Works In Progress

Four weeks.  Four wedding paintings.  That's the spring wedding rush in this studio.  At the moment, three of the paintings are underway and the fourth will start this weekend.

As mentioned in my last post, the first of these paintings didn't start very well.  The concept was good, but my execution wasn't.  While waiting for the first dance, I had started putting in the outdoor environment, with the idea of putting the bride, groom, and others in later.  That method didn't really fit with the way my brain works and I ran into all sorts of issues once the people started going in.  So the next day in the studio, I wiped it out and started over.  This let me get the important parts of the painting - namely, the couple and family members - positioned where they made the most compositional sense.  That painting is now nearly finished and here's how it looks right now (click on the images to enlarge):

The second painting got off to a great start.  It was a surprise for the bride and groom - they wanted an artist but the bride's mom said "nope, too expensive, not in the budget", while at the same time already having me lined up to do just that.  I love surprises like that!  We decided that the subject of the painting would be the return walk down the aisle at the end of the ceremony.  And the bride and groom gave us the perfect setup.  So when they spotted me painting away at the reception, they were over the moon.  This was one of those paintings where everything was working from the get-go, which made it loads of fun.  No wiping it out in the studio the next day!  Instead, I've made some progress on it and here's how it stands right now:

Last weekend's painting required a road trip to Atlanta.  I am NOT a fan of driving in Atlanta.  So I hit the road way early and took the scenic route down through Sylva and Franklin, rather than driving interstates all the way.  Got to Atlanta and ran into seven lanes of traffic slowed to a 5 mph crawl because an 18-wheeler was parked on the side of the road.  Yep, it wasn't blocking anything.  Sheesh. But I'm glad I gave myself plenty of time.  And this painting was a Special Case.  The couple had booked another artist, but she backed out with just a few weeks to go.  So in order to uphold the honor of wedding painters everywhere, I took on the job.  The couple wanted the subject to be the first dance.  To liven up the composition and color, we decided to place them outside in the courtyard, which was the bride's favorite part of the facility anyway.  So here's how the third painting stands right now:

So one painting is almost done, two are in about the same level of completion, and a fourth starts Saturday.  I'm spending a lot of time in the studio and really having a good time.

The Wedding Season Has Begun!

My 2019 wedding season kicked off yesterday.  I was the live event artist at the wedding of a lovely couple who got married at the Dennis Vineyards near Albemarle, North Caroline, which is a bit east of Charlotte.  It was a lot of fun to get back into the swing of the wedding painting thing again.

When the bride and I were planning what to put on canvas, she was torn.  She wanted it to show the first dance, but she also wanted to see the beautiful vineyards.  Well, this is a painting, and I can put anything I want anywhere I want.  So our idea was to show the first dance outside, on the lawn, with the vineyards in the background.  Good plan.

All went normally for me for a while.  I arrived early, talked with the event planner and venue manager, got set up, met the bride and groom, and started taking reference photos of everything.  I continued taking photos all during the ceremony.  Since the ceremony was outside, this gave me an indication of the direction and color of the light, how any breezes affected hair and dresses, and some idea of how the people looked in the landscape.  After the ceremony, I tagged along with the photographer and videographer as they worked with the newly-married couple and got some really good references.  Then we moved inside and I shot a ton more photos during the first dance.  Then it was time to get to work on the painting.

My approach was to do a very rough block-in of the landscape, then put the various figures into it.  Sounds like a good idea, right?  Well, I took it too far.  When I started putting figures into the landscape, the landscape had a lot to say about where the figures went, which wasn't necessarily where I wanted them to be.  Not only that, but I had to wipe out the landscape underpainting (which was still very wet) to paint the figures in.  And the brushstrokes for my figures picked up the remnants of the green paint and tinted everything.  To top it all off, I thought my figure drawing was for crap.  Sheesh.

Fortunately, the couple and guests were quite impressed by what I managed to get done in a fairly short amount of time.  I had a great time talking with many people, from the 4-year-old flower girl to an 80-something gent.

Back in the studio today, I plopped the painting on my easel and studied it.  I decided that the basic idea and composition were fine, but execution was sub-par.  So a lot of thinner and some scrubbing with a stiff brush removed most of the still-wet paint.  Next was to block in the dancing couple, and that went much better than the first effort.  Then I did a good bit of thinking and planning on how to put in the rest of the key figures, and how to get the landscape to support the composition.

Result?  A much improved structure in which to paint the people, while showing relationships, emotions, and activity.  Lesson learned: don't paint the background first!  Indicate the setting, but only roughly.  Then block in the key people.  THEN develop the painting all over.

So NO, you can't see it right now.  I'll show a work-in-progress when it's a bit further along. 

A New Toy

I've liked sports cars almost all my life.  I've had a few, too: '70 Opel GT, '69 Alfa Romeo Spider, '80 Triumph TR7, '68 Triumph GT6+, '76 MG Midget, and an '85 Porsche 944.  And I had a '91 Taurus SHO, which was the factory hotrod version with a screaming Yamaha engine and a 5-speed manual transmission.  The last of the sports cars was the 944, which we sold in about 2001.  I've had small trucks and a Volvo ever since.

But the sports car bug never left.  I have subscriptions to a couple of car magazines that kept the fire going, and periodically I'd look at eBay, Craigslist, or Bring A Trailer, just to see what was there.  The fire really got stoked last year when one of my magazines started a series on a '71 Alfa Romeo Spider that they bought and began fixing up.  I've always had a soft spot for the Spiders.  I think they're one of the most beautiful production cars ever made, with sleek and elegant lines.  So most of my eBay, Craigslist, and Bring A Trailer perusals focused on Alfas.  Just to, y'know, see what's out there.  That's all.

Last year, a Spider popped up on Bring A Trailer and it was right here in the Asheville area.  It sounded pretty good, so, y'know, just to see what's out there, I connected with the guy to check it out.  Well, his definition of "pretty good" and mine weren't the same.  The Alfa was completely worn out.  The paint was faded, top was shot, steering vague, oil pressure near zero, it smoked, interior needed to be replaced, wires hanging down from the dash, you get the picture.  I didn't bid.  It wound up selling for about $9,500, and needed that much more work in order to be a $10,000 car.

