"Sammy"

Oil on panel  - 8" x 8"

It seems odd to sit here knowing there is no place to put my work anymore.  Well, to be fair, there is still facebook and this blog.  I was speaking more of an internet commerce site.  Five years ago I became involved with the daily painting movement - a collection of artists motivated to paint and post a painting every day of the week and some weekends as well.  Those familiar with this blog know that I failed miserably at the "daily" part. I did post 149 entries in 2008, less in 2009 and continued to fall off from there.  It's not that I couldn't have done something everyday but I didn't merely want to dash out a piece just for the sake of saying I showed up.  I think it's like Cal Ripken's continuous 2131 game streak or better yet, Lou Gehrig's.  It may be blasphemous to say but I suspect there were days when the manager put them in for one "at bat" just to keep the streak going.  I am going to miss my fellow painters at www.dailypainters.com.  Some of them were stellar and did manage to produce quality work on a more or less daily basis.  I endeavor to become more disciplined in the coming months.  Hopefully, with better time management, I can do both gallery work and some small pieces.  

It's fitting that my farewell piece is my boy Sammy looking wistfully out the studio window.

"Mr Big"

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Oil on archival, museum quality 1/8" ampersand gessobord panel - 6" x 6"

Painting a brindle Great Dane was a new experience for me. The brindle coat presented quite a challenge. There are very dark hairs and very light hairs playing off each other. If you lay down the blacks and then feather in the pale Naples yellow, they want to blend together. It takes a soft touch to get the effect. Mr. Big is one gorgeous Dane. His coat is almost tiger striped with rich umbers and deep blacks shot with pale yellow highlights and they don’t come any sweeter. He shares his digs in Baltimore with Walter the wonder wiener. They make quite a pair. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Danes. One of my very first commissions was a painting of a harlequin Great Dane, way back in the early seventies. My cats were not happy with his modeling sessions at the studio. That early commission was almost life size. Is it me, or is it perverse to paint a Great Dane on a 6 inch square panel?

"Tartelette de fraise avec des pistaches"

oil on archival, museum quality 1/8" ampersand gessobord panel - 5" x 7"

What can I say about strawberries? When I was a boy, my dad took me sailing every Sunday, whether I wanted to go or not (I didn’t). He longed for me to share his passion for being “in the wind;" I never did, although being “in the wind" on a motorcycle has been my passion for 40 years. When I was old enough to drink, preferably beer, sailing became way more tolerable. Dad kept a bottle of Chivas Regal on the boat which, I later found out, contained Four Roses that he had decanted into the empty Chivas bottle after he had finished it. That was my Dad. On the high seas, you drink what’s available...any port (or scotch) in the storm. For years I thought Chivas was swill until he sheepishly confessed. Dad, an old navy man, was ahead of his time. Long before the gas wars of the 70’s, when the price of gas on the dock skyrocketed, propelling all those Chris-craft owners to take up the sheets, Dad had his little wooden Spanish sailboat; the Señorita, moored at Stacy’s Salvage Yard. It was the only sailboat in the place. Later Stacy’s would grow to become the Trade Winds Marina, a huge sailboat facility, but back then it was little more than a marine junkyard. The bright spot of going sailing on Sundays was the prospect of getting a 25 cent hamburger at Gino’s or, in season, going to the farm near the boatyard and picking strawberries. There was a “pick your own” field on the road near the docks and this was my introduction to real fresh produce. The prospect of fresh strawberries and corn on the cob in late summer made those Sunday sails bearable. I grew up, as did most of us in the 50’s, with canned vegetables. I didn’t see fresh spinach, peas, asparagus or mushrooms (which I never saw, period) until I left home. I can tell you canned asparagus is nasty and don’t get me started on succotash. Who came up with that one? Why ruin perfectly good corn, even canned corn, by adding lima beans…yuck! Those ripe fresh berries made for some tasty strawberry shortcake!

"Mark Spitz corkscrew"

Oil on archival museum quality 1/8" gessobord panel - 5" x 5"

This is the companion piece to the painting (Haut Medoc-1997) that I did in December. The ubiquitous Mark Spitz corkscrew has been around for quite a while. We all have one tucked away in a draw somewhere. Though not my favorite device for the extraction of a cork from a lovely bottle of Bordeaux, it is always there as a reliable backup when the Cépage Laguiole corkscrew goes missing, as it is wont to do, buried under the myriad of saved corks in the drawer where it resides. Why Mark Spitz you ask? Those of us old enough to remember Mark Spitz capturing a record seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics also remember just before we opened that bottle of Mateus Rosé or Lancers, we would hold the chrome corkscrew horizontally, pull in and out on the screw end, the levers swimming wildly through the air and ask with a giddy laugh “Hey guys, who’s this?" ...I guess you had to be there.