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In Joy, I shared the image and story of a wedding present portrait of my niece Elizabeth and her now-husband-then-fiancé Chris at the moment of their engagement. Elizabeth's older brother James married his then-fiancé-now-wife Jen about three months after that wedding, and I took a different approach for a gift painting for them. James and Jen became engaged in Amsterdam prior to the whole COVID-19 thing, and James had prearranged for a photographer to be there to capture the moment. The "She said yes!" photos that were shared show James and Jen on a bridge with flower boxes and quaint Dutch architecture in the background.

Aside (make that a snide aside): Back in my day, people didn't do these high-falutin fancy proposals in perfect locations with all the bells and whistles. They walked uphill both ways in blizzards to propose any old place, by gum, and on-call photographers be damned. But I digress.

Anyway, instead of a portrait, my goal was to paint the bridge itself, with the couple as an incidental detail. Do you know how many romantic bridges there are in Amsterdam? Neither do I, but I can tell you that there are more than 100, and every dad-blamed one is architecturally distinct. How to find the right one? Well, sitting drinking coffee with the mother of the groom one morning, we scoured the internet for pictures of Amsterdam bridges. The bridge railing posts had a certain kind of ball on top and that was our sole clue to follow. I think we looked at at least 500 photos on Google Images until one got pinned down and  I felt pretty confident that it was the right bridge. This made me happy. 

The happiness later faded because pretty confident is only a distant cousin of absolutely certain. So putting the Deerstocker cap back on I googled wedding photographers in Amsterdam. I then emailed a photo of the couple on the bridge to a randomly selected photographer describing what I was trying to do. I included words of apology because I assumed the photo had in all likelihood been taken by a competitor. All I wanted to know was the name of the bridge so that I could fine tune my Google Image search. I really did not expect an answer. 

To my surprise and delight, I received a prompt reply which not only named the bridge (which was decidedly NOT my pretty confident guessed one), but also included a Google-Earth link to the bridge itself. This allowed me to digitally explore the bridge from every angle and viewpoints from adjacent streets in order to select the composition of the painting. Dutch people are the greatest! No, let me be more specific: Aleksandria Rudenko of Rudenko Photography is the greatest. Next time you are in Amsterdam, hire her to take your picture. You'll love it.

Back to the painting. I have no idea whether a canal boat was passing under the bridge when James proposed, most likely not, but, hey, artistic license. The parking sign suspended in mid air is, I must acknowledge, a mistake. But I remembered that James is partial to the artworks of Magritte, so I told him that I did it on purpose as an homage. It's our little secret, so don't tell him (wink).

That's it for nieces and nephews with pending weddings at the moment. While a painting is a more personal and one of a kind wedding gift than something picked out of a registry, it's always a bit of a gamble because there is no guarantee that any given painting will necessarily be the recipients' cup of tea. I follow up with each married couple to let them know that it's okay for them to give an honest reaction; I will never feel insulted if an unasked-for painting is consigned to a laundry room, closet, doghouse, or handy landfill. So far, though, these personal paintings as gifts seem to have been well received.

Prior to James' and Jen's wedding, we spent a couple of weeks exploring southwestern national parks, so if my history is a guide, you might be seeing paintings of canyons in the near future. Consider yourself forewarned.

This is a portrait depicting our niece Elizabeth on the day she accepted a proposal of marriage from now husband Chris. I painted it as a wedding present. There they are in harsh midday sun at the Griffith Park Observatory in L.A. Not the best lighting for either a photograph or a painting, but there you go. Their eye sockets appear as dark featureless blobs, but I can state for the record that the real people depicted herein have in actuality quite pretty eyes with fully functioning pupils and irises. I choose this image for a portrait because of the sheer joy in both their faces, lack of eyeballs notwithstanding.

Like all of us, I've attended my fair share of weddings. In some cases, it is natural to keep ones fingers crossed hoping that the marriage will last until the couple arrives at the reception. Not this one. This was such a joy filled celebration headlined by two souls so obviously perfect for each other that even a stranger walking in to ask directions to Sea World would have been enfolded in the sublimeness of it all. 

Elizabeth has had the foresight to jettison the last name Creech to protect potential offspring from the inevitable schoolyard nicknames I know from personal experience (Screech, Creature, etc., they write themselves). She is now a Kramer. Thanks to Seinfeld, we'll have to let time determine whether this will be an improvement, nickname-wise. 

Congratulations, Liz and Chris.

The title of this blog is a quote from a statement released by Governor Ralph Northam on September 2, 2021, in response to the Virginia Supreme Court's rejection of appeals to reverse the 2020 order to remove the "iconic but divisive" Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond.

The actual removal will begin on Wednesday September 8, 2021, and will likely require three days to complete. The statue's ultimate resting place has not yet been determined. Putting aside its unfortunate history, it is a work of art in and of itself, so whatever museum or battlefield it wanders to will have that at least. 

You may recall that I have addressed this issue in previous blog entries. Also, allow me to remind you that quality reproductions of my painting Monumental Change II: Time to Erase Jim Crow are available for purchase. They are 24" x 18", each is signed and numbered, and are available for $100.00. I will be donating 10% of sales of this signed limited edition print to the ACLU.

To arrange for purchase of prints, please contact me at [email protected]. I will be out of touch for a few days because the fickle finger of fate has me scheduled for surgery the very day the statue comes down. But I will respond eventually, so be patient. 

In my last Blog entry, I discussed my sometimes fanatic drive to paint a scene more than once. The mysterious Case of the Weeping Cherry Tree involved my lack of satisfaction in how a previous painting turned out; however, there are myriad reasons to paint something more than once. Sometimes you like a painting fine but just want to try the same subject in a different style.

Back in 2020, I whimsically named a mountain outside Banff “Mt. Bader Ginsburg.” That is of course not its real name. The painting hangs in my studio in a place where I see it every day. I’m not thrilled with it, but I’m not necessarily unsatisfied with it either. To me it’s a middling example of what I can accomplish when I paint with oils. Seeing it so often led me to think that I’d like to paint the mountain again in a looser, more rugged style. After all, Mt. Not Really Bader Ginsburg is a massive, rugged, sedimentary rock leviathan. It’s HUGE.

