This spring seems to be all about rebuilding, around here, and fresh starts.  I'm getting a clean sweep in my attic painting studio, for one, which is dismantled right now because of various home construction projects (chimney work and a new roof).  I can't wait until the work is finished so I can put everything back the way I like it, especially the easels I usually have set up to receive wet paintings when I bring them inside after making them outside!  Right now, instead of that useful system, there are paintings strewn all over the rest of house, on pretty much any horizontal surface that has room and is above or beyond the reach of our cat Hodge.  Tricky!  Nevertheless, painting outside again with the return of the warm(ish) weather has been a great joy.   After spending wintertime painting inside there is nothing to compare to the feeling of working right out in the middle of miles of open space once again.  The cobwebs are gone in a moment and contentment is a rising tide.

Speaking of open space, I've got two paintings in a group exhibit at the L.C. Bates Museum at Hinckley, on Route 201 just outside of Fairfield, Maine.   The exhibit is fortuitously entitled Open Spaces:  Reimagining Pastoral Maine, and it opens this Friday evening, May 6, from 4-6 p.m.  The show will run from May through early October.  Directions and more information at the museum's website, here.  

And, I'm so happy to say, my solo show at Landing Gallery in Rockland, Maine, is happening very soon:  Postcards from Home, May 24 - June 26, with an opening during the first Friday art walk on June 3, from 5-8 p.m.  I'm getting ready to deliver the paintings to the gallery - they are framed and ready to go and there are a lot of them!  Around seventy paintings in all, mostly small but a few quite large.  The gallery has a color catalogue to accompany the show, and I have copies too - they are five dollars each - to buy one please contact me or the gallery.

After my solo show I will be taking two painting trips, one to Bear Island and one to Great Spruce Head Island, in June and July respectively, and also plan to be painting around Frenchman's Bay and Schoodic for much of the summer.  Then in September the group of artists I go on retreat with at Long Ledge on Islesboro will be meeting again.  This will be our tenth year together, and Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Falmouth, Maine, will be showing a selection of our work in a Long Ledge exhibit in November.   This will be a tremendous show - the other artists at this retreat have been making incredible work and I feel so lucky and blessed to be included both in this group and in this show.  Dates and details to follow when the time comes.

And, as always, I welcome visitors to my home studio - or should I say, I will, when I reassemble it!  Soon!  Please call or email ahead to make sure I'm home.  And, if you are out and about this season, and see a painter sitting down in the ledges at Schoodic, or on a remote beach in downeast Maine, look for an old gathering basket full of paint to see if it's me.  I'd love to take a quick break and say hello.  Best wishes for a peaceful spring and summer, filled with nature and art.

Islands off Sand Beach, Stonington,  Maine - oil/panel. 5 x 7" - from my solo show Postcards from Home.

January thaw time.  How I love it.  I was out painting from my car, earlier this week.  Temps were in the 40s and it sure was windy, but the car provides shelter.  In fact I sit in it, to paint.  With a wooden panel propped up on the steering wheel, my palette in the passenger seat, supplies in the back set within reach, and the window rolled down, I am good to go.  Painting snow, and seeing the way it transforms the landscape, is quietly thrilling.  I want to do more of it, but today I'm indoors, working on everything else in life.

And, truth be told, I have hardly been painting at all.  Since returning from the residency at Schoodic I've been caught up in family matters, and am also preparing for my upcoming solo show, Postcards from Home, at Landing Gallery later this spring.  All the paintings are finished. Most of the frames I need for them are on order, and I'm ready to attach the paintings to them, as soon as they arrive.  Great winter work.  I've also spent quite a bit of time selecting paintings for the booklet/catalogue.  I'm really excited to be doing a booklet, and just made the final choices and had them professionally photographed.  I have a mock-up (right now it's hovering around 24 pages).  I'll order it from the printer soon.  My first show catalogue!  It feels like a such big deal, in my little world!  I say that, since the paintings in it are all small, but I hope they represent the best of what's going to be in this show.  One of my favorite things to (attempt to) paint, in the last few years, is a huge expanse of space, in a tiny painting.  The postcard format, the rectangle, keeps calling me.  5 x 7" and 9 x 12" wooden panels are my favorite sizes.  I will also have some large paintings in the show - the postcard format scaled up - but not many.  More news and images later in the spring!

