Carolina Piedmont sun). This week's record heat-wave (and its long string of 100-plus temperatures) has strained my resources a bit. But it's still looking good.
The painting I began a week ago, "Pentimento (The Fabius Briggs House)," is finished. I added a few final highlights and now consider it completed. As mentioned in last week's blog post, the painting is based on an actual house here in Raleigh that is in danger of demolition. Hopefully a guardian angel can be found to save this noble structure.
After a four month hiatus, I returned to painting this past weekend. When I put down the brushes at the end of February, I had no intention of staying away this long. March was filled with house guests, then April brought the garden season (and a newly-sodded front yard), travel in May and June, more guests...well, it turned into a longer break than I intended.
With the coming of summer and its accompanying heat, my painting sabbatical will officially end next weekend. I have taken a few months off, first to work heavily in my flower gardens and yard, but also to pause and consider where I am as a visual artist. Most importantly, I've been thinking about what I want to do next as a painter.
This past weekend I took another sojourn to what has become my favorite day-trip destination, Reynolda House, located in Winston-Salem, NC. On this trip I viewed their current exhibit "Trains that Passed in the Night: The Photographs of O. Winston Link." While I was familiar with Link's railroad-themed photographic work, I had only seen an image or two in past exhibits at other museums. This show pulled together a huge collection from his 1950s project that captured images of steam-powered locomotives of the Norfolk & Western Railroad. It was absolutely captivating and surprisingly relevant to my own work and visual art interests. Unfortunately, the exhibit closes this coming weekend, but I am already looking forward to Reynolda House's next exhibition, "Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum," which opens in October.
This is the third night study I have completed this year. Depicting the Savannah Theater, this painting was quickly executed as an exercise in lighting. Like the others, I was not concerned about the final product as much as I was interested in the light and mood.
This is the second in a series of night scenes I have been working on this year. Once again, I used a Savannah street for inspiration. I improvised some of the color palette in this work, and edited out pedestrians and automobiles to focus on the structures and the lighting effects.
Earlier this year I began a short series of night studies based on imagery from Savannah, Georgia. I completed these exercises on small canvases and worked very quickly. I used the experience to loosen up a bit and to experiment with lighting at night. These aren't meant to be considered "finished" pieces, but serve as oil sketches - essentially warm-up routines for extended painting periods.
This large painting is the most recent work I've completed. It depicts a section of Biltmore House at sunset. I used my own source photographs, taken on previous visits to Biltmore, to sketch out the composition, and then I improvised the lighting to create this particular time of day.
Today's weather forecast for Raleigh is an ominous one, with a major storm front racing across the state and set to hit this afternoon. It has inspired me to dig back into my archive of works and post this small study. I completed this painting in an hour one evening completely from memory. I have a distinct childhood memory of an approaching storm that caused my mother to put us kids in the car and head for shelter at my grandmother's house. As we loaded into the car, a huge bolt of lightning struck in the distance where our neighbor's house stood. This canvas conjures up the image I have stored in my memory from that afternoon, albeit without the bolt of lightning.
Since it's been a quiet time for studio production, I thought I'd post some archival works to the blog. This canvas dates back to 1997. It was inspired by a vacation trip to the Pacific Northwest in 1992 that took me to Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Washington and Oregon. I traveled to Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Glacier national parks during the trip, seeing spectacular scenery unlike any other places on Earth.