A couple of weeks ago, I just happened to be on eBay (not looking for anything, I swear) and there was a really nice '87 Alfa Spider.  From the photos, it looked like it had been well cared for: the paint was in good shape, advertised with no rust (a BIG issue with Alfas), had the original top with a clear rear window, and supposedly ran well.  The seller's writeup said all the right things that an Alfa owner would recognize and it looked to me like he was (a) honest and (b) really knew what he was talking about.  I thought, dang, that's nice, it's gonna go for big bucks.  The opening bid was really low at $5250, and I expected it would sell for at least double that.

As the week went on, nobody bid.  Nobody.  Finally it was an hour before the auction was due to end and there were still no bids.  My stress level went off the scale - should I bid on it?  Yes? No? Yes?  Finally Janis said, look, you know you want it, just buy the damn thing.  So I waited until the last minute, in case there were other goobers like me watching, and threw in my bid for the opening amount.

I won the auction.

So now I own a 1987 Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce (pronounced "vel-OH-chee").  As it turned out, the seller was a fantastic guy who gave me what he knew of the history of the car.  He had only put maybe 300 miles on it during 8 years of ownership, and kept it in his garage, where it was usually blocked in by his family's other cars.  There was a good bit of recent work that fixed some common Alfa problems.  He and I hit it off really well - we both saw ourselves as caretakers of the Alfa.  Nobody's a "caretaker" of a Toyota.

I arranged to have the car shipped from Annapolis, Maryland, here to Mars Hill, North Carolina.  The car arrived late Friday afternoon.  I spent the weekend fiddling with the car and going through all the spares, accessories, parts, manuals, and other items that the previous owner included.  On Monday, I got the car licensed and put the tags on.  On Tuesday, it got a new set of tires, since the old ones were around 12 years old.  Then I went ripping up and down some of the winding back country roads around my home.  Just to test it out, you know.

Impressions?  This is a really nice survivor.  It's certainly not perfect, but it has been driven, maintained, and lived with by owners who took good care of it.  It's a very physical car to drive.  By that, I mean that it does not have power steering, so it takes a lot of effort to crank the wheel.  It has a manual transmission that, in typical Alfa fashion, has synchronizers that quit working in probably the first year.  It's loud, it vibrates, it's immediately responsive to every steering/throttle/brake input, and it demands that you PAY ATTENTION to what you're doing.  But if you do that, damn, it is such a sweet car!

That drive exposed a few things that need to be addressed.  But then, I expected no less.  None of the issues are serious and I can take care of all of them but one - I gotta have a shop replace the rear wheel bearings.  Other than that, the car is eager to go play on these back roads.

I needed a car like this like a hole in the head.  But boy, I really LOVE this car!

Studio Projects

I've got a whole bunch of projects going on in the studio right now.  They keep lining up in the queue and piling up faster than I can get 'em done.  It's frustrating in that there's so much that I want to do, but it's also exciting, in that I already have enough to keep me busy full-time for months.  And that's without new projects that are going to crop up.  So here's a look at what I've got going.

First off, I have a double-portrait commission.  A wonderful couple from Greensboro recently got married and wanted an artwork to commemorate the occasion.  What we decided on was a charcoal and pastel portrait of the two of them together.  I got with them for a photo session, figured out which photos told the story the best, and got started.  Double portraits are usually tricky.  The first figure usually goes in without too much trouble, but the second will kick my butt.  That's because I have to match the size, lighting, and technique to the first figure.  So in addition to getting a good likeness and bringing life to the image, there are these other issues that have to be considered.  It can be frustrating, but it's also fun.

I'm doing a series of portraits of a wedding planner.  Mary Bell is one of the very best wedding planners I've worked with.  She's on top of every detail about any event, keeping vendors like me in line, and making sure everything goes off like clockwork, all while making it easy and stressless for the couples and guests.  I had Mary in the studio recently for a photo session.  Two charcoal and pastel artworks are now done.  The first image is in line with my series of figurative works: high-contrast lights and darks, very dramatic.  The second is more like a portrait, with the value contrasts dialed back and better lighting on her face.  Here are the two images for comparison.  You can click on the images to see larger versions.

Mary #1

Mary #2

Another new figure series is in the queue.  Jazmin, one of the regular models for my Wednesday night life sessions, came to the studio for a photo session a while back.  Jazmin is a lively young lady, very spirited, a bit of a show-off (in a good way), and a natural in front of a camera.  There are a lot of images that are just screaming to get caught on paper or canvas.  I haven't done one from these photos yet, but here's one from one of her life sessions last year.

Jazmin #4

Meanwhile, as I've noted in previous posts, I've been looking at the artwork of Nick Alm for quite some time.  The way he puts multi-figure compositions together is pretty incredible.  They are based on a strong abstract composition that underlies the whole canvas, and the figures are placed so that they comprise the structure and tell the story.  Here's one example:

Nick Alm: "Bacchanal"

Here you can see that the figures in white form an upside-down triangle.  The figures on the right merge into one large dark shape, while on the left, the wall, chair, man's trousers, and shadows all blend into another single dark shape.  The girl in the center is set off by her long dark hair and the detail in her face and figure.  This is only one example - Google "Nick Alm" and you'll see dozens of examples.

I wanted to try to put some of his approach into practice and see how it works for me.  I have several thousand photos of weddings and receptions, so I raided my stash for reference images and am putting together a test painting.  Here's what it looked like a week ago:

This was okay, but there were some serious issues.  One, I used Alm's muted palette of largely black, white, and grays.  That works in paintings of a bunch of people sitting around cafes getting drunk, but doesn't work in a celebratory situation like a wedding.  It needed to feel lighter and happier - it needed bright colors.  Two, although the three bridesmaids were facing the viewer, none of the men were.  In fact, three had their backs to us.  In a painting that's meant to memorialize an event, you want to memorialize the people who were there, so you need to see their faces.  So I made some changes.  Here's how it looks now:

Obviously, I blew up the reception hall and moved everybody outside.  Were they really outside?  Who cares?  It's a much more cheerful picture.  I reversed the guy on the right, changed the guy he was talking to into a grandmother, and revised the figures on the left.  Much better.  Now I need to add some more figures: at least one, maybe two, around the guy sitting on the left, and another sitting on the right.  But what I've learned is that I can take Alm's approach of creating a large abstract composition, featuring large areas of light and color, make them into people, and the painting will work.