So I put away the paintbrushes, picked up a bunch of palette knives, pulled out the reference photos and sat. And thought. And after all that pondering I decided to ask Siri to play Robin Trower. I turned up the volume, got in the zone, and furiously troweled on paint like a brick-layer in a wall building race. This painting was completed in two Trower-powered sessions using 99% palette knife and 1% dabbing with an old T-shirt. Is it better or worse or just different from the original Mt. Not Really Bader Ginsburg painting? While that’s totally subjective, I vastly prefer the overall feel of this one. To my eye it is more painterly.

Take, for example, the tall evergreens in the bottom left quadrant. In Mt. Not Really Bader Ginsburg,  the down-sweeping tree branch style is obvious. In the palette knife painting they are indiscriminate shapes that only seem tree-like when viewed from a distance. It think the rock in the new version better suggests something enormous and hard. The same water seems different is the two versions, and as it turns out I prefer the sky as depicted in the first painting. C’est la vie.

Next, I decided that I should learn the actual name of this mountain. I went online and looked at maps of Banff and its environs. As far as I could tell from all the maps, it looked to be either Cascade Mountain or Stoney Squaw Mountain. I sent a jpeg of the painting to Mountain Galleries in Banff asking if they know its name (and sneakily, but ultimately pointlessly, hoping to get some critical comment on the merits of the painting from the gallery management). They did not bite, either on the mountain’s name or the painting. The smarter approach I took next was to send a copy of the reference photo I used to the rafting company from whose watercraft the photo was taken. I heard immediately from Tim at Rocky Mountain Raft Tours that these paintings depict the north face of Mt. Rundle. Or, more accurately, the lower half of the north face. Like I said above, Mt. Rundle is big; the canvas would need to be double in size to get the full height.

Mount Rundle is to Banff as the Statue of Liberty is to New York City. You see the former, you know the setting is the latter. You’d think I would have known this all along, but, hey...old dogs.

I painted this impression of Cades Cove in Great Smokey Mountains National Park  well over a decade ago.

Cades Cove has it all: history, geology, waterfalls, moonshining, colors, log cabins, grist mills, and bears. I painted this watercolor based on a few photos taken from the edge of a large parking lot. The hazy hot mid afternoon sun did not provide the best light, but I liked the big open meadow with the tree lines and the mountains climbing away in the distance. The painting is as much my memories and imagination months after the fact as it is the kinda crappy photographs used for guidance.

Some few years after I painted this, we were enjoying a getaway at the Snowbird Mountain Lodge, a lovely inn in western North Carolina. As we enjoyed a cocktail in the bar, I noticed and became fascinated by an oil painting showing - you guessed it - a big open meadow with tree lines and mountains climbing away in the distance....

Crystal noticed my distraction and inquired as to my inattention to our conversation. I told her that I was having a deja vu moment, and was pretty sure I was looking at somebody else's painting of the same scene I had painted long ago. Different time of year, different time of day, but the same view quite likely from the same parking lot vantage point.

I suppose it shouldn't be surprising. There are doubtless thousands of paintings of Cades Cove out there and who knows how many of this particular meadow as seen from this generic vantage point. I won't dismiss the possibility that the painting which caught my eye at the Snowbird depicts some other meadow in some other part of the world. All I can say is that when I saw it, I knew it, and I knew I'd been there myself, and this feeling of shared artistry with a perfect stranger is the best kind of deja vu.

In my last post I shared a detail from a work in progress, singled out solely because it is the first painting done from start to finish in the new studio.  I am pleased to note that the painting is now complete, and that it turned out in a manner consistent with my goals. Which were:

1. To depict an extremely well-known and commonly photographed site – Lake Louise looking toward Mt. Victoria – in a novel way. In this case, from the vantage point you have when you hunker down behind a large flower filled planter at the Chateau Lake Louise hotel on a July evening.
2. To capture the amazing color of the glacial water, without making it the whole point.
3. To let mountains be mountains, glaciers be glaciers, and chrysanthemums be chrysanthemums without any of them calling undue attention to themselves or detracting from one another.
4. To do all the above in at least a modicum of painterly fashion. If a tree or a rock or an entire mountain is not photographically accurate, so what?

As far as Goal 1 - Yay! Do a Google image search of Lake Louise paintings, and you'll find dozens from the same vantage point, most with little to nothing in the foreground. I'll not claim to be the first or only person to try the behind the planter trick, but it doesn't appear common.

Goal 2 I will leave to you to ultimately decide, but I'm happy.

Goal 3 is a partial success. Although not photographically realistic, the painting nonetheless does what many photographs, at least landscape photographs, do. It places everything in in the same general focus. Imagine yourself hunkered down behind the planter. When you look at the flowers, the stuff in the distance goes out of focus. When you look at the distant mountain, the flowers become a blur. Everything is still there and you are aware of it, but your eye only focuses on one thing at a time. The artists I most admire are the ones who - regardless of style - successfully delegate either the foreground or background into something more akin to how the eye/brain process works. Most often, they do this by rendering the background in a veiled washed out fashion. Take a look at the Richmond Folk Festival painting here. The tents and trees and powerful locomotive in the background exemplify what I'm taking out. This deliberate effort to provide depth by deciding on the focal "zone" is something I keep working on, but the Lake Louise painting does not benefit from a more conscious effort towards that end. It's not a deal-breaker, but Goal 3 was not fully achieved. 

Let's talk about Goal 4. My painting group friend Sylvia loves to tell about the time (maybe more than 15 years ago) when mentor Christaphora Robeers commented that one of my watercolors was "painterly." Apparently, when out of Christaphora's earshot, I quietly asked the group what that meant. I'm not sure there's a standard definition, but let me suggest it's the opposite of linear or realistic and is based on the artist's color and texture choices. A painting might be deemed painterly if "there are visible brushstrokes, resulting from application of paint in a less than completely controlled manner, generally without closely adhering to carefully drawn lines." Based on that crack about a less than completely controlled manner, my whole life is painterly. 

