October 2011.  Here it is fall already. I am happy to say I had a wonderful summer and I hope the same for you.  I made a lot of paintings and sold a lot of paintings, this season. I painted in Addison, in Milbridge, on Bear Island, on Great Spruce Head Island, at Marshall Point in Port Clyde, on Grindstone Neck in Winter Harbor, on Islesboro, and on Mount Desert Island. I feel very lucky to be able to take day trips and reach all these special places within just an hour or two.  What I pack for a day out painting: many canvases and panels, paint, brushes, my easel, a dropcloth, paint rags and trash bags, lunch, water, sunscreen, hats, something soft to sit on (I often paint sitting on the ground), boxes for wet paintings, a camera, binoculars, and a few dollars for ice cream on the ride home.  I’m getting it down to a science. Only once have I forgotten something truly essential, and I was able to let go of it and enjoy the day anyway. A good lesson in making do, and being with what is.

April, 2011. Happy Spring - it’s a bit  late around here but I’ve already been outside painting anyway, between snowstorms. I’m looking forward to truly mild weather, I must say.  Meanwhile, here is my exhibit schedule for 2011:

As I said earlier, the 2011 Portland Museum of Art Biennial includes one of my paintings. The exhibit opens to the public on Thursday April 7th and runs through June 5th. The museum store is selling the exhibition catalogue, which includes a color reproduction of my painting, and my art statement.

In May and June I will have a group of small paintings at Landing Gallery in Rockland.  The gallery officially opens its season on First Friday, May 6th, with a large invitational show of new work from all the gallery artists. I'm excited to be showing for the first time in this great gallery, located next to the Farnsworth Museum.

From July 22nd through July 27th I will have work up at the Islesboro Historical Society, in a group show with the artists I go on retreat with on Islesboro every September. We showed together at this venue two years ago and the exhibit was a great success, so we're back again. I'll have eight or ten paintings in the show.

In August I will have three paintings in a curated exhibit entitled "Home and Away" at the Blue Hill Library. The opening reception is August 5th and the exhibit will be up through August 26th. I've participated in this fundraiser for three of the last four years and am very happy to be back again this year.

Finally, during October, I will be artist of the month at the Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library. Ten or fifteen of my paintings will be on display during regular library hours, from October 1st through the 29th.

That’s it, for now.  I guess the only question remaining, is, with all that going on this year, will I have enough time to actually, you know, paint...?  (Short answer: YES.)

October, 2010. I’m happy to say I had a very productive summer and fall of painting outside almost non-stop.  I’ve been working hard on two new related groups of paintings: the first of long views from high ground, the second of cloud formations over familiar or simplified landscapes. I just added a lot of new images from 2010 to the oils section of this site, so please take a look to see examples of these. As well as bringing on this new subject matter, this year has had me painting in all kinds of sizes, from 5” x 7” panels up to 24” x 60” canvases.  The smaller pieces are single notes of joy and the larger ones resemble sustained music.  I hope. At least that’s how I feel about them!

As I begin to put together a calendar for 2011, two exhibits I will mention right away.  One painting of mine will be in the Portland Museum of Art Biennial, which opens in early April.  Then I’ll have around ten paintings in another group show at the Islesboro Historical Society in late July. Other than preparing for those events, a quiet winter of studio work lies ahead.  Bliss.

June, 2010.  Summer is fast on approach and I’ve been busy framing work for a few impending exhibits, all here in Maine. First up is a group show at the George Marshall Store Gallery in York (two paintings) in June, then a solo show at Handworks Gallery in Blue Hill (twelve paintings) in July, and finally in mid-August and September, another solo show at a great little take-out or eat-in restaurant in southern Maine, Edna & Lucy’s, located in Pownal center, just west of Freeport (ten paintings).  All that, and a recent renovation project here at home, means that I have spent woefully little time at the easel during the last two months.  I can’t wait to get back to it, so I’m stretching canvases and gessoing birch panels in preparation for my annual painting trip to Bear Island later this month.  I’ll be staying for a week and taking advantage of the longest days of the year, from dawn until dusk, painting this beautiful island in Penobscot Bay, one of my favorite places on this earth.  Being alone for a week doing what I most love to do in this amazing setting is both a privilege and a luxury, and I try my best to make the most of it every year.

Please contact me for more information about any of my shows, or to arrange a time to stop by and visit at my home studio, and don’t let all the busyness of life keep you from having a great summer!  Thanks for checking in.

February, 2010.  I hope everyone’s winter is going well.  After a bit of a break over the holidays, I started painting again and was very busy working  in January. It was warm enough during the thaw to do a bit of painting outside - I took a trip down to Port Clyde to do just that - but for the most part I’ve been working on some larger studio paintings.

And I just delivered a group of paintings to the University of Maine at Machias, for a solo exhibit in their art gallery. The exhibit is entitled “Margins of Safety” and explores the edges of some long-familiar landscapes, mostly in Washington County and around Penobscot Bay. I’ll have around thirty paintings in the exhibit. The gallery in is Powers Hall; the gallery hours are weekday afternoons from 1-5 or by appointment by calling 207-255-1279; the opening reception is February 10th from 6-8 p.m.; the exhibit runs through March 26th, 2010.  Email me for more information, or if you would like me to mail you an announcement postcard (they look good!). That’s all for now.  Hold on - spring is on the way - it will be maple sugar time before we know it.