This still has a VERY long way to go, but it's been an interesting trip so far.  I've been learning a lot about composition and tying things together - all lessons that I can carry into this year's crop of wedding paintings.

In addition to all this, I've been keeping my Wednesday night life group going.  It's not always successful for me.  I had a string of three weeks in a row where my works were not just substandard, they were pretty bad:

And we had a beautiful model that night.  Sheesh.  Since then, though, things have been going better.

So that's what's going on in the studio right now.  Lots of stuff to do and I'm excited about digging into all of it even more over the next few months!

Losing a Dog

Our little Soozzee has left us.  As I've described in several recent posts, she was suffering from a variety of ailments: deaf, blind in one eye and almost blind in the other, Addison's disease, arthritis, bladder stones, a thyroid condition, a skin condition, and worst of all, dementia.  Since my post last month, the dementia took more and more of a toll.  She got lost in the house pretty much all the time. She used to bark when she wanted us to get her down from the bed, but she stopped doing that.  We think she probably just forgot about barking.  Her inner GPS (the primary subject of my last post) got significantly worse.  She just seemed lost all the time.  She had often had trouble standing up and would stumble more on her walks.

Soozzee still had her happy moments, though.  She enjoyed parts of her walk: she'd stop and sniff at anything, even if she didn't know which way to go.  If we got out "the light" in the evening (a laser light that she has chased around the house since she was a little pup), she'd still pounce on it, but only for a minute and then she'd forget it was there.  And she liked to have some reassuring pettings.

But it was clear that she wasn't going to last long.  And on Saturday, April 6, that day came.  We did the morning walk and she kept going off the wrong way.  After getting back in the house, she wandered around lost, and while walking down the hall, she pooped without breaking stride.  The poor girl would never, ever, have pooped in her own house if she was at all aware.  The fact that she didn't know enough to control her own body was our signal that she was, to all intents and purposes, gone.

We called our vet, the Animal Hospital at Reems Creek, and made an appointment.  The people there have taken wonderful care of our dogs for almost 15 years and were almost as torn up about it as we were.  So just after noon last Saturday, they gave little Soozzee the injection and she passed away in my arms.

Good God, I wanted to die.

We're trying now to adjust to life post-dogs and, damn, it's hard.  For years, our lives have been largely structured around Soozzee and her sister Indy, who passed away a bit over a year ago.  At 9 am, it was time to wake up the dogs (yes, you read that right) and take 'em on their morning walk, then give 'em their meds.  Around noon, it was a ride in the car to take care of errands.  Around 4-5 pm, it was their evening walk and then dinner.  At about 7 pm, it was play time, usually with "the light".  Around 11 pm, one last time outside to do their business, take their evening meds, and off to bed.

Now, I'll be thinking "oh, it's 4 pm, gotta take Soozzee on her walk .... uh, damn ..."  It's a great big emptiness where Soozzee and her sister used to be.  Janis and I don't quite know how to fill it.  We'll get there, but it's going to take a while.  I still tear up over Indy's passing and that was well over a year ago, so it'll probably take at least another year or so to get over Soozzee.

I've been asked several times if we're going to get another dog.  No, we won't.  For one, it's unfair to any dog to be asked to fill in the hole left by another.  For another, there are things that we want to do, mainly travel, that were difficult or impossible with two dogs that were special needs.  And we just need to figure out life as empty-nesters.

Ever since I started writing this blog, there have been occasional posts about our two sweet Shih Tzus.  This is probably the final one.

Goodbye, little Soozzee.  You have my heart forever.

A Dog, Dementia, and Directions

I've posted before about my dog.  She's a sweet little Shih Tzu who's going on 16 years old.  For the past year or so, dementia has gradually been taking hold in her little brain.  She's not gone, not yet, but the dementia is slowly taking her capabilities.  One of them is her sense of direction.

Now, Soozzee has never been much of an outdoor dog.  She's always been a bed potato.  That's like a couch potato, only her happy place is our bed.  Walks are not something she looks forward to.  From middle-age on, she got more and more resistant to heading out.  Dragging her along on her leash wasn't fun for either of us.  So we got a dog stroller.  I put her in the stroller for the outbound trip, take her out to the farthest point, put her on the ground, and she will trot, or even run, back home.  And it got to where she seems to enjoy the outbound trip.  She'll stand there, looking forward, sniffing the air, taking it all in.  Then at some point she'll say "enough", and turn around in the stroller and start pawing at the back.  Time to head home, Dad.

Lately, though, dementia seems to be hitting her internal GPS.  After a stop to do her business, or just sniff, or whatever, she'll forget which way is home.  She'll look both ways and then head out in the wrong direction.  I'll turn her around, and she'll say "nope, home is THIS way", and head off in the wrong direction again.  This will happen over and over.  "C'mon, Soozzee, home is THAT way."  "No, Dad, it's THIS way."  "Soozzee, it's THAT way."  "No, THIS way."  Aaarrggh.

But I found a trick.  I put her back in the stroller and turn her around a couple of spins one way, then a spin the other way.  That seems to hit the reboot button on her inner GPS.  Then I head away from home for maybe 10-15 feet.  That's like the outbound leg for her, so when I put her down again, she heads off in the correct direction.  At a trot, tail up, heading for home.

Does it work all the time?  No.  But it usually does.  And sometimes I have to do it two or three times on a walk.  But a Dad's gotta do what a Dad's gotta do.

