pumpkin time

I should never order totally useless, but really cool-looking items from Fresh Direct (like these) because I know that I won't be satisfied until I paint them. So I bumped a portrait I am painting of my husband (doing it from a photo, since he doesn't really understand the concept of sitting still) onto the back burner and painted these two "Baby Boo Mini-Pumpkins" (I kid you not) on a 5" x 7" linen covered panel. And now back to the portrait! If you are interested in purchasing this little painting, please click here.

alla prima!

study in pink and grey, as it turns out.

last day study

Lobsterville in the fog

another Menemsha boat

I am finding the boats on Menemsha Pond irresistible - something about the brilliant autumn sunshine, the marshes - which are just beginning to turn color - and the boats, seemingly abandoned for the winter. That, of course, is probably not the case - I feel certain that Menemsha Pond boat owners are nothing if not conscientious about taking good care of their seagoing property, but poetry dictates that the boats will lie here, buffeted by the elements, their paint peeling - the only denizens of a deserted island. Anyway, this is a study of one of them - 5" x 5" on a linen covered panel. Sold.

Menemsha boat study

5" x 7" oil on panel

MV wildlife refuge

There is a huge beautiful and, at this time of year, totally empty wildlife preserve near the Tisbury Great Pond on Martha's Vineyard. This is a study looking out towards the marshes . The trees have not yet started turning to fall colors, but the grasses have and the light is decidedly autumnal.

MV tree study

This old tree stands at the edge of the property, just against the forest. Most of the day it is in shadow, but first thing in the morning, it catches the brilliantly cold dawn light full in the face. I have had to spend some chilly time out in the yard for a couple of days to catch its few moments in the sun!

Eliot's tomato

Our friend Eliot has always ranked way up there in the galaxy of good guests at the farm. He so clearly loves the house, the land and the area that it is a pleasure to have him around. But this year, he got the gold star because he brought me heirloom tomato and kale plants from the farm where he is working for the summer. Sadly, the kale met an early demise when the bunnies got to it, but the tomatoes thrived, at least in so far as tomatoes can thrive in a climate that has more in common with Canada than it does with the lower 48, and last night we dined on home grown tomato and basil salad! This fellow above didn't make it through Irene and was on the ground, so while it may still end up as part of our dinner (fried green tomatoes, anyone?), right now it is sitting in my studio, a very shapely and interesting subject for a still life.

sold

La foret

Oh, to be in Rambouillet now that autumn's here!*

11" x 14" oil on panel

*with apologies to Robert Browning

If you would like to purchase this painting, click here.

yay zinnias!

To me, zinnias are the perfect mid-summer garden flower: brilliantly colorful, oddly sturdy and a little sassy in their unwillingness to be carbon-copy blossoms, one just like the other. I never have any success growing them at my farm - they get eaten by rabbits - so when I saw them for sale today in a NYC greenmarket, I bought them, pricey as they were. The farmer who sold them to me told me that his trip into Manhattan from southern Jersey took him three hours - two hours for the highway trip - a distance of about 100 miles - then a third hour to creep along from the Lincoln Tunnel into the heart of the city, 15 miles at most. What a trooper!

the barn, morning mist

A little encouragement is a dangerous thing. I wasn't really going to say anything about this painting when I posted it - it is pretty self-evidently a barn - but my friend Judy told me she likes reading my blog. Not looking at it, but reading it. So this is for Judy! Judy has been to my farm in the mid summer and in fact, when she visited she and I had the most unexpected small-town kind of a day. When she arrived, I told her the brief history of our house, the area, the town and some of the people I know up here - the kind of deep background info that I always feel people like to hear. I mentioned several notable names - that of my running buddy Joan, those of my friends Jane and Harold who own the paint and paper store in town, the name of the estimable woman Faiga who runs Good Cheap Food, aka "the piano store" (but that is a story for another time) and finally a nod to Leland, the contractor who renovated our house - all people who one way or the other dip in and out of our life in the country. That afternoon Judy and I went to town for lunch and by golly, who should we run into on the Main Street, but Joan, Jane and Harold and Faiga - just as if I had stationed them there for Judy's benefit. At each encounter, there were introductions and a chat ("this is Judy - she is here from the Berkshires and this is Joan, my running buddy" etc.) After lunch, we got back in the car for a spin around the countryside on our way home to the farm and on one of the back roads, there was a house under construction and sure enough, as we slowed down (so as not to raise too much dust from the dirt road), who should we see coming around the side, but Leland, the contractor, the only personage we hadn't yet run into. So once again, introductions and a little chat and then home we went, everyone accounted for. Judy was at my farm at just about this time of year and though I don't remember if there was morning mist on the land, the yellowish late August foliage and the barn in need of a good paint job were probably much the same.

