Forest Nocturne

Forest Nocturne

I am easily disoriented by

by the shortening days

as winter’s breath creeps up

and darkness looms.

But I forget,

and take a walk

that is a little too long

for the allotted daylight.

As the sun begins to settle

behind the trees

and the shadows lengthen

into nothingness,

I feel a presence in the woods.

The warm earth cools

and the rising mist

veils the rock masses

and fallen trees.

And the audience begins to assemble

in their usual places

for the evening concert.

I am the uninvited guest.

So I hasten my pace

towards home.

My book Mr. Hubbard's Heart- a story about one man's journey to discover compassion within himself, has just launched as a book app on iTunes and Amazon. I have been working on this book for close to sixteen years, and it means the world to me to finally have Mr. Hubbard out in the real world. I would love to have a hardback print version produced but the app is really wonderful because the paintings are beautifully illuminated on an ipad or kindle fire, and the music, which was composed by my nephew, Ethan Freeman adds magic to the story.
 Here is a link to iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mr.-hubbards-heart-storybook/id816548683?mt=8
and to Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Authorly-Mr-Hubbards-Heart-Storybook/dp/B00K02EUBS/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

And here is the trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcqnlLKzrZ4

When the Size of a Painting and the Size of a Wall don't Match Up

Sometimes it happens...A person falls in love with a painting they see in an exhibit. They take down the dimensions at the gallery, then go home and measure their wall, and they come to the conclusion that it doesn't quite fit.  In some cases the wall is expansive and the painting is just not quite large enough to engage the space. And in some cases the painting is too big or not the right proportions.  In the past year I have had two clients who originally saw one of my paintings in the gallery, but then asked me to do a similar piece for them, custom designed for a particular location in their home. I love to do this as it allows me to get to know them, and see the environment where the painting will go. It also gives me the opportunity to make the painting more personal.

I painted Oliver's Dream last fall after visiting the client in Hobe Sound, Florida over the summer. They live very near the ocean but do not have a view, so she asked that the painting open the space with a view of the water, and she also wanted to bring some of their tropical surroundings into the room. I used a palette that related to the interior while introducing some new colors such as the vibrant clementine wall.  I  painted a tile floor and worked with multiple point perspective with the eye level on the eye level of someone standing in the room to give depth and a feeling that one could walk right into the painting. I also incorporated some architectural elements from the room, such as the large Palladian windows, and symmetry.

My client asked that their adorable King Charles spaniel named Oliver be the main character in the painting, so he sits rather royally in the arm chair on the left, making eye contact with the viewer.  He loves to chase salamanders so there are salamanders of various colors hidden in the flora of the fabrics as well as on the glass table top and in the flowering vines. The client had especially liked my mermaid paintings so we placed a mermaid sitting on the windowsill, playing the flute for Oliver and the various seabirds. There is also a painting within the painting of her grandchildren, and the couple dancing below the palm trees by the water represents her three happily married sons.

Cello and Painting

Several years ago, I was listening to NPR and I discovered the music of the cellist Zoe Keating. I have never been the same since. Her cello has inspired many the the paintings in my recent show at the Jane Haslem Gallery and has fueled my creativity in general. I put it on in my studio and it makes my mind more fluid and lets emotion rise to the surface. Here are three of the paintings that are directly related to songs from her album "Into the Trees". And here is a link to her website. 

Thank you Zoe.

http://www.zoekeating.com/

Into the Trees

This is a painting I just finished titled "Into the Trees". It is oil on linen, 36" x  48". It will be exhibited at the Jane Haslem Gallery during February and March. There will be a Valentine's Day opening from 5:30-7:30 pm, so come and bring someone you love (spouse, partner, child, significant other, granny or grampa)
There will be a lot of drawings and  paintings, including "Stories from the Woods" and a number of "Love Letters".

Dogs with Wheels

I have always loved seeing a dog in a car, hanging out, acting like he owns the vehicle- proud of his wheels and being a little bit off the ground, for a change. I especially like watching  dogs on vacation, riding in their jeeps, trucks and other recreational vehicles. This selection of "Dogs with Wheels" is inspired by the dogs of Block Island. Each painting is oil on panel, 12" x 16".