It's sad to see her slowly going downhill.  Her diminished capabilities mean that our social lives are very limited - we rarely get to go out to dinner, don't go to movies together anymore, and don't take trips.  Soozzee gets really stressed when she's left alone in the house now, and somebody has to be around to watch her when she wanders, or be there to give her her meds, or take her on the walks.  Sometimes she's a pain in the butt, sometimes she's funny, and sometimes she's frustrating.  But this old dog has earned every bit of consideration we can give her.  And I'm just happy she's still with us.

Different Meanings in Artworks

Ever noticed that different people see different things in artworks?  One person will look at a painting and see something very peaceful, while the next person will wonder what demons are eating at the artist.  What's worse is when a critic writes a review that pontificates on the artwork's meaning and you've got no clue where this critic, who supposedly is enlightened, comes up with that interpretation.  And the worst thing is when said critic says that his/her meaning is the only one there is, leaving you and your very different interpretation out in the cold.

The truth is that we all come to an artwork with our own biases, likes, dislikes, viewpoints, personal histories, experiences, random mood of the day, and all the other baggage that goes along with being human.  So we all will react differently to the same piece of art.  While it's true that some people will be able to make more educated guesses at what the artist might have meant, or some people may be able to better identify which artworks are of higher quality than others, it's still true that each individual's experience of an artwork is unique to them.  As an artist, I can't control how you respond to something I painted.  I can only do my best to put my own intentions on canvas.  After that, the artwork is on its own, and you will see what you will see.

This hit home to me many years ago.  I was a continuing-education student at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.  This was a place where even the continuing-ed students were very serious about their work.  Our painting instructor gave us an assignment of doing a still life at home.  Sounds pretty simple, right?  So I went home and got to work.  My approach was to put a bunch of stuff into a pile and start re-arranging, tossing things out, and simplifying, until I got to something that was visually interesting.  Then I slung some paint.  Here's the result:

I was a Navy officer at the time, so that was my cover ("hat" in civilianese).  The teddy bear was mine from when I was one or two years old.  I liked the fact that there was a strong black/white contrast with interesting yellow shapes, all very harsh compared to the soft texture and color of the teddy bear.  Mission accomplished - there was the homework still life painting.

In the next class, the instructor had us critique each other's work.  When they got to mine, nobody said a word about the "strong black/white contrast with interesting yellow shapes, all very harsh compared to the soft texture and color of the teddy bear."  Instead, I heard a backstory about how the father had gone off to war and left a child at home, and the father wasn't coming back and the child was going to grow up without a dad, and this was one of the saddest paintings ever made.

Say what?

I could see that trying to explain what I'd been thinking about when putting the painting together didn't matter one iota to the people looking at it.  They created a much more interesting story than I ever could, and who am I to mess with that?  Since then, I don't worry too much about what others might see in a work.  In fact, when I do an artist talk, I try to get the audience to tell me what they see in the work.  Depending on the responses, they may never hear my own thoughts.  The only time it concerns me is when the predominate opinions are way off the mark from my own intention, which means my execution didn't match my intention.  I've learned a lot about my own works from hearing what people say about them.

Going back to the sample painting above, I eventually decided that the choice of the hat and teddy bear were not random and not just about colors and textures.  The teddy bear was the very young innocent me, while the hat was the grown-up me, and I was saying something about both of them being present at the same time.  I gave the painting the title "Now and Then".

So when you look at some of my artwork, don't ask me what I was trying to say.  Tell me what you see in the painting.  That's much more interesting.

More New Works

I've been fairly productive in the studio this month.  I've been able to do quite a few charcoal and pastel works, both from life and from a photo session with Natalie.  I've also done a couple of oil paintings, started work on an experimental oil painting, had a photo session with another model, and this afternoon had a photo session for a commissioned portrait.  That's a lotta studio activity!

I'm not going to snow you under with a whole bunch of artworks all at once.  So to start with, here are five charcoal and pastel works of Natalie.  She's a wonderful model - a tiny young woman, beautiful, fairly reserved, but with a wild child buried inside.  She has worked with my Wednesday night life group quite a few times.  I've found life sessions to be invaluable - a critical exercise for anybody who calls themselves a figurative artist.  But one thing that life sessions can't do, at least not in a single 2-hour session, is probe much below the surface.  The model gets in a position and then holds it.  All facial expression goes away.  Don't believe me?  Try to hold a smile or frown or whatever for more than a few seconds.  It doesn't work.  Besides that, if you try, it comes across as false.

That's where photo sessions can be valuable.  Photos can capture momentary facial expressions or body positions that can't be held for more than a fraction of a second.  That's where a lot of personality is really revealed.  So, to try to capture some of Natalie's spirit, we did a photo session in the studio late last fall.  Here are several artworks resulting from that session as well as one Wednesday night life session.

Natalie #4

 I love the hand positions in this one.  She was just turning around, not even trying to pose, and there was some of her natural elegance.  In the artwork, I played up the elegance and simplified a few things to keep the focus on the pose and hands.

Natalie #5

 The reference photo had a good bit to recommend it: an interesting composition between her torso and arm, and the heavy shadows, particularly covering her eyes, gave her a mysterious air.  So that's what I worked with.  The charcoal and pastel dust trickled down the paper and I decided to leave it.  Hey, this is an artwork, not a photo!

Natalie #6

 Natalie is a lively young lady and I wanted to try to capture that aspect of her as well.  Smiles and laughter can be very hard.  That was certainly true here: getting the right balance of likeness and spirit kicked my butt.  But I think it got there.

 Natalie #7

This was another butt-kicker.  For one, it was done on black Canson paper.  This was the first time I'd used a black, and it required some different thinking.  All my other works have been on Canson papers with a mid-value tone.  With those, I could go both lighter and darker.  With black paper, you can only go lighter.  And black paper has NO depth.  I quickly learned that it required a pastel treatment over the whole surface to give it any kind of life at all.  And the pose turned out to be a problem.  In the original reference, she was sitting on a stool, but that didn't look right, so I wiped it out and decided to have her standing.  The upper torso, shoulders, and upper arms worked okay, but the first attempt at a face failed.  So I decapitated the poor girl (NOT REALLY) and replaced it with a head from another image.  And the hands came from a different photo session with another model entirely.  But in the end, it works.