So, if this one is painterly, I think this is why:

You don’t see them, and I didn’t actually paint them in, but there are bears, canoes, hikers, berry bushes, deer, bumblebees, fish, and more in this painting. They are there - in the woods, on and in the water, behind a ridge, or around the bend - all implied by the paint applied in a less than completely controlled manner.

Princess Louise Caroline Alberta was the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria, married to the Marquess of Lorne, Governor General of Canada from 1878 until 1883. I remember from my childhood in Canada that the Governor General is the appointed representative of the British monarch who acts with no real power while maintaining a full schedule of ribbon cutting type activities and savoring the presumably happy perks associated with old money. Nice work if you can get it, but silly. The Marquess himself doesn’t seem to be remembered for anything other than being one of Victoria’s many sons-in-law, but the princess in typical privileged fashion lent her first name to Lake Louise and the nod to her father (“Alberta”) to the province in which the lake sits. You go girl. The Stoney Nakota First Nations people had named it Lake of the Little Fishes, which is vastly more charming. Like everything else relating to European colonization, though, the original name ultimately got swept under history’s rug. Queen V herself – not content with having an amazing waterfall on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border and a Masterpiece mini-series named for her – is memorialized by Mount Victoria, the glacier carved peak viewed smack dead center from the lower end of Lake Louise.

Here endeth the history lesson.

This posting discusses a detail of a painting. The painting itself is nowhere near complete. As you can see from the shot of it on the easel, a good three quarters remains in the underpainting stage. Like the painting discussed HERE, I intend to capture the view  across the lake from behind a flower filled planter at the Chateau Lake Louise Hotel . I am taking this one slowly, in steps, and unless I whip something else out quickly while some stage of this is drying, it should be the first painting completed in my new studio.  Probably be a few weeks yet.

The detail shown may or may not be done. I think it looks fine and reasonably suggestive of the real deal, but that is no guarantee that it won’t need a tweak or two once the whole painting reaches the state of completion I like to call "time to stop farting around."

This one is oil on canvas, done primarily with brushes although the palette knife saw use on Mount Victoria itself. The interesting challenge is the white of the glacier up against the white of the clouds. Absolutely pure unadulterated white is usually reserved for only the teensiest highlights in paintings, while grays, blues and, well, any color in myriad very light shades are used to give white some dimension. In this painting a large part of the cloud got to be untainted bright white. What a joy. If you look down at the bottom of the detail, you’ll see just a hint of the lake water. So far, it looks like the color is right. I won’t really know until the planter flowers are painted underneath whether it still reads correctly though. Go figure.

Our vacation in Canada’s Rockies took place at the end of July and every stroke I’ve painted since then depicts something or other from that trip. This one won’t be the last, but it should be the last for the time being. Hope it turns out well.

Crystal and I just spent a remarkable 11 days in Alberta and British Columbia. Was this the best vacation we've ever taken? Quite possible so. We'd heard many times that the Canadian Rocky Mountains stand among the most heavenly and breathtaking landscapes on earth, and nothing on this trip led us to dispute this assessment. Wildlife, wildflowers, waterfalls, glaciers, mountains - whether rugged or peaceful - all delighted the senses. When I viewed the glaciated landscape much of the geologic language I learned decades ago in college came tumbling back: U-shaped valleys, hanging valleys, moraines, triangular facets, drumlins, kames, and more.

The water in glacial areas is mind-blowing. In fast flowing rivers it is milk white. In lakes, the color ranges from sea-foam to teal to cerulean blue, changing moment to moment with dizzying brilliance as sunlight and shadow play games. Nature by Crayola.

This is the first of what I imagine will be many paintings inspired by this trip. The view of Lake Louise is world famous. Among our many photos were a few taken from behind a large flower filled planter on the grounds of the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise hotel. This is not an “official” painting, as I intended it solely to be a study. I didn’t sweat the underlying drawing; rather, I painted this to experiment with things like how to capture the amazing color of the lake water. Greens are created by mixing blues and yellows, and there are myriad possible combinations. When by themselves, colors read differently than they do when they are placed next to other colors. In this painting, the lake color by itself is nothing like the teal of Lake Louise. However, in the context of the rest of the painting around it, it at least begins to imply its luminescence.

I was not pleased with how I had rendered the mountains and glacier at first. They looked amateurish and timid. Sometimes when this happens, I grab a big old brush and start, well, cartooning on top of it all. If it works, great! If it doesn’t: big deal, it’s only a sheet of paper. I saw a quote recently along the lines of “I never lose. I either win or I learn something.” True for me as far as painting goes.

I think this time it kind of worked. I find whimsy and drama and fun in this watercolor. I certainly cannot claim that it captures the majesty of the actual scene; but I think it does show a place you might just maybe want to visit yourself someday.

Informational signs at overlooks throughout the Rockies told us why the glacial lakes have such astonishing colors. Glaciers grind the underlying rock to everything from SUV sized-boulders down to rock-flour. Rock-flour is exactly what it sounds like: rock particles ground as fine as the flour used to make bread. When sunlight tries to penetrate all the dissolved rock-flour in the glacial water, the result is absorption of all the wavelengths EXCEPT the blue ones. Yay! Give me a fist-bump for science.

Crystal and I took a raft trip on the Bow River outside of Banff. Our raft guide proposed a better reason. When asked why the river was such an amazing shade of blue, he thought for a moment and said, "Well, scientists will talk about minerals in the water and such, but I don’t think that’s the truth. The reason the water is blue is because it just makes you feel happy."

I hope this painting makes you feel happy.

As with many artists, painting is what I do to keep cheerful and I have a day job that pays the bills. I'm generally an "in the studio" painter, having tried and enjoyed plein air but not found a way to arrange my painting schedule with enough freedom to make it a habit. Accordingly, I use my photographs as the starting point. Modern telephones allow me to have a camera available at all times, and I often photograph the weirdest things thinking I may one day consider them as subject matter.