November, 2009.  Many thanks to the great customers and friends who purchased art this year; I had a very good season for both painting and selling. Now I’m looking ahead to a quiet winter of studio time (usually when I paint larger works, vs. smaller outdoor paintings), and making plans for the upcoming 2010 season.  To start the year off, I’ll be having a one-person exhibit of around twenty-five paintings, at the University of Maine at Machias art gallery in February. The paintings for that are already painted, so right now I’m framing them and thinking about possible hanging order.  My other current project is creating an archive of all my old work, and it’s been very interesting to see what I was painting twenty years ago, and how my concerns have evolved since then (or not!).

The weather’s been beautiful here this fall and I’ve been out painting on Deer Isle, Cape Rosier, Mount Desert Island, and elsewhere, but it’s finally getting too cold to paint outside, for this thin-skinned painter at least, and so for the near future I’ll be at home chopping wood, painting by the woodstove with the cat napping next to me, and thinking about next year’s island painting time. Stay cozy and enjoy the holidays, everyone.

July, 2009.  Summer is really here and I’m painting a lot outdoors in the (finally) great weather. This week I’m headed to Islesboro for an exhibit with a terrific group of artists - we’ll be showing at the Islesboro Historical Society.  The exhibit opens on Friday evening, the 17th of July, and runs through the following Wednesday. I’ll have ten paintings there, and will be on-island all week myself, painting and spending time at the exhibit, and goofing off with my friends during off-hours.  Email me for more information, and take a look at my blog for images of five of the paintings I’ll have in the show.  Thanks!

May, 2009. Painting outside again with the coming of spring has been a real joy, especially after working indoors for much of the long winter. There’s just nothing like standing out in nature and deeply looking at your motif while intuitively making decision after decision about what must go on the canvas and what merely needs to be indicated. I tend to paint much more quickly and loosely outside than in the studio.  So far this spring, I’ve been painting in Seal Harbor on Mount Desert Island twice, and also painting here around town, in Stockton Springs.  And in the backyard - I couldn’t resist the forsythias in bloom (that yellow, with a long blue horizon behind it...).

The next few months will be exciting ones for me.  First, I am about to deliver two large paintings to the Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in Ellsworth, Maine, for inclusion in a curated show: Island Artists: Fairfield Porter, Eliot Porter, the Porter Family, and the Great Spruce Head Island Art Week Artists and Poets.  The exhibit opens on Sunday June 14th. Then, at the end of June, I head to Bear Island, out in Penobscot Bay, to paint for a week.  And in July, I will be part of a group show on Islesboro. Then in August, I’ll have a few paintings in a show in Blue Hill. Here comes summer!

February, 2009.  I’ve spent much of the past month at the easel, working hard on new paintings. For me, the best painting often turn out to be the one in which I wondered at the start if I would really be able to do this.  Working outside my usually-relaxed comfort zone, in other words, and pushing myself to try something different. In my new work, I feel like I’ve been taking some chances with both composition and color, among other things, and for the most part it’s been working out well. Particularly regarding color - I tend to stay within a rather limited palette of earth tones, but right now I have alizarin and lavender and a range of cadmiums on my palette. I’ve also been working on rendering natural patterns, particularly ocean waves and clouds. I’ll post some photos of new work soon to illustrate what I mean.

Away from the easel, I’ve been slowly reading the collected letters of Cézanne, between other books. He has some good fatalistic advice for painters: “My painting goes cahin-caha.  Sometimes I have fabulous bursts of enthusiasm, and still more often painful disappointments.  Such is life.”

I’ve had a lot of great comments about this site; thank you to the people who’ve sent email and talked to me in person about it. I appreciate the feedback, because this is just version 1.0.  I’ve recently added a folder of available work under the “paintings” section, and I also hope to add a guest book to the site soon, so folks can sign up for my mailing list and leave comments more easily.  Thanks again for stopping by.

January, 2009. Welcome to my new site!  Winter in Maine is a great time for taking stock, and in retrospect this has been a terrific year. Besides doing a lot of work at home, I spent a week alone painting on Bear Island in June, a week painting with friends on Islesboro in September, then the entire month of October working hard at Weir Farm in Connecticut as their artist-in-residence. I’m still painting primarily landscape but have also recently returned to my first love, still-life.  And I’ve been doing some drawing, as well as writing and illustrating a gardening journal.

Over the last year I experimented with painting on wood, something I haven’t done in twenty years, being a cotton-duck kind of girl.  I found some birch plywood panels I really liked, sanded them down, put on two coats of gesso, sanded some more, and came out with a fantastically smooth painting surface. I used many of these panels on Islesboro and at Weir Farm with results I’m happy with.  I’ll be adding photos of some of these new paintings here soon.

The year ahead looks promising - I’ll go to Bear Island again, and hope to spend time on Vinalhaven in midsummer. In the meantime renovations continue at home on my studio, and I’m painting downstairs near the woodstove for now. I’m also sorting out canvases for a few group shows this summer and already thinking about a one-person show in the early spring of 2010.  Details to follow as the time draws near.  Thanks for reading.  

plate of tomatoes, islesboro, maine - oil/canvas, 14” x 10”, 2007

copyright 2009, sarah faragher, all rights reserved