Natalie #8

This one didn't come from the photo session, it was done during our Wednesday night life session a few weeks ago.  This pose was a challenge: visually, she's upside down and foreshortened.  And the light was coming from over my left shoulder, so there was almost nothing in the way of shadow to help give depth.  All of which made this one kinda fun.  I did 90% of it that night, then worked on her face and arms the next day.

Not everything is a winner, though.  There was one image of Natalie that I worked on, off and on, for weeks.  It finally went into the trash.  Sometimes you just gotta recognize when a composition isn't going to work and move on.

There are quite a few other artworks that I've done and would like to talk about, but will save that for the next post.  Oh, and all of these are available, if you'd like to have one for your own collection.  Just sayin' ...  

Choosing Exhibitions for Universities

In a previous post, I wrote about some of the things I've learned while installing exhibitions in a university art gallery.  Right now, we're going through the process of selecting the final exhibition for the 2019-2020 school year, and I thought it would be a good time to talk about what goes into these selections.

The key driver, for me, is diversity. The art world is made up of art in all media, including many that typically aren't considered art media.  It consists of drawing, painting, printmaking (and all that is just in my own studio), encaustic, graffiti, woodworking, pottery, sculpture, metal, glass, installations, quilts, fabric, found objects, photography, and all the different types of mixed media that you can possibly imagine and more.  And that's just in media.  In concept and execution, there are many more.  Painting alone has representational, photorealism, abstract, impressionist, expressionist, drip, and various movements within and combining those types.  So there are a ton of different types of art.  And many students in a university have never been in an art gallery (I've heard that several times just this past fall), so our job is to expose them to a wide variety of different art forms.

The exhibitions this year are doing just that.  We've had a faculty show, an exhibition of works that combine 2D imagery with 3D furniture, and a set of raw paintings followed by a very precise exhibition of 125 instant photographs.  The students seem to have gotten a lot out of the variety that has been presented.

As a painter, it's easy for me to name a dozen other painters who would be great to have in our gallery.  But that doesn't do right by the students, faculty, staff, and local residents who are our "customers", if you will use that term.  So I've been reaching out beyond my norms to identify other types of exhibitions.

So over the next 18 months, we're going to have quite a variety.  One show will be by convicts in a prison's art therapy program.  We're having a show of art by Madison County public school students.  We'll have a very energetic abstract painter, followed by a classically-trained painter whose subject matter ties in with the University's Bascom Lamar Lunsford festival of Appalachian music.  There's a photographer who creates edgy, large-scale works.  We'll have a group show of potters working here in the county.  There will be an exhibition of sculptures by several individuals who will be teaching workshops on campus.  And we'll wind up the season with an exhibition of student work, followed by an exhibition of work by our seniors.

Commercial galleries find their own unique niche and then fill it with art that they believe they can sell.  That's a great thing for artists, but it doesn't answer all of a community's needs.  A university isn't worried about selling, its mission is to educate, and it does that with variety.  And meeting that mission is forcing THIS painter out of his comfort zone!

New Artworks

With the end of the wedding season and a quiet period in my day-job business, I've been able to spend some more time in the studio lately.  I've been working primarily with the charcoal and pastel series and thought I'd share some, with their stories, here.

James 

Rachel

I met James and Rachel late last fall.  Without getting into specifics, James has had some experiences that few of us have ever had and none of us ever want.  He's a very intense man who feels deeply and expresses himself honestly.  Rachel is his wife.  She is his rock.  She's a beautiful woman through and through and, from my experience, very upbeat, outgoing, and positive.  They are two halves of one being.  Soon after meeting them, I knew I had to do their portraits.  Both came out, I think, pretty well, and will be on their way to James and Rachel very soon.

Every now and then I'll bring one of my models into the studio for a photo session.  We'll go for about an hour and take a ton of pictures.  These sessions are really about getting the models to show parts of their personalities that don't come out in a crowded life session.  I don't direct, no "do this, do that" - instead, it's about encouraging them to be themselves.  Last fall, I did such a session with Natalie, one of our regular models.  She's a lovely young woman with alabaster skin tones that are so hard to get right, and a reserved manner that hides a bit of a vamp.  Over the past week or so, I've done three of her:

Natalie #3 

 Natalie #4

Natalie #5

These were a lot of fun to do.  My goal was to capture some of the playfulness that sometimes bubbles out, while keeping the mystery that's hiding behind her reserved demeanor.  There was one other artwork of her, one that began in a life session but never hit the "keeper" criteria.  I tried reworking it and it failed.  So it's destroyed.  But these turned out well, especially, to my mind, #5.

I've got another project going in the studio as well, a painting.  I'll cover that one in another post.

Creating an Art Exhibition

Last fall, I added a new job to my hodge-podge collection of activities.  I became the Director for the Weizenblatt Art Gallery at Mars Hill University.  "Director" is a kinda grandiose title, but the duties entail making sure the exhibits are put up, taken down, and advertised in various media, and that the receptions happen on schedule.  It's not rocket science.  It has provided quite a bit of insight into all the little things that make an exhibit a success, as well as how schools choose their shows.

The first exhibit this past fall was the biannual Faculty Exhibit.  Trying to corral a group of artists into delivering their work to a specific place by a specific time can be challenging.  Fortunately, this group of faculty members were pretty good about it.  Even better, they left the layout and installation of their works to me, the new guy, that some of them hadn't even met yet.  Now I'm of the opinion that the installation of a show is an artwork in itself.  You want each piece to have some breathing room around it, you want each to show itself to its best, and you want it to flow well from one piece, and one artist, to the next.  And that's whether the viewers are moving right to left or left to right.

(Note: you can click on the images to enlarge them).