The Evening Entertainment

This is a painting I finished recently for a show at Dog & Horse Fine Art in Charleston, South Carolina. It is called The Evening Entertainment. The narrative is open to interpretation, but I think any one who comes home from a long day at work to be greeted by their dogs, will be able to relate.  The painting is oil on linen 36" x 48".  Check out the Dog & Horse gallery website when you have time!
http://www.dogandhorsefineart.com/exhibitions.html

Bugfire

I finished this painting earlier this summer. It is inspired by a book by the same name, "Bugfire" written by the author Jean Heilprin Diehl. The setting for the painting is the Amazon Littlebee House on Block Island, RI. Last summer I was walking by the house and someone was trimming the magnificent hedge that surrounds the property. When I passed by again, I saw that they had made the opening in the hedge into a heart. Jean's novel is about an adolescent girl who is facing some challenges in her family life and finds enlightenment by helping a younger child whose personal challenges are greater than her own. I see the opening in the hedge as sort of a window to the luminosity of the spirit and the fireflies as real and allegorical flickers of light against the impending gloom of dusk on a heavy summer evening. One of my art students, beautiful Caroline, was kind enough to model for the figure. To know why the title of the book, and the painting is "Bugfire" you will have to read the novel when it is published. It is wonderful.
The painting is oil on canvas, 36" x 36"

A Room with a View, and a Family

I recently finished this portrait for a family. It is 44" x 64" oil on linen. The family lives on a lake and they asked that the landscape out the window  be painted in winter so that the lake would be visible through the trees. The room was yellow, so a relationship between the warm interior tones and the violet and blues in the winter landscape happened naturally. Various other elements note things from their personal and professional lives. The boy is an accomplished musician so I gave special attention to his beautiful hands and long fingers- in the painting he is playing Chinese Checkers, but in the painting within the painting, on the right- he is playing the piano. The painting now hangs in the same room that it depicts, so even at night when the sky is dark, they can still enjoy the view.

A Dog's Life and Lucky Dog Animal Rescue

This is a tiny painting I did of my dog Rembrandt who is actually rather large.  It is one of my "A Dog's Life" paintings in which I am trying to express how a dog enjoys a particular place or environment just as we do. In this painting Remy is lying in the field below the Spring House Hotel on Block Island. He has his head lifted slightly to catch the sea breeze. If you could get close enough you would see that his nose is twitching, taking in all the interesting smells that the breeze carries with it- at least for a dog.  Because I love dogs, and love looking at dogs, I have started fostering rescue dogs, until they get adopted. I am fostering for an amazing organization in DC called Lucky Dog Animal Rescue. They rescue dogs from high kill shelters in the south and bring them to the Washington area to find homes for them. Last week they found homes for fifty-four dogs. Seeing the dogs get lifted off the trucks into the arms of people waiting for them, is one of the most moving things I have ever witnessed. The dogs enter their new life looking a little timid. Some of them cower and crouch when their feet touch the ground. Then they look into the eyes of the human who is reaching for them and you can almost hear them sigh.  They know they have been saved and given a second chance at life. I am so moved by this endeavor that I have decided that part of the proceeds from all my A Dog's Life paintings will go to Lucky Dog Rescue so that more dogs can get lucky.

Mrs. Paisley's Night Up

I love this poem by India DeCarmine and it inspired me to do this painting.  In the painting Mrs. Paisley takes a break about half way up, to catch her breath and gaze at the moon. The painting is oil on canvas 36" x 36".

The Gift: Wherein Mrs. Paisley

Rights One Wrong of Her Misspent Youth

When Mrs. Paisley was a child

She wasn’t what you would call wild.

She never deigned to skin her knee,

Bake with mud or climb a tree.

In short, for all of her young age

(when beastly girls were all the rage),

her main aim was taking care

not to disarrange her hair.

Mrs. Paisley eyes an elm,

hitherto within the realm

of things she’d not meant to ascend.

Yet lately she’s discerned a trend

whereby categories shift.

With fine, long limbs, this tree’s a gift.

Mrs. Paisley’s not elastic,

and the angle is quite drastic

of that first limb. While she heaves

her butt up towards  the new spring leaves,

she thinks of neighbors with a view

and hopes they’ve better things to do.

She strains, she gains the branch, how sweet

to feel its curve beneath her feet.

Yet soon she knows that sweeter still

is the second branch; a thrill

attends each branch in turn. Her knee

is skinned as she goes up the tree,

but Mrs. Paisley doesn’t stop

until she’s reached the tippy top.

Here she grins and looks around.

How pleasant to have left the ground. 

The Calm before the Storm

oil on linen 36"x48"

 In this painting a cellist plays alone in a quiet room. As she plays, the room metamorphosizes into an enchanted forest and birds begin to fly in and congregate on the tables and chairs. The cellist’s dogs listen  and are seemingly undisturbed by the visiting birds. Outside the window the sky is getting dark, and storm clouds move in over the city, in contrast to the calm silvery interior. I was inspired to do this painting after reading about birds displaced by the high winds during Hurricane Sandy. Gannets were spotted in New York Harbor, Jaegers at Cape May, NJ, and Petrels on the Hudson River.  I started thinking about the room as a sanctuary, like the calm before the storm, in the face of impending chaos.

