Heading up to the Cape

At last! I felt the beginning of this trip would never come, I feel like a kid at Christmastime. Today I drive up to Cape Cod for a week of painting, a bit of rest and fun.

The truck is packed with tons of painting panels and plein air art supplies, the necessary "techie" stuff (gps, cell phone etc.) and enough clothes to get me through the week.

The drive is long, about 6 hours with a straight shot through, but with gas, bathroom and food breaks, it will take about 8 hours. On the other side of this trip, is my gracious host and dear friend, Doug and I'll be staying with him all week. He's a real Cape Cod guy, and knows the place like the back of his hand. No doubt, we will be eating plenty of lobster and oysters this week.

I hope to be able to post photos of the Cape as well as photos of paintings as they come along. This painting is from last year on the Cape. Sunsets are tough because you cannot work it fully "from life" - this final version was created from a very quick study I had done (and lots of hand written field notes) as well as a photograph.

Will the rain ever end???

I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in PA, we had have an incredible amount of rain. This means that I've been spending a lot of time in the studio working on still life work and larger paintings from the plein aire studies I've done when the weather was nice.

This is the most current still life I've been working on - it is a work in progress, it has quite a bit more to go. The original intention was to put a branch of white dogwood on the right side of the painting, but I missed the window of opportunity and the dogwood flowers are now long gone - so on to plan two. I'm still working on plan two . . .

The size of the support is very unusual, 9 inches high by 24 inches long. I had to plan carefully and chart out a "golden mean" graph on the support before I began painting so that everything held together design wise.

Titles of paintings don't come until they are finished, so this is just a plain old "still life with ginger jar" right now.