Speaking of spring - I know it's not even February yet, but I already have spring fever.  I think that painting so intensively outside, so late into the fall, and then coming indoors so abruptly... well, it felt like a waterfall that dried up overnight.  And so,  I CANNOT WAIT to get back out there, back to work, and preferably back to Schoodic, as soon as possible.  Not to pick up where I left off, in November, but to continue exploring there.  The day before I packed up and came home, all I could see were the paintings I hadn't had time to make yet.  Rocks and trees were whispering, "What about us?" and I promised I'd come back as soon as I could.  I've been there once since then, on my birthday in December, a week before Christmas.  It was freezing and gorgeous and as compelling as ever.  I didn't get any painting done that day, but I did one quick sketch in pen, and took a good long look at everything. 

Here's to an early spring!  And one painting from the residency.  It's not going to be in my upcoming show - I will be studying this one for a while, to see where it leads me:  "8 a.m., Schoodic, Maine" - oil/canvas, 18 x 24".     

Late last week I returned from my time as an artist-in-residence at Acadia National Park.  For three weeks I lived in an apartment on the old U.S. Navy base, now the Schoodic Institute, within the easternmost part of the park at Schoodic Point.  But mostly, I was not living in an apartment, I was living outside.  The warm fall weather held.  I was out there painting watercolors at dawn, and sunset found me attempting oil paintings as the last light of the day waned.  I got up early one morning to see the full moon set over Cadillac Mountain, and I walked out at night many times, first to see the moonlight on the ocean, and then again when the moon waned, to sit on a granite ledge and gaze into the vast starfield overhead.   During the days, I sat by the shore painting, hiked in the woods, wrote and sketched in my diary, and filled a watercolor album, all while encountering the spectacular landscape of this wild area, not to mention the wildlife living therein.  Birds, living there and migrating through, mammals including deer, a porcupine I sketched, an otter family I was lucky enough to see twice, many snowshoe hares with their fur just changing from brown to white, and a coyote, who loped by me one day on her way into the woods - alert, intelligent, fully alive and completely at home in her environment, perfectly connected with her landscape.  On my best days at Schoodic, I felt that way myself.  I say on my best days, because they can't be all best days.  I make room for all the emotions that might arise, not only joy, during the intense and introspective time of a a residency. 

Here is how mine unfolded.  Week one:  general euphoria, an unlimited feeling of spaciousness and possibility, coupled with some rushing around, to try and paint everything I love most, all at once!  At the end of week one the hurricane blew through, and the ocean was truly awesome.  In fact it was overwhelming, and after attempting to paint the aftermath of the storm I had to retreat into the woods for the rest of the day, to move away from all that raw energy.  Week two:  the storm did pass, peacefulness returned, and with it a settling in, and still that broad feeling of time being suspended.  The wall clock in my apartment didn't work and I didn't need it to, because the time was always now.  I made major efforts on large canvases during the mornings, then lighter efforts on smaller canvases in the afternoons.  I also took a few days to just work in watercolor, and hiked around with my sketchbook and supplies in a backpack, and stopped wherever I wanted to paint.  Week three:  nothing lasts, and the wheels start coming off the bus.  The pace I was working at was difficult to sustain, and I missed home and my loved ones very much.  I also realized that I would not have time to paint everything.  I mean, I wanted to paint everything!  (I still want to!  It's all so good!)  But instead I could only choose individual moments - this rock, this tree, this view.  And what I was able to paint did not come all that close to the splendor of what I was actually seeing.  Over time, this can be upsetting!  However.  I have made friends with failure and I am in love with trying.  Often when beginning a canvas, I say to myself, quietly, Just try.  And then I do.   For me, it's the only way to move forward as a painter - one canvas at a time.  Again, this can be frustrating!  By the time week three was finished, I was very tired, and ready to pack my things - all my tries - and return home.