My job involves meetings and reports and working at the computer, with occasional field trips. Some years ago I spent a few days in Jamaica on an environmental compliance audit for a client (I was an environmental consultant at the time). The client put me up in one of those gated resorts in Montego Bay, but the work was at their factory some 20 or 30 miles out of town. Here's how it worked: I would wake up, take a swim in the Carribbean, eat some outlandish breakfast at the buffet, clean up, then go wait at the lobby door. The plant manager would pick me up in his beat up 300K+ miles Isuzu Trooper and drive to the factory as though speed limits had no meaning and he just didn't give a damn what he bounced off of along the way. Jamaicans drive on the left and the city of Montego Bay has some roundabouts. Out of habit, therefore, I kept looking the wrong way for oncoming traffic when approaching a traffic circle. This inevitably led to my peripheral vision sensing vehicular missiles approaching from the way traffic was actually flowing, and I learned quickly to shut my eyes whenever we approached a rotary to forestall screaming like a five year old every minute or two.

But eventually we'd get out of town and I could pay attention to the surroundings. Unlike the Disney-like plasticity of the resort, this was presumably the "real" Jamaica. Oh how I wished I could ask the plant manager to stop the Trooper for a minute here or thirty seconds there so I could snap photos of the marketplaces, shanties, undeveloped beaches, people and myriad other visual delights that cried out to be painted. But they were paying me to do a job for them and I couldn't think of an acceptable way to bring it up and represent myself and my company professionally. Ah well.

The factory was in a little town called Sandy Bay. Hundreds of Jamaicans worked there making clothes. Air conditioning was limited to the offices and even there it was about as effective as standing in front of a melting ice cube tray. Behind the factory heading up into the hills were some one or two hundred little residences along unpaved roads, each one in varied states of construction. The locals told me that the homes were built in stages, so if a foundation or wall was unfinished it might stay that way months or years, until the money or time to complete it was found. Often, this might include adding more cinderblocks or partial roof or whatever to the next room or addition, only to stop work part way after the time or money ran short again.  The one constant was bright color, although sometimes too only part of a wall or roof would be painted. It was pretty.

Part of my responsibility had me walking the perimeter of the property. This afforded me the opportunity to take a few pictures up into the hills of Sandy Bay and the beach out in front of the factory. These are my only images of the "real" Jamaica. In fact, other than some tropical flowers, I'm pretty sure that I didn't take any snaps at the resort at all. I know there are millions of people who love such places, and the resorts are surreally nice enough I suppose, but it's not my thing.

This painting shows the hills of Sandy Bay. The woman carrying a package on her head might seem Hollywood contrived, but I can tell you she is representative. I of course painted this some time after that business trip. I'm glad I had the opportunity to see a tiny part of the country outside the resort fence. If I could do it again today, I think I would ask the manager to stop here and there so I could snap some photos of the real deal.

Then I might paint a few more memories.  

FAIR WARNING. This is not even close to my usual light-heartedness.

"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness is like a villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!"

William Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice

If you’ve traveled with me via this website you know that I like to paint pretty things and write quirky observations regarding them. It's not deep or edgy. My stuff generally makes no stronger statement than you'd hear in a conversation between Mr. Rogers and Aunt Bea. This painting veers from that pathway, so I suppose this blog entry might as well be disruptive too.

I am not a biblical scholar or theologian by any means, but experience informs me that Shakespeare was spot on in the admonishment excerpted above from The Merchant of Venice. There is no action or speech so vile that one cannot find a single bible verse to "justify" it. Not in association with the Bible itself, rather by the cold blood sometimes found in the human heart.

So, though I am not a biblical scholar or theologian, I do at least recognize that Romans 13.1 must be read with all of Romans 12 and 13 in order to even begin to place it into the perspective Paul presumably intended. I won’t get into those details here, as scholars, theologians, and clergy have done so eloquently for centuries. They’ve had to - because folks keep insisting on plucking verse 13.1 out of the rest of Paul’s missive to justify genocide, racism and violence. It happened notably in Nazi Germany, under Apartheid, and as part of the U.S. history of slavery and Jim Crow. I cannot speak for intentions, I can only observe that it has been done repeatedly, and there is that commonsense wisdom about what happens to those who forget history.

I had really really really hoped we’d gotten beyond all that. So I was shocked to my core that in 2018 the Attorney General of the United States would in a public speech do exactly what all those slavers and gas chamber jockeys of the past did. He told his minions that Romans 13.1 makes anything the government does okay. Governments and "laws" are not simply peachy keen, they are God-mandated peachy keen. This is not citing scripture for a purpose; it is utilizing scripture as a weapon. 

It is unfathomable to me that the highest legal counsel in the country would have such misguided intentions or downright disrespect for the Constitution, the people, and scripture itself. That he would apply such a long ago discredited biblical interpretation as a tactic. Moreover, it is unacceptable. Something has gotten royally screwed up in this nation if even one person considers this appropriate governance.

The title of this painting is Paul Weeps. I painted it during one furious session. It's quite imperfect. My version of Paul lazily maintains the stereotype that biblical folk all looked like Caucasian hippies. I acknowledge that, in my haste, I painted his tear with an amateurish and very heavy hand. But I wouldn't want to change a thing in this one. I purposefully rendered “Romans 13.1” to look as though it was painted on a wall with blood. I think people who use this verse to justify suffering do just that with the symbolic blood of those they choose to oppress.

I have found it impossible not to add my voice to those who are aghast.

There is an old British nursery rhyme called “This is the House that Jack Built,” written in the whimsical format English professors call a cumulative tale (along the lines of, for example, the 12 Days of Christmas). You say it over and over again, each time adding a new part. What therefore starts as “This is the house that Jack built” becomes “This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built,” after which it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on until, thankfully, you arrive at:

This is the horse and the hound and the horn

That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn

That kept the rooster that crowed in the morn

That woke the priest all shaven and shorn

That married the man all tattered and torn

That kissed the maiden all forlorn

That milked the cow with the crumpled horn

That tossed the dog 

That worried the cat

That killed the rat 

That ate the malt

That lay in the house that Jack built.

None of which has the first darn thing to do with Jack's actual house, not to mention prompting the conclusion that British people are just flat out weird. But you might also appreciate how a child fed a literary diet of this and similar blather can in fact grow up to become a Beatle or member of Monty Python. Since my childhood included many intervals giddily chanting I am Sam – Sam I am – I do not like Green Eggs and Ham, pardon me a moment while I remove all cobble-like objects within a stone's throw of my North American glass house. 