The Attraction of Fishing

My initial concept for this painting was to create a “floating room” as if it had just drifted onto the sand at the edge of the water. I have always loved the image/idea of mermaids and all the mythology and folklore that go along with them. I have done several other paintings with them, including the painting “Water Music” in which a mermaid is sleeping in a chair listening to a pianist. While I was working on that painting I did a drawing in which the mermaid was stretched out on the top of the piano and the shape of her body and tail and the long shape of the grand piano just seemed to fit together like the pieces to a puzzle.  In composing this painting I became intrigued by how the shape of the back of the mermaid also reflected the rhythm of the dunes in the landscape behind her.  The title comes from a quote I read from a filmmaker in which he said  “life can both be explained in the same way someone might explain the “attraction of fishing”. I interpret this as our desire to go forward in life is motivated by not really knowing exactly what we might catch if we keep casting our line.  In the painting there is a fisherman in a rowboat, fishing with his dog. There is an interchange of dreams here. It is possible that the fisherman is daydreaming that he may catch a mermaid, and the pianist is dreaming about fishing as he plays, and thus the mermaid has materialized on his piano. The dogs in the painting are not dreaming, but instead they are enjoying the simple bliss of a comfortable chair and the pleasure of being out in a boat in the water, unencumbered by the more complex dreams and desires of their human companions.  The heron in the foreground with the fish is frozen in the moment, one foot in the “real” world and one foot in the dream world of the “floating room”.  The painting is 30" x 42" oil on linen.

Rabbit Summer

"Rabbit Summer" is the third of my three moon paintings composed on a square. The moon in this one has just gone down and the sun is just rising. The woman gardener on the yellow striped sofa tried to stay awake to keep the intrepid rabbits from eating her vegetable garden. But she dozed off....not even her faithful dog knows how to handle the situation. The painting was inspired by my own gardening challenges this summer when a bumper crop of rabbits sprung up in our neighborhood and devoured all our lettuce, radicchio and green beans. Fortunately the tomatoes were spared.

"Rabbit Summer" is oil on linen, 48" x 48".

Goodnight Moon

This painting is titled "Goodnight Moon". It is oil on linen, 48"x48". It is the second in my summer series of moon paintings. ("Moon River" is in an earlier post)

 Many of the elements of the painting are inspired by the wonderful poem/children's book by Margaret Wise Brown that has lulled so many children to sleep.  It starts off:

"Goodnight Moon...

Goodnight room 

Goodnight moon 

Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.

Plutarque

This is a portrait I did late this spring. The people who own this beautiful dog, asked that he be painted from behind- that it suited his personality. They also sent me a snapshot of Plutarque in this pose and extra pictures of the California Coast. I had difficulty parting with the painting when I finished it, as I had become fascinated with the dog and who he really was. So I asked his family to please write his biography to go with the image on my blog. It is wonderful. The painting is 20" x 24" oil on panel.

PLUTARQUE a.k.a. Mr. PLUME

After moving to California, I started looking for a new four-legged friend.  First place I looked at was the SPCA website.  The requirements were simple: a male small enough for me to carry if needed.

After entering these criteria on the website I saw his picture.  Because he is black and white, after being captured roaming the streets he was named Domino.  When I called the SPCA I was told that an adoption was in progress.  But a few days later he was still on the website.  I called again and got the same answer.  A week later, same thing, so we decided to make the trip to the SPCA.  It was Labor Day weekend 2000.  There he was, waiting to be adopted with only three days left before being euthanatized.  We were told that he had been rejected because he had kennel cough (easily treated), he was labeled aggressive (true toward men) and finally because of a lack of connection (when you meet a dog in a room where other animals have been brought in before, the dog is of course more interested in sniffing around than in “connecting” with you).  If not adopted that weekend, “Domino” would die the following week.  As I could carry him, he was young (not quite a year old) and healthy, the decision was easy.  We filled out the forms, gave him a new name and took him home.

The tradition in France is that the first letter of the name of a dog is different each year.  He was born in 1999 and that year the letter was P hence Plutarque, famous philosopher.  For a lot of people that name is difficult to pronounce and very quickly it was abbreviated into “Plu”.  When my Mom saw him she immediately called him “Plume” (meaning feather in French because of his tail) and the name stays.

Aside from being abused (we couldn’t touch him, especially the head, cuddle him) and left alone, Plume didn’t know much.  He spent the first few days running in the backyard, finding a way to escape (being very successful and us being very worried, but coming back home after a few hours), barking at himself when facing a mirror, forgetting to eat and literally falling asleep after hours of running, smelling, exploring, listening and hunting gophers.  We spent 3 months taking him to school to teach him some basic commands (the “Come” command never worked and still doesn’t), interact with other dogs and human beings and learn that not everybody wants to hurt him.  It helped him somewhat but it took quite a few more months before we could pet him without him being scared.  As he didn’t have a normal puppy life he had to be taught everything.  A couple of weeks were enough for him to enjoy going for a car ride.  One day I finally drove with him to a somewhat isolated beach.  We were on the bluff when he sat down and just looked.  Mesmerized, fascinated by the space, the smell, the noise, not one muscle moving.  That’s when I took the picture.  What was he thinking?  I will never know.  There was nobody, I let him free and he took off.  Running, on the beach or at the edge of the water, running while looking at the birds flying, running but keeping an eye on me, running until he was exhausted and came back to have a drink and let me put his leash back on.  He was happy.  He was free.  Every chance I had to let him free on the beach I did it.  And every time, I just watched him running free, happy, running until his legs couldn’t carry him and he comes back lying down beside me.