I have no images to share right now, of any of the 34 oil paintings I completed, simply because I haven't photographed them yet.  They are unpacked and leaning up in my attic studio, though, and I run upstairs and look at them for a few minutes, then have to leave again.  At their worst, they say to me, "All that, for this?" and at their best, they say to me, "All that, for this!"  What a difference one punctuation mark makes!  Many of them fall flat, in my eyes, but some of them also approach transcendence (again, in my eyes), and they make every attempt worthwhile.  What a strange thing painting is - I can't think about it too much or I start to wonder why anybody ever does it in the first place.   It echoes and describes pure feeling, pure emotion - in a word, love - in a way that nothing else seems to do.   How?  What a mystery it is.   

Wonderful people at Acadia National Park and the Schoodic Institute hosted me at this residency, and left me alone for the most part, to paint the weeks away in happy solitude.  I cannot thank them enough for this great gift.  I returned to the home of my youth, went back to the land in the ways that suited me best, learned a lot about myself and my place in that landscape, and will be unraveling and examining the skeins of this amazing experience over the coming months and years.  And, needless to say, I'll be returning to paint at Schoodic again, whenever I can.  There is more work to be done there, by me, and I can't wait to do it.

It's October already!  This year has been almost unbelievable, on so many levels.  A few highlights:  the solo show of my work at Landing Gallery in Rockland this summer very nearly sold out, and the weather has been consistently amazing for outdoor painting, so I've been out there as much as possible.  I experienced immersive, productive painting retreats - ten days on Bear Island in June, and a week on Islesboro in September - and soon I will be heading off to the Schoodic peninsula for a residency at Acadia National Park.  This week I've been sanding and gessoing panels and preparing to stretch canvases of all sizes to be ready for whatever I encounter there, from quick small sketches to larger more developed paintings.  I also want to do some drawing, and perhaps watercolors too.  I think with all the stuff I'll be bringing along I could open a small art supply shop for the duration of the residency. 
;O) 

In other news, I will have work in two upcoming shows and wanted to share the details.  First, from October 3rd through November 30th, six paintings of mine will be at our great library here in town, the Stockton Springs Community Library, alongside paintings from six other local artists.   Some of the paintings are very close to home, like this one, painted while looking out the living room window at the neighbor's house across the street:

This was a freezing snowy January day, but there was warm light on the south side of the house and it all felt very glowy against the blue shadows - the painting is 12 x 18", oil on canvas.  I wanted to be outside painting, truly, but here in Maine in the middle of winter, well, we do what we can do!

The second show I'll have work in this fall will be at Landing Gallery in Rockland again, from mid-November through the holidays.  Five or six gallery artists, including me, will be showing around ten paintings each, all still life.  I'm excited about the opportunity to exhibit some of my other work besides the miles-wide landscapes that are my current preoccupation.  I've written here before about how still life was my first painting love, when I learned to paint in college and for years after that, and I return to still life painting a few times a year, even now.  It's all about the close looking, really, and love of form, attempts at description, and compositional choices.  And of course color, and the paint itself - all of it!   Most of the paintings I'm taking to Rockland are quite small - flowers in a vase, tomatoes on a plate - but this one is a bit larger:

A pail of delphiniums - oil on canvas, 18 x 18" - in a corner of our dining room.  The delphiniums had all blown over in a high wind and I brought them inside.  They asked to be painted until I finally gave in and said Okay, okay! and set up my easel in the dining room.  For a few days.  The other members of the household (husband, cat) approved and were generally patient and understanding.   Here's a close-up of the pail:  

I can't even say what a pleasure it was to paint this metal pail.  I kept adding stripes of color to it as the rest of the painting developed, and by the time I was finished with everything else, the pail was finished too.  When I was first drawing and painting in college art classes, highly reflective surfaces were among my true loves, so returning to this theme in paint felt great.  Should I have put my own reflection in there, I wonder?  Lots of painters do, but to me the painting already feels like something of a self-portrait (as do all paintings, it seems - I mean, painters can't help it - you paint, and there you are! which can be both a blessing and a curse), so I didn't need to be any more descriptive than I wanted to be at that particular moment.