None of which, in turn, has the second darn thing to do with THIS painting. This painting is called The House that Jack Built because (surprise!) it depicts a house that my brother-in-law Jack built. Jack has built many houses for his family over the years; everything from a sort of Hobbit hole buried beneath the earth to Wisconsin’s most spectacular log home to one constructed using insulating concrete forms. This house, between Waukon and Decorah, Iowa, is notable for having a glorious view out of its sunroom and possibly more examples of taxidermy inside than in all of the Museum of Natural History. I painted the view from the sunroom in “Five Deer, Dusting of Snow” (see blog dated February 24, 2018). I probably won’t paint the taxidermy.

This house is special. It just sits there in its perfect setting and prompts a smile. Go visit. Take a fishing pole. Your cell phone will stop working on the way and will only work intermittently enough to infuriate you once you’re there. Maybe that’s the point. You won’t mind because you’ll be happily watching the big open sky and the deer and the (ghosts of ) antelope playing.  

All from the vantage point of the house that Jack built. 

Growing up always near an ocean, I fell prey to the standard stereotypical conclusion that the Midwest has all the natural beauty of a paper placement. No topography, waterbodies limited to farm ponds, and the only thing meeting the generic standard of "pleasing to look at" was - maybe, if you're lucky - a brightly painted red barn in the Old MacDonald vein. If you want to see something in Kansas, goes the meme, you need to find the back road leading to the world's largest aluminum foil origami squirrel. With time and travel I learned otherwise.

Case in point - my brother-in-law's place in Waukon, Iowa. First lesson, there is topography in Iowa. Second lesson, there are trees. It is not pretty country. It is beautiful. I had the astounding experience of observing the two most spectacular sunsets I've ever seen in my life from the vantage point of his house, all within 24 hours.

Jack and Phyllis are hunter/fisher folk. Their property, depicted in this painting, is an excellent locale for their passions. The only days of the year that one or the other or both don't have binoculars sweeping to and fro monitoring the patterns of the deerfoxturkeybobcathawks are the days they are out of town.  

The painting? Well, time of day is morning. As implied by the title, there has been a dusting of snow. Maybe a wee bit o'mist rising from the valley leading toward Patterson Creek. Let's call it February. Five deer? Well, I'm sure there are more of them deering around in the woods ravines fields scrub shrub meadows little ponds ditches rocks streams. That's what the binoculars are for. 

As with, I suppose, many other end of the Baby Boom children - particularly the ones whose parents opted out of "church" - my first introduction to the manger story came from Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas. "And Lo the angel of the lord came upon them, and the glory of the lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid."

And as with, I suppose, many other people of every age in Western culture, my mental image of an angel has been railroaded a wee bit beginning with European art and later transmogrified by Hollywood into any sort of vaguely human figure with optional bird features, weaponry, and glowing head.

All well and good, yes, but my favorite conjuring up of the Gospel According to Luke Christmas narrative is from songwriter Bruce Cockburn's Shepherds: 

They wake up suddenly in the night

There is light

And figures dancing in the sky

Clothed in more colours than the world can contain

Must have really been something for those in the same country shepherds to see...

Merry Christmas, 2017

The opening day of deer hunting season in Maryland is always the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I'm not a hunter but many in my wife's family are, including my brother-in-law Steve and nephew Joshua. When they lived in Laurel, we would always spend Thanksgiving with them. One of the many rituals of those holiday weekends was for me to accompany Steve and Josh (on the so called Black Friday) to their hunting sites at River Valley Ranch so that they could get their stands "just right" for the following dawn. After that, maybe some hiking or - frequently - rabbit hunting. My job during rabbit hunting was to avoid being in the line of fire as they beat the bushes. Steve's joy at one particularly good shot, sort of a twist from the hip movement out of a John Wayne movie, is a hilarious memory.

This painting depicts an area of River Valley Ranch near the chuck wagon cookout site. It's near, but not at, the S & J deer stands, and prime rabbit hunting territory. In that part of Maryland in late November the deciduous trees have lost most but not all leaves and the bare branches serve to highlight the evergreens. Hard to find a better place to while away a pleasant autumn afternoon, especially if you know there'll be rabbit sautéing away in a cast iron frying pan a few hours later.

I painted this several years ago. It's a full sheet watercolor and I've always liked the way it turned out. Just noticed it going through the jpegs, realized that I haven't sent out a blog in a while, and so here it is to help us all remember that Thanksgiving is right around the corner. In so many ways, none of them having to do with the almighty dollar, it's the perfect holiday.  A time to catch one's breath. Peace.

What would you think if I painted too bland?

Would you stand up and walk out on me?

Lend me your eyes and I’ll paint you something

And I’ll try not to, well, suck

As you see, songwriting, even in homage or parody, is not my thing. So….

Here, again, is the Frauenkirche in Dresden, Germany. My first quick little painting of this amazing architecture (see the July '17 blog post "Frauenkirche, a Study") involved two hours, one brush, maybe five colors, and a 9 x 12 panel. The result was, I think, whimsical and fun, but not particularly rich on detail or accuracy. So I wanted to paint another version in which building proportions, depth, and scale would be taken more seriously. I tend go after the “feel” of things in my paintings, and am rarely if ever interested in capturing every detail and nuance, as there are other painters who excel at that approach. But the fact is that this church is majestic, in no small part because it is HUGE, and that’s something the first small “fun” study does not capture. The Frauenkirche has an amazing story, and I refer you again to my July 2017 blog for that summary.

This painting is Big – the canvas measures four feet high and three feet wide – and it took over a month of fits and starts to complete. I owe so much to my painting pals with the Wednesday Night Art Group, because their suggestions helped in this painting’s creation. As is our wont, we all request and/or offer to each other thoughts, suggestions, encouragement, pointers, “Wows,” “Oh Dears,” laughter, and the occasional critical dabs of paint in the color we need but don’t have in our box. Sometimes their suggestions help me because the recommendation confirms to me exactly what I don't want to do. More often they solve some challenge I could not figure out, and that is where my painting friends are pure gold. Lend me your eyes and I’ll walk you through the process, and I’ll try not to put you to sleep.