One day, Plutarque went in the guest bedroom.  On the bed there was an old teddy bear given years before by a friend.  It didn’t take him long to “steal”, carried him to the yard and “adopt” it as friend.  From that day on he carried it around, cleaned it, took it hunting with him and slept with it.  I patched the poor thing as many times and as long as I could but after more than 7 years I finally had to put it in the trash.  This teddy bear was the first of many other fluffy friends.  Mr. Plume is well known in the neighborhood for running and barking at passing by bikers or pedestrians with one of his toys in his mouth or having meeting with his toys around a gopher’s hole.

Plutarque adopted me and was very protective (sometimes too much) very quickly.  It took him longer to be the same with Mike, my husband, although he loved playing rough with him.  Months of patience and love were needed for him to trust us. 

Plutarque is different.  Too much abuse when he was a puppy has left indelible marks.  He is independent but needs to have his people around.  He needs space and fresh air and to run in the yard but he is able to spend hours by the door of my office, protecting me and ready to go wherever I go.  If I had to define him I would use words such as freedom, independence and solitude but also trust, protection/possession, need of human contact and unconditional love for his people.

Moon River

I finished "Moon River" this week. It is the first time I have done a painting on a square canvas. I am  oriented toward horizontal rectangles, so it was interesting composing on a square. I decided to  work off the symmetry and  put the vanishing point in the center of the canvas, creating a kind of vortex around which to compose. The river recedes beyond the vanishing point and the other diagonals in the interior recede to two other vanishing points on the same horizon line outside of the picture plane. The song "Moon River" has many associations for me. The earliest is of my mother playing it on the piano when I was a small girl. As I got older I came to imagine that as she played it, she dreamed about a more romantic period of her life, when she didn't have four little kids running around her. I loved to sit next to her and watch her face, while she played, with her eyes softly closed.  I can remember reading the title and lyrics over and over again. I was always mystified by the words "Dream maker, you heartbreaker, wherever you're going I'm going your way." "Moon River" is oil on linen, 48" x 48"

Moon River beginnings

This is the underpainting for the painting I am currently working on. It is another "floating room"interior. The title is "Moon River".  It is oil on linen, 48" x 48".

The First Mate

I finished this painting last Friday.

In August we spent a week, or almost a week because of Hurricane Irene, on a lake in the Berkshires. It was a very quiet lake with only a few canoes or kayaks gliding in and out of the coves. A man lived in the cabin next to ours. Every couple of hours he would come out of his cabin and get in his canoe with his dog. The dog would move gracefully to the front of the canoe and stand looking straight out with his legs up on the bow like a proud masthead. The man would then paddle him the full length of the lake and into the marshes beyond. One day we were out in our kayaks and paddled close to the dog in the canoe and the man told us his story. He had adopted the dog from a very rough urban kill shelter. The dog had been returned previously by three foster homes because he was aggressive. He had a number of scars from the fights and abuse he had suffered. The man adopted him and brought him to his home on the lake where he could live quietly and unthreatened. The canoe outings soon became the focus of the dog's (and the man's) day. The dog waited at the door of the cabin patiently until the man made a move as if it was time for a paddle. Then he would run to the dock and take his place. A magical relationship had formed for both of them. It was hard to imagine him as an aggressive dog, as we saw him gliding calmly, smoothly, elegantly across the lake, in his canoe with his man paddling soundlessly behind him.

Water Music-A Mermaid's Lullaby

I just finished this painting and it left today in a truck to Studio E Gallery in Palm Beach Gardens. My studio is very empty now. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to paint larger and wonderful to know that someone has space in their lives for a big painting. It feels like suddenly being able to take a deep breath of fresh air. Like my last painting, "Blues for Dogs", "Water Music" involves an interior/exterior space with one merging into the other. The idea of a "floating room" has intrigued me for some time, and I have done sketches considering this concept, but this is the first painting where I have actually explored it fully. I plan to do more with it. The title "Water Music" comes from the suites composed by Handel which were first played by musicians on a barge on the River Thames for King George I and his close friends. The story goes that the barge moved along with the tide, and the King liked the music so much he asked the musicians to play it three times. In this "Water Music" the sound coming from the piano is so beautiful it is drawing creatures from the sea to come and listen. For the mermaid, it is a lullaby.