I decided to group each artist's pieces together, first and foremost.  Then they were positioned so that there was some kind of a connection to the adjacent artist's work: similar colors, similar subject matter, similar size, whatever was "similar".  I spent quite a bit of time leaning stuff up against all the walls and then adjusting their order and spacing.  Once it felt right, I hung them.  For the pottery, I hauled out a bunch of pedestals and put them all together in the center of one of the two rooms.  This created a kinda free-form sculpture to hold all the pieces, helping to focus attention on them and allow the eye to move from one to the next.  It also provided a bit of protection: when pedestals are scattered around the room, people can/will bump into them and knock them over.  In the photo above, there are figurative photos on the left, leading to my figurative charcoal/pastel pieces, along with the "pottery island" in the center of the room.

The next show was very different.  We had Randy Shull, who has been a professional artist for a few decades now and is very experienced in showing his work.  As I said before, I think the installation is an artwork itself, and nobody knows the work better than the artist.  So I let them decide what goes where, while my role is to provide tools and other assistance to help them build the show they want.  Randy was super easy to work with: very easygoing, very professional, and well prepared.  His show was a mix of combined painting/furniture/sculpture pieces (yes, all three aspects in one work) as well as mixed-media pieces.  Here's how the opening looked:

You can kinda see here how Randy followed the same concepts: the colors in the small orange piece on the left were reflected in the large wall hanging/floor-furniture piece next to it, whose blues were picked up in the three small pieces to its right, and so on around the room.

The third show was very different.  David Hopes is a very intuitive painter, building his paintings organically.  He's also a poet, playwright, actor, and singer - an all-around Renaissance man.  David brought his intuitive sense to his installation: "if it feels right, do it".  So there was none of the careful measuring and adherence to gallery norms in this installation.  For example, most galleries will hang paintings using a 60" standard, meaning the center of the work is usually placed at a height of 60 inches.  Not David.  Some works were placed close together, some hung in places we've never hung a work before (for example, on the 6" wide end of the dividing wall), and there was one 15-ft wall that had nothing on it.  It was very free-form.  But for all that, the feeling of the installation seemed to match the feeling from the paintings.  I had some reservations, but decided to hold off until I saw how it looked.  It definitely provoked some discussion, but in all, I think letting David hang his own paintings without interference was the right call.

This week, we hung a new show.  Jay Kranyik is a photographer working with Polaroid and Fuji "instant" cameras and film.  These are small images, very intimate, with a unique sense of color.  Jay's subject is primarily urban landscapes: geometric arrangements in primary colors.  All of his 125 images were mounted on 8"x8" mats.  Jay was extremely careful about accurate positioning of every one of his images, down to the half inch.  It was the polar opposite of working with David, but then, Jay's photos are the polar opposite of David's paintings.  We had a bit of a conundrum in deciding how to hang the works on the walls, since there were no wires on the backs.  Our first thought was to use L-pins to clip them to the walls, but we couldn't find 500 pins in time.  (Yes, with 125 artworks and 4 pins/artwork, that's a lotta pins).  In the end, we went unconventional: we used roofing nails.  These nails have wide heads that overlap the artworks to pin them to the wall.  They're also a helluva lot cheaper than the L-pins.  We then set up a pedestal to show visitors his old Polaroid camera and newer Fuji camera.  For college kids, this may be the first time they've seen something other than digital!

So those are some of my experiences in managing a university art gallery.  There are a lot more aspects to it, like getting to talk with the college students, running receptions, planning exhibitions for the coming year, and handling publicity.  I'll get to some of those in future posts.

Living With an Old Dog, Part 2

Yes, it's been a month since my last post.  Life has gotten in the way, of course: a big day-job project, Christmas, New Year's, and a thousand other things.  One of those things is our dog, Soozzee.

You may remember a previous post from August of last year.  Soozzee had just turned 15.  She was pretty much deaf, was blind in one eye and almost blind in the other, and had a variety of ailments.  All that is still true, of course.  She's had Addison's disease for over a decade - an ailment that is deadly if not treated, but if treated (a pill a day and a shot every 4 weeks), is almost invisible.  She has dry-eye in both eyes, requiring medication twice a day.  She has a thyroid condition, requiring another pill a day.  She needs a Pepcid a day to keep her stomach settled.  She has two skin conditions: one that results in "old-dog bumps" all over her back, and another that results in skin flakes that need to be scraped down with a tick comb periodically.  She has two big stones in her bladder and possibly more forming in her kidney.  The vet doesn't want to cut the stones out due to her age, so Soozzee lives with them.  And because they seem to give her a good bit of pain every now and then, we give her some Gabapentin to help ease it.  Yeah, we spend a lot of money on the little girl every month.  And there's no Medicare for elderly dogs.

Since my last post, Soozzee's case of doggie dementia has gotten a bit worse.  I think it's exacerbated by not being able to see or hear much of anything anymore.  She gets lost in the house, or will sit or stand and just stare off into space.  She gets "the wanders" in the afternoon: around 2:30, she wakes up from her post-lunch nap and just ... wanders.  All over the house.  Bumps into things and stops.  Gets stuck behind a door.  Really, she needs one of us to keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn't get into too much of a problem.  Which means that one of us is wandering along with her, or nearby.  And she gets really, really spooked if we go off somewhere and leave her at home alone.

This dementia development has really put a damper on our out-of-the-house activities, both work and social.  Either Soozzee goes with us, or one of us stays home with her.  So: going out to a movie and dinner in Asheville?  Umm, nope, can't leave the Sooz for more than an hour.  A day trip somewhere?  Probably not, and only if we can take her along.  Fortunately, we can leave her in the parked car for a while since she doesn't freak out like she does if we leave her home - she seems to understand that we gotta come back to the car at some point.

When I go to the studio, Soozzee often goes with me.  But she doesn't just curl up on the couch and take a nap the whole time.  Nope, she'll go down for about an hour to maybe an hour and a half.  Then she wakes up and ... yep, she wanders.  I keep the doors to the outside closed, but she goes everywhere and, of course, it totally wrecks my concentration.  So I'll give up after a bit and head home, usually with a stop up at the church so she can do her happy run.

And that's the coolest thing.  Here she is, 15 1/2 years old, running across the grass like a puppy.  She can't see where she's going so I have to steer her, but she still gets that happy-dog smile.