The first thing needed was an accurate drawing. If I have unlimited time and plenty of erasers, I can draw accurately; however, my painting time is limited so I prefer to cheat (hey, worked for Vermeer). Included in my big ol' box of painting supplies is an otherwise useless little cheapo projector from Best-Buy which I use to project a photo from my phone onto the canvas for tracing, allowing me to draw accurately in much less time. So, thank you very much Mr. Otherwise Useless Cheapo Projector. As you can see, even with this little bit of cheating I prefer to limit details. Who cares about individual bricks and gargoyles, just get the windows and doors and rooflines more or less close-enough, get going, and see what develops.

The next several steps involved my blatantly ignoring various comments and suggestions from the gang.  No, I didn’t feel like painting the sky concurrently with the church. No, I don’t want to use a bigger, or smaller brush. Etc.

However, Ginger caught my attention using a Marine Gunnery Sergeant chewing out a recruit tone of voice. There is a statue of Martin Luther in the public square in front of the church. In my original study, ol' ML was demarcated with about three slashes of paint. In this one, he was done with numerous carefully applied layers of paint that coalesce to represent an actual statue of an actual, albeit faceless, human being. Ginger admonished me to do absolutely nothing else to Martin Statue. He is finished. Complete. Do not screw it up trying to change it.

I listened. And did not ruin the painting trying to alter the statue.

Painting the church itself and the plaza and distant buildings took three sessions, during which I again cheerfully disregarded any and all kibitzing from the WNPG. After that I added the sky. Skies can be tricky. It’s boring to just use Cerulean Blue for skies, but that IS the color of the actual sky we all see every day. In some paintings you can have fun with yellows, reds, purples, pinks, golds, grays and even greens in the sky, but in this painting I did not want the sky to compete with the church, so boring old Cerulean with white clouds was all that I chose to use.

This time Janet offered the worthwhile advice. Janet is usually soft-spokenly polite – along the lines of Georgette on the Mary-Tyler-Moore show. In this case, though, she channeled her inner Rhoda: “I don’t like the clouds. They compete with the church. They’re pulling your eye up and out of the painting. You need to soften them.”

I listened. And the painting improved. Out came a dry brush for some vigorous declouding. Thanks Rhoda.

See what I mean?

Once a painting is only seemingly complete in the sense of having all the canvas covered with paint, the real effort begins. It needs to be finessed by adjustments, alterations, embellishments, subtractions, and little dibs and dabs here and there and everywhere to make it come alive. Think of Bob Ross, the PBS afro-haired hippy painter of old. As he so often famously cheered, your trees should be happy trees so the observer can just sense that there’s a friendly little rabbit just behind that rock. My once and always art instructor Christophora Robeers always stresses the push-pull, lost and found edges, lightest lights relative to darkest darks, and many other intangibles necessary to inch a painting towards that magical state when it is time to "put the brush down, sign it, and get out of there."

Towards this end, I was gravely distressed about the man in front of the statue. He was there, unnoticeable, in the original photo I worked from. In the painting, unfortunately, he was misplaced and wrong, creating with Martin Luther a vertical line through the bottom middle of the painting that is referred to in technical composition jargon as a “remarkably stupid mistake.” I spent over an hour doing everything I could think of to make him less noticeable. Darkened his clothing. Gave him even less definition. This. That. Nothing worked.

Now it was Canan’s and Marcia’s turn. First one, then the other, sometimes it seemed in unison:  “Just Paint over him. Get rid of him. It’s time. Be brave. Just do it!” Not a suggestion. These were when-I-say-jump-you–say-how-high orders. Paint. Him. Out. NOW.

I listened. He’s gone. The painting is done. Or, at least, at that frustrating point where any problem solved just creates another problem that might be worse. As Christophora would say, time to get out of there. Whatever remains in this one that may not be “quite right” is entirely my doing. As noted, so much of what is good in this one is directly the result of wise counsel from the Wednesday Night Painting Group. Cheers to you, one and all.

I get by with a little help from my friends, with a little help from my frrrrr-iennnnnnnnnnnnnds.

Helsinki is a lovely city. Crystal and I had one day to explore it, just enough to give us a taste of its myriad charms. This painting is based on a photo I quickly snapped when we were walking to the Russian Orthodox Church. I liked the juxtaposition of the relatively new (sailboat, delivery van, people in brightly colored garb) against the weary old structures and wharf. I've been having fun lately doing quick little studies on small panels and this was a natural to add to that collection. I was going for misty afternoon, which corresponds to the photo I worked from, but ultimately decided to show some late in the day clearing in the distant sky. Pay no attention if the shadows and lighting consequently make no sense. Artistic Freedom, you know.

So. Little painting. Turned out okay. What to call it?

Canan, one of my painter friends, amuses me because she wastes absolutely no effort in trying to title her paintings. They all have one word names like "Fish" or "Tree" or "Istanbul" or "Cat." It is a very utilitarian approach and I admire her for it. Try as I might, however, I cannot do the same. A painting she might title "Table" I would feel compelled to call "Tuesday Morning Coffee" or "Still Life with Grapefruit and Mug" or "Hannah Wants Cornflakes Today" or "Yes I Know That This Title Is A Pretentious Snoot But I Want To Sound 'Artistic' Besides I'm The One Who Painted The Darn Thing So You Can Just Shut Up."

It occurred to me that this boat might be one that charters out regularly from Helsinki. Its location, along the wharf, as opposed to in the nearby marina, suggested as much. So I spent a ridiculous amount of time Googling every combination of words having anything to do with Finland and sailboats in hopes of learning the name of this particular vessel in order to come up with a pompous title along the lines of "Lars Drinks Coffee and Eats Cornflakes at a Helsinki Wharf Aboard the S.S. Minnow. Thursday Afternoon. Greenwich Mean Time. Ish."

Which I would later edit down to S.S. Minnow in Helsinki Harbor.

However, I do not know the sailboat's name, so this is titled "Helsinki Harbor."