The framed painting in the background isn't one of mine, by the way - it was painted a few decades ago by a dear friend.  It was a great exercise, painting a smaller simplified version of her painting, and makes me want to go to museums to set up my easel and paint versions of some of my favorite paintings by other people.  I've always read that there's no better way to learn from the masters, and I have done some quick sketches before, in pencil or pen.   But, that will have to wait for the time being.  I've got enough on my plate for the upcoming months, and besides, I'll be outside, learning from that other great master - nature.

In conclusion,  some words of thanks.  The interest in my paintings over the last year has been such a blessing, and helps lift me up and out the door, with blank canvases in hand.  So, THANK YOU.  It means the world to me to be able to continue to do what I most love to do.

Summer is already drawing to a close, and how hard this is to believe!  But the season isn't over yet - Seal Level, my solo exhibit of paintings in Rockland, Maine at Landing Gallery, has been very successful and has been carried over until the end of August, with the addition of some new work on the same themes.   Thanks so much to art collectors, friends, and family who turned out to support this show - I appreciate your interest so very much!

In other news, I am also very pleased to be participating in the final exhibit of the summer - the annual Penobscot Potluck -  next week at the Islesboro Historical Society and Museum, from Friday August 22nd through Wednesday the 27th.  Details and directions are here.  I will have around fifteen paintings in this group show, made on Islesboro, around Penobscot Bay, and beyond. 

And, of course, I've been making the most of these too-brief summer months by painting outside as much as I am able - I've spent time working on Bear Island and Great Spruce Head Island, in Winter Harbor, out at Schoodic Point, and in Brooklin, where this new painting (pictured below) recently came into being.  It was a beautifully foggy morning.  The fog was lifting slowly and brightening, the tide was rising, and it seemed as if all the life clinging to this huge granite erratic was breathing with happiness - barnacles, seaweed, algae, and tiny whelks and periwinkles.  I worked quickly to indicate as much as I could before the tide came up to the edge of the sun-bleached top of the rock (and I had to move back from the water's edge, myself, on the nearby beach).  This is 16" x 20", oil on canvas, one of my favorite sizes to paint on.   I completed 90% of the painting on site and finished the final 10% back in my studio. 

Usually I will try to complete a painting on site, all in one go, but often circumstances dictate otherwise.  In this case, I had the essentials from the scene and wanted to address the painting itself, away from the scene, to see what it needed to be complete.  This is such an intuitive thing, in my case, but quite definite nonetheless.  And it's a lovely moment - when whatever it is inside you says Done, that's it... and you set the brush down.  It feels like reading the last page in a satisfying book, or hearing a latch click shut on a garden gate.   But at the same time, it doesn't feel like an ending - more like a recognition of completeness.   In this case, it's a high tide feeling, a quiet brimming.  Hard to describe, but one of the many reasons I keep painting! 

I just delivered a carload of paintings to Landing Gallery in Rockland for my upcoming solo show, Sea Level, which opens this Friday evening, June 6th.  The gallery website has photos of all the paintings and my statement about this body of work, so please take a look!  The show contains a few large studio paintings and then lots of plein air work from the past several years - around forty paintings, made one by one near the high tide line, this way:

Seeing all the paintings in the gallery is like looking back in time, for me.  I remember my painting days so vividly,  in both cool fog and bright sun, both morning and evening, and the paintings themselves become reminders of these many times and places of great joy and direct engagement with nature.

Preparing for this exhibit aside, I've been reveling in the return of warm(ish) weather to coastal Maine, which means even more long days painting outside.  This was my view, recently:

Sometimes I stand at the easel and sometimes I like to sit right down in the rocks.  It depends on the vantage point I most want, the activity of the wind and tide, and the size of the canvas or panel I'm using.  That's an 18" x 24" canvas, half-finished at this point.  The basalt ledges were weathered smooth by the tide and were very soft underfoot.   The day was exquisite and I felt so lucky to be there.  But every day out painting feels like that!  One of the many reasons I love it so much.  I hope it shows in the paintings.