There have been a few times over the past six months where I've thought she finally started her last downward spiral.  Each time, she's bounced back within a few days.  I'm so very, very thankful.  Yes, living with a dementia patient is hard, whether they have two legs or four.  But I'm happy to put up with it.  When she plants her butt up against my hip at night and starts snoring, it's all worthwhile.

Apryl #3

Apryl #3

Charcoal and pastel on toned paper

Here's my newest piece in the charcoal and pastel series that I've been doing for a couple of years now.  I'm pretty happy with it.  Apryl is a very lively young woman, very animated and a great life model.  I've done two previous artworks of her.  Both times, she took interesting poses and held them like a rock.  That's great for figure studies, but there's one drawback.  No model can hold a true facial expression for more than a moment, no matter how good they are.

Want to test it?  Great!  Get a mirror and give yourself a big smile.  No, no, a REAL smile, one that you mean.  Nope, try again.  Okay, getting better.  Got it yet?  Okay, now hold that for 20 minutes.  Don't move, now!

Yeah, right.  Many people don't even like to smile for the camera, and that's just for a second or two.

The issue with facial expressions is that they are reflections of our inner state of mind, which is constantly changing.  When you're posing for an artist, you can hold your body in a position for quite a while, but your mind is going off somewhere else.  As one guy who sat for the painter Lucien Freud said, posing is a cross between zen meditation and a trip to the barber.  I've found that models' faces will settle in to a neutral or blank expression, one that will naturally hold itself over a long period of time.  Sometimes you can see flickers of expression cross their faces as some train of thought is amusing, frustrating, or whatever, but mostly it's just blank.

So how do I do expressions?  Photography.  I'll have a camera out as I talk with the model and will shoot a lot of photos.  Then I'll use the photos as references to build the artwork.  I don't copy the photo, though, but will use the images to see the details of how somebody's face shows expression.

This image came from my last life session with Apryl.  Her expression during the pose was, as all are, pretty blank.  But she's certainly not blank, she's smart, funny, and very expressive.  So during a break, I got out my camera and took a bunch of photos as we talked.  Then we went back to the pose. Now, several weeks later, I was able to go back, look at the photos, and start something new based on them.

Originally, this was a full-figure image of her sitting cross-legged.  I had a rough block-in and decided that it wasn't good enough.  For me, the attraction was in her face, and the small paper didn't allow a full-figure with sufficient room to develop her face.  So I rubbed out the figure, although you can still see a few traces of it.  I started over, looking at just the head and upper body.  The first stage was a rough block-in with vine charcoal.  Then I wiped down most of the vine and hit it with willow charcoal.  Why wipe down the vine?  It seems to fill the pores in the paper with slick particles and the heavier charcoals and pastels don't want to stick.  So I wipe a lot of the vine off, leaving enough to guide me along.

My next stage with Apryl was to use the willow charcoal to develop the features.  But I developed the features too much: there was so much detail in the face that the image lost some of the magic.  I got frustrated and hit it with a kneaded eraser.  That took a lot of over-development out and what was left was streaky.  But the streakiness was cool, so I re-developed the face, but only lightly and not nearly with as much detail.  Then came a light application of pastels to add color, first to the lighted areas, and later to some (not all) of the shadows.  Usually, I focus on the eyes, but this time, I focused on her smile, which was the important element in her expression.  There was a lot of experimentation, lots of rub-outs and erasures, and some happy accidents.  Finally, there was the image.

So, yes, I'm very happy with this one. 

Last Wedding Painting of 2018

I completed the last wedding painting of the year just a couple of days ago.  The next day, Klaire and Drew came by the studio to pick it up, and I had one of those moments that swells your heart.  The first time a couple sees their painting in real life is magic.  In this case it was a high-pitched "OHHHmygaaawwwwdddd", complete with eyes wide and hands to face.  Yep, I think I nailed it.

The last time they had seen their painting was at their reception.  I was packing up and they were about to head out the door for the sparkler run, but they came over to get one last look at it.  They already loved it, even though I told them it was just a rough block-in.  Here's how it looked then:

As a block-in, this is barely satisfactory.  It establishes the basic composition and the couple's pose, but that's about it.  The pose is roughed-in, the wedding party is just hinted at, and the crowd is nonexistent at this point.  Time to get to work in the studio.

Over the next few weeks, I reworked every square inch of the canvas multiple times.  Drew and Klaire were developed, the crowd added and changed, the wedding party developed, both sets of parents were included, the forest and arbor behind them were brought up to spec, and the two ferns on pedestals developed.  And here's how it turned out:

Quite a change, isn't it?  I feel pretty good about the end result.  Apparently, so do they!

My next booking isn't until well into spring, so now I have a bit of a hiatus from wedding paintings.  There are a lot of other works that I've had in mind for a long time, but haven't been able to get to them, so over the next few months they'll be tackled, one at a time.

If you'd like to know more about my wedding paintings and the whole process, check out the Asheville Event Paintings site.

Hell in Paradise

Our son, Rick, and his family (wife Julie and son Jackson, aka Jax) live in Paradise, California.  That is, they did until last Thursday.  Their home was one of the thousands that was destroyed in the fire that also destroyed about 90% of the town.

They're lucky: they're safe and they have a nice place to stay for the time being.  A growing number of people didn't make it out at all (76 as I write this, with over 1,000 still missing).  Many of the survivors are living in tents or shelters.  It's a brutal situation.

So what happened with them?  Well, they had been watching the fire for a few days.  It was on the other side of a ridge, so it needed to be watched, but wasn't an imminent threat.  On Thursday morning, there was smoke in the air, but no sense of danger.  Jax went to school and Rick and Julie went their respective ways to work.

A couple of hours later, Jax called Rick at work.  Fire was approaching the school.  It was in the trees nearby and the kids were being evacuated, and Rick needed to come NOW to get him out.  Rick hightailed it over there and retrieved Jax.  They tried to get up to their house to get their dog, Sugar Ray, and whatever else they could.  The way was blocked: police wouldn't let them get anywhere near the area as the fire was already up there and moving way too fast.  They drove to Chico, about 15 miles away, where Julie had been working.  Her boss has a big house and they invited Rick and the family to stay with them.