Canan would name it "Boat." I envy her.

I visited Germany in the summer of 2016. My wife works with the Greater Richmond Children's Choir and they were touring the country. I decided at virtually the last minute to join them partway through the tour, and Lufthansa'd my way to Dresden in mid June. I had one day to myself before I would meet up with them.

I have read Slaughterhouse 5 and knew that Dresden had been decimated by Allied fire bombing during World War Two. But as I wandered around the city I foolishly thought to myself - "huh, this must be a part of the town that wasn't bombed and burned." Because the Dresden old city looks OLD - centuries old. I distribute my ignorance equally between jet lag and typical American obliviousness to the rest of the world. But some credit MUST go to the amazing artisans of Europe whose ability to recreate what I would have thought unrecreatable is beyond astounding.

The Frauenkirche was built between 1726 and 1743, replacing a predecessor which had existed since the 11th century. It stood several hundred feet high, cheerfully deflected every cannonball fired at it during the Seven Years War, and was living helled to smithereens with the rest of Dresden in February 1945 as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. lay sobbing in a fetal position in a basement slaughterhouse. When the fires ended there was little left of the church except for the statue of Martin Luther outside it's front door.

And this is how it stayed the entire time Germany was split in two. It wasn't until the 1990s that reconstruction began and it was 2006 before the church was restored. And, again, when you see it, and everything else around it, you would swear it is all hundreds upon hundreds of years old. Martin Luther remains outside the door to welcome one and all.

It is a magnificent structure; absolutely beautiful. I plan to one day paint it on a large scale, with appropriate attention paid to its architectural details and immense and stately beauty. This painting is a quick little study done for the fun of it. While not plein air, it was done using the plein air "timing" of get 'er done because the light's going to change soon.

I really like this one. Hope you do too.

This is the REAL Neva. She is part Bichon Frise and part Maltese, a pseudo-breed that snobs call a Maltichon (pronounced Malty Shawn). Malty Shawn, however, is just a ten dollar French sounding word for “mutt.” I attribute this to the time a light bulb lit over some poodle owner's head in association with adding “adoodle” to the end of the name of whatever puppies resulted from hanky-panky with another breed. Labradoodle, anyone? Goldendoodle? The adoodle advantage, you see, is that breeders can sell “puppies” rather than give away “mutts.” I believe we would be inundated with Horseadoodles, Giraffeadoodles, and Cowpoos if they could figure out how to make it happen.  

Over time, the owners of other breeds wanted in on this action.  Breeders of Bichon Frises and Malteses (both recognized Westminster Dog Show contestants) were more than happy to pretend that BFM puppies were worthy of a fancy mock French name. All of which is way too much information to go through when people ask me what kind of dog Neva is, so my standard answer is that she is, officially, a “Little White Fluffy Dog.”

I say the REAL Neva because when she comes home from the groomer every other month she does not look like this. Those few days she looks clean and cotton-puffy and it is possible to tell that her ears are actually apricot colored and her feet are not really slate gray from dirt. Then reality sets in and she again becomes, to her great pleasure, the dusty scragamuffin dog who you see depicted here. Whether cleaned and groomed or filthy and fuzzy, she is a stone cutie. Now, people with dogs that weigh more than six pounds might consider Neva to be some kind of “toy,” with associated implication of sub-canine status. However, I offer proof of her bona-fides by noting that she has the official canine two speeds (off and on), plays fetch religiously, and goes ape-adoodle beyond belief at the sound of a doorbell. Member of the total dog club, in other words.

I hesitated at first about trying to capture Neva in a painting. Several of my Wednesday Night Paint Group cohorts are such masters at pet portraits that the baseline for capturing animal personality is intimidatingly high. I worried that, in comparison, I might end up painting something that looked more like a Rastafarian collie or pipe-curled iguana. On the other hand, I am a firm believer in the “it's only paint” philosophy. As in – who cares if I failed to get a good likeness? It's only paint. 

In this case, it's only A LOT of paint. Most of this painting was done with a palate knife, utilizing same general artistic technique that non-health-minded people employ when slathering butter on dinner rolls. I worked very quickly and, frankly, had myself a paint-slathering ball. There were after the first session a couple of small details that weren't Neva, but the paint had to dry before I could put the fix in. Now that it's done, this is her, all the way.  Neva.  Or, possibly, Phyllis Diller.

Which brings me to the other point I'd like to share about this painting: how long it took to paint. Many artists dread this question because sometimes you get lucky and knock out a keeper in no time. (Trade secret: we’re all terrified that if we tell somebody that such-and-such a painting only took an hour or two, they'll ask how come it’s so expensive).

Answer: this took 2 hours and a lifetime to paint. Two hours slapping paint around like butter on a dinner roll. A lifetime learning how to do so. The most important lesson learned over those many years has already been mentioned, and it's one of the hardest to learn. Sometimes you just have to wait for the paint to dry before you can fix something. If you don't, you still might pull off a lovely painting, but only if mud is your intended subject matter.     

Neva would say Hi, but it's nap time.

BTW, to any doodle aficionados out there.  I was just kidding!  

Today, March 10, 2017, I started my new job in the Office of Environmental Health Services at the Virginia Department of Health.  But enough about that!  I actually had to leave early on this first day of the rest of my (working) life in order to travel a few blocks to the Richmond Office of Senator Tim Kaine.  I hope my new employers will be forgiving.  

The back story:  years ago, when Mr. Kaine was completing his term as Governor of Virginia, then Secretary of Health and Human Resources Marilyn Tavenner commissioned a painting from me commemorating his service because he was absolutely the "best boss" she'd ever had. What I painted was a watercolor of a scene at Douthat State Park, his favorite Virginia state park.  It hangs above the fireplace in his Richmond home to this day.  

When I painted "Memorials," it occurred to me that this would make a wonderful gift to the Senator in gratitude for his service to the Commonwealth of Virginia and the nation.  Moreover, the symbolism of two great political figures, Washington and Lincoln, would be, hopefully, inspiration to him as he continues to serve the people.  So I contacted Marilyn to see if she could help set this up.  She was more than happy to oblige.  It took about four months but she was tenacious and today it happened.