If you would like to purchase this painting, click here.

saturday morning petunia

quick study

5" x 5" oil on linen panel

July Virtual Paintout

This is a stylized painting of a photo taken by the Google truck on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel - this month's destination for the Virtual Paintout. Parts of Jersey are green and manicured and parts are a little wilder but to me the most charming feature of the landscape is that there are tiny lanes everywhere that corkscrew through the dense island foliage. I hope to have captured some of that feeling here. It is 4 " x 4" painted in oil on a linen covered board. If you would like to purchase this painting, click here.

fireworks on July 3rd

One thing we have in upstate NY is serious weather. Saturday was gorgeous! Picnic weather. Sit outside in the back and look at the wildlife through binocs - weather. Couldn't have been prettier and because the light in my studio was lovely, I started a self-portrait. Self-portraits are always helped mightily by good lighting. Candles would probably be best. But yesterday - Sunday the 3rd of July - we woke up to major rain. It was dark and heavily grey outside and so much water was falling that you could see the drops smashing against the road and splashing back up so that there was like a thin layer of foam on top of the asphalt. The self-portrait was hopeless. I tried, but with no light coming in, it started to look like I was painting myself in a dark mask, so I stopped and since I had this little marigold in a jar out there in the studio, painted it. But that is not the story. The story is that sometime in the mid-afternoon, there came a lull in the thunder and lightening that had been booming around the valley all day and then all of a sudden out of nowhere a flash of lightening and an unbelievably loud crack of thunder simultaneously crashed down around our farm. I was so startled that I dropped my palette on the floor! Yes, the lightening hit the property but amazingly the only harm was that it took a limb off of a tree in the front of the house and for some reason - bypassing all other electrical systems - knocked the phone out. I went back to my studio after my heart slowed down and painted a second flower, but that effort failed. Not a surprise.

rose exercises

It was a dark and stormy day today in upstate NY. The sky never did turn blue and from time to time it got so black and threatening that I thought we were going to have another big thunder and lightening thing like we had last night. My dog has never been much of a marine, but last night she was super-scared - cowering in the corner farthest from the window. Today, she spent the day curled, quaking, in the armchair in my studio where there was little light, but a lot of nice roses picked from the wild and gnarly bush by the barn. The roses are very delicate, even a little malnourished - not your chubby English types at all. And they open from bud to fully formed bloom very very quickly. The weather made me just as jumpy as the dog and so I sort of flitted around my studio throwing paint on various surfaces hoping to make something that resembled the roses I had brought in from the cold. Don't know if I managed or not, but I learned a little something. And I was rewarded for my efforts when, listening to the glorious "Softly awakes my heart" aria from the Saint-Saens opera "Samson and Delilah", I looked out my studio window and saw not only a rabbit in the grass, but also a beautiful deer leaping across the pasture AND a blue heron flying overhead on its way to the pond!

the girls

Cows are surprisingly curious creatures so when I was out walking with my sketchbook and found these girls in a pasture over near East Meredith, they came right over to the fence where I was standing and actually stood there long enough for me to draw them - sort of. I also took a photo and though we were leaving pretty soon for the city, I spent a couple of hours out in my studio trying to capture something of the cute profiles they offered to me as well as the color of the deep, rich, green foliage which - right now in Delaware County - qualifies as a wonder of the world. Sold

June Virtual Paintout - New Zealand

When I arrived at my son's college graduation a few weeks ago, I realized that I had forgotten my little point and shoot camera. So in a moment of largesse, brought on not only by the great pride of this second child finishing a degree but also by the happy conclusion of more than 23 years of paying tuition, my husband drove us straight to Best Buy where we purchased a much fancier camera than we either could afford or could figure out how to use! With a quick glance over the start up pages of the handbook, I managed to have it up and running in time for the ceremony and the family gatherings but now that I am back in my studio trying to take accurate photos of my paintings I am totally lost. This is the best image I could manage of this painting which is my submission to the June Virtual Paintout blog. What you see is way more vivid than the Google street view it is based on and only slightly more colorful than the actual painting. Next post, I hope to do better!

liberty and old glass

8" x 9" oil on stretched linen

click here to purchase

buttercups!

This is prime time for wildflowers in upstate New York. The fields and roadsides are covered with daisies and clover, little pale purple flowers that look like a cross between asters and daisies, tiny blue flowers - it is really quite something to see. I remember the first run I took here 24 years ago this month, I kept myself occupied by counting the different varieties of flowers I saw as I ran along the back river road: I stopped counting somewhere in the fifties and that didn't include flowering shrubs or trees. If you look out into the distance right now, you can see fields of pale yellow - not the brilliant solid patches of lime-yellow like the mustard fields in France, but a richer shade as if the color has been lightly scumbled over the green grasses beneath. Those are masses of buttercups - one of the daintiest little flowers around. When I was a child we used to hold them up under our chins and the bright reflection would prove just how much we loved butter!

some kind of flower

We don't really have a "garden center" up here in farm country. What we have is a house on the corner of Route 23 and East Meredith Road where, for many years, the family sold garlic. Yes, a garlic stand on the side of the road. A fine, french idea if ever I knew one. There was a greenhouse or so at the back, but their main product was, yes, garlic. Then several years back, they expanded. One greenhouse followed another and now, though they don't sell tools or fertilizer or wood chips or burlap, they do sell annuals and perennials, herb and vegetable plants and, if you get there early enough in the season, seed potatoes. Every year now, they expand ever so slightly and this year's improvement was a big one. It used to be that you would turn into the parking area from Route 23 then, leaving, have to back around and go out the way you came in. This year they bulldozed a driveway from the parking lot out behind their house and onto the East Meredith Road which makes the business of getting in and getting out so much easier! When I went there this past week, I bought a few herb plants and a huge tomato plant (having already ordered my seeds and potatoes from Burpees) and I also splurged on the annual (painted above). I think it is an annual, anyway. When I got home, the labels had fallen off so I don't know the name of the flower, whether it is an annual or perennial, whether it grows in sunlight or in shade or any other important pieces of information. So I planted it next to the herbs in my vegetable garden figuring that everything is happier around basil and rosemary. And because I spent a good part of the last few days digging and planting, I have only had enough time to paint this small canvas depicting my new, unnamed flower. For this week however, I feel that my beautiful potager, which is the french word for vegetable garden, is enough of a work of art.