The senator was extremely gracious, and seemed thrilled with the gift.  He let us know exactly where he planned to hang it in his Washington office, and indicated he will send us a photo of it in his office along with an invitation for us to have lunch with him in the Senate Dining Room.  

A truly delightful man; he even offered to write a note excusing my cutting out early my first day on the job!

This is another painting inspired by a recent visit to Iceland.  This amazing waterfall, named Gullfoss, sends the previously relatively placid river Hvita through two right angle cascades into an extremely narrow gorge where the mist makes it look like the earth is swallowing millions of gallons of water whole.  It's a fabulous thing to see, and unlike Niagara Falls, it is surrounded on all sides by undisturbed natural beauty rather than casinos and Hard Rock Cafes.

Like Geysir (see the blog from February 2, 2017), Gullfoss is part of Iceland's famous Golden Circle.  I suppose this means that I will someday need to paint something from Pingvellir National Park to complete the trilogy.

When I am not painting, I work in the environmental field and my college education is in geology.  So the architecture of Gullfoss – those right angles – is quite interesting to me.  There are any number of reasons some rock erodes with angularity:  mineral orientation, layering, fracturing.  Since Iceland is a baby, geologically speaking, and essentially comprised of volcanic rock sculpted by glaciers and subsequent erosion, it has its own geologic logic.  Essentially, meltwater from Langjokull glacier eons ago found a fissure or two in the basalt (lava rock), viciously slashed a left-right-left pathway through it, and has charged mightily on ever since.  It's a variant of the classic Rock Paper Scissors, with a twist.  When water and rock first meet, rock ALWAYS wins, which is why the falls zig-zag the way they do.  Except that erosion has its own set of rules.  Given enough time (geologists tend to view time in units of millions or even hundreds of millions, of years), water will ALWAYS beat rock.  Come back in a few million years and see.  Gulfoss will eventually be no more.

Enough geology lesson.  Let's discuss the painting.  If you Google Gullfoss images you will see almost nothing other than photographs from this vantage point.  It is a spectacular view.  The thing is, the geologic processes discussed in the previous paragraph rudely gave no consideration whatsoever to the needs of future painters.  The bottom right quadrant is essentially a black mossy monolith of stone that mocks every governing rule of thumb applicable to the composition of an image.  This is not a problem in photography, but it's frankly a booger to paint something solid black receding into the distance.  One of my painting friends suggested that she'd be tempted to not include it.  But then it would not be Gullfoss. 

Also, by virtue of camera limitations and this landscape, most images of Gullfoss tend to be mostly waterfall and not much sky.  I wanted to challenge this.  With all due apologies to Montana, Iceland is also Big Sky Country and I wanted to honor this in the painting. 

Why the title Signour Tomasdottir?  In the early 20th century, Gullfoss appealed terrifically to certain parties as the perfect location for a hydroelectric power plant.  Signour (the daughter of then Gullfoss owner Tomas Tomasson) saved the falls from this fate.  She lived on a nearby farm and loved the beauty.  As part of her protest against destroying the falls, she walked many times from Gulfoss to Reykjavik (120 kilometers) to speak against it.  There is even some suggestion that she may have walked barefoot; I read one history stating that she spoke fervently with bleeding feet.  Ultimately, when it seemed that her efforts had failed, she threatened to throw herself into the falls as her ultimate protest.  Her efforts were successful and today Gullfoss is federally protected land.

If any of this is the something new you learned today, you're welcome.

*Signour’s name, along with many of the other Icelandic names and words used herein, is jammed packed with umlauts and accent marks.  All of which are beyond this blogging platform's ability to harness.  Humor me, just pretend I spelled things correctly.

My wife and I were recently in Iceland, unique amongst all the places we’ve ever visited.  This is my first attempt to capture its wild beauty in a painting. 

In our annual Christmas letter I described Iceland as the landscape of the Moon painted green, black and gold and punctuated by steam.  That’s way too wordy for a painting title, so this is just called “Icelandic Steam.”  While I was painting it I reflected that one of the things that makes Iceland so visually fascinating is the absence of trees.  Quick history lesson:  there were trees when the Norse first settled, but they razed every single one of them creating farms and building boats.  The few trees now growing in Reykjavik were planted for decorative purposes.  Joke told to us by a local:  If you ever get lost in the woods in Iceland, just stand up and you’ll be fine.

The painting depicts the landscape near Geysir and Strokkur.  Geysir (pronounced Geese Ear) is the origin of our English term geyser (according to the infallible Wikipedia, it was the first geologic hot water shooter known to modern Europeans and written about, so the name became the common noun.  Sort of like if the first bearded fat bald guy ever seen was me, then the term for any bearded fat bald guy would be “hey, that guy’s an “Anthony”).  Geysir the geyser is an old geezer - hasn’t erupted in years.  Strokkur, its baby brother, is more hot-tempered and blows its top every five to ten minutes and is therefore doomed to perpetual encirclement by tourists holding fingers on the shutter buttons of their cameras.  Neither Geysir nor Strokkur are shown in the painting; rather, it depicts the landscape of the general area.  I don’t recall traveling more than 15 minutes in any direction in Iceland without seeing steam venting from the ground.  Another local told us that Icelanders leave certain hot springs for the tourists to befoul and zealously keep the best ones their own little secret.  The nerve!  Imagine if we kept all our Grand Canyons to ourselves and only let tourists from Iceland see roadside ditches. 

This was painted in a big room full of fellow members of the Wednesday Night Painting Group (see Link).  As is often my case, I sat off by myself painting as though in a race, with a flurry of jabbing and scraping brush strokes, contributing rarely to the group conversation, and then only to make one of my awful jokes.  (WNPG Observation:  How can you tell when Anthony’s not there?  The jokes are funny for a change).  As is also often my case, I paid very little attention to accurately capturing the actual geometry of the landscape in this painting, and the colors I used are perhaps jarringly cartoonish compared to the real place.  Still, I think it captures the “feel” of Iceland.  I hope you do too.  Of course, if you’ve never been there you’ll have no way of knowing, but you can trust me.  After all, I’m an Anthony.