The next day, Rick and Julie were able to get into their neighborhood, using a little subterfuge since only emergency workers were allowed in.  Their house was gone; in fact, it was still burning underfoot. The only thing standing was the chimney.  Worse, their dog Sugar Ray died in the fire.  Julie's mother lived on the other side of town.  She and Julie's sister had made it out as well, so they were safe, but Rick and Julie went to check on their house.  It was gone, too.  So was almost all of Paradise.

Since then, it's been a matter of regrouping, finding out what they have to do and what their options are, and discussing what they're going to do in the future.  Right now, there's not much they can do.  Rick still has a job of managing operations for Waste Management - a job that will be very important in the near future, I think.  The fire is still burning and people are not yet allowed back to their houses ... or at least, where their houses once stood.  Jax needs to be in school.  Julie's job is still safe since the fire hasn't gotten to Chico.  So they're figuring out what needs to be done first, then they'll work on the long-term plan.

In the meantime, Rick and Julie have been overwhelmed by the support from friends and strangers alike.  Here's what Rick had to say about it on Facebook:

Woke up this morning with an incredibly full heart, here’s why… Since this tragic fire, we have more people in our lives than prior. We have completely new friends. And while our relationship LITERALLY rose from the ashes… They are happy/healthy relationships that will continue to develop for the rest of my days. To be quite honest; if it weren’t for this fire, I would not have these people in my life. 

I have “new” old friends. These people have always been there. We go through life and tend to drift away every now and again. The term “Life sometimes gets in the way.“ describes this group of friends for me. Here’s what I can tell you about this group… They have been nothing short of spectacular. And while my little family is doing well, make no mistake, we are starting to run with our new lives a little bit more each day. It is comforting to know these people are running with us. Often times; they are leading the way! 

If you know anything about me, you know I pride myself on doing and being more for my friends. For me, it is all about relationships. I fear, I could never be more than my friends have been for my family over the last week. I WILL TRY!

YOU ALL OVERWHELM!

This kinda tells me that they're going to be all right.

An iMac and the Mojave Update

"What did you do to the computer?"  That question from my wife was the first indication that we had a problem.

We have an iMac that's two years old and had been running well.  The previous day, we had a notification from Apple that we should update to the new OS, called Mojave.  Earlier updates hadn't been much of a problem, so that evening, I started the update.  Several hours later, when we were calling it a night, I checked and the progress bar showed about 75%.  Slow, but these updates were slow sometimes, so no problem.

The next morning, though, it was still at 75%.  No progress at all over 10 or so hours.  I did a bit of research on my old Dell and there were recommendations on restarting the process.  So I shut the iMac down and restarted it.  And discovered major, major issues.  Boot time was about 15 minutes.  Once booted, it didn't recognize the keyboard and mouse for a long time.  When it finally did, the response time to a mouse click or keyboard entry could be 30 seconds or more.  I rebooted and it was the same.  So I started looking at how to dump the Mojave update and revert to the previous operating system and quickly discovered that it was going to be beyond my skill level.  I shut the computer down, unplugged it, and hauled it off to Charlotte Street Computers.  This is Asheville's best Mac store and repair shop and we've had super service out of them before.

Even our technician at Charlotte Street had problems with our computer.  First, he verified that our hardware was all working correctly.  Then he tried the usual assortment of tricks and fixes, but nothing worked.  The next step was to duplicate all our data, wipe the drive, reformat, and do a fresh install of either High Sierra (the previous OS) or Mojave.  I decided on Mojave, since it'll have to be done sooner or later, anyway, so why not have a pro do it?  Except this fresh install of Mojave didn't work, either.  It was still incredibly slow and acted up.  More research by the tech indicated that Mojave seems to have been designed for computers with solid-state drives instead of hard drives.  Hard drives are spinning discs and, while they operate extremely fast, they can only do one thing at a time.  Mojave wants to the processors to access the drive multiple times simultaneously.  No problem for a solid-state drive, but impossible for hard drives.

So I decided to upgrade to a solid-state drive.  Our tech did the installation, ran some tests that showed it was running as designed, then migrated all our data back onto the new drive.  While he was at it, he took our old drive and mounted it in an external case to use as our backup drive.  Great!

The only remaining issue seemed to be that all our passwords were gone.  I'd have to re-set our computer and application passwords, and we'd have to re-set all our internet passwords when we visited various sites.  A bit of an annoyance, but not a problem.

So I took the computer home and, over the course of a couple of hours, discovered that there were till two problems.  One was that my mail application didn't want to work at all.  It did for Janis's account and for the tech's, but not mine.  The other was that the computer didn't see the ethernet port anymore.  Wifi worked, but not the ethernet.  Back to Charlotte Street.  Our now-harried tech fixed the mail problem (a known issue with Mac upgrades), but couldn't for the life of him figure out why the ethernet port wasn't working.  So he gave us a Thunderbolt-to-ethernet connection (Thunderbolt is another port on Macs, apparently; I have no idea what it's all about).  I picked up the computer again yesterday and set it up again at home.  Knock on wood, everything seems to be just fine now.

According to our tech, this Mojave update has been fraught with problems.  It was really bad when first released a couple of months ago and has gradually gotten better, but it is still problematic, as we just proved.  This was NOT a well-designed Apple update.  They released it too early and didn't think some things through.  The hard drive issue, for example.  Apple's poor development work wound up costing me about $350, five days, and a lot of heartburn.  So for all the Mac users out there, think twice before jumping on the Mojave update.  Wait several more months before trying it, and be prepared to take your computer to a pro if it crashes.  So far, I haven't seen anything that jumps out at me as a major step forward from the older OS, so I can't say this was all worth it.

More Wedding Paintings

Wow, it's been almost two months since my last post.  That's not good!  I've had a lot of stuff happening and wanted to write about it, but just didn't.  No excuses, that's just what happened.  So it's time to do some catch-up here on a lot of topics.  For today's post, we'll talk about three completed wedding paintings and one that's in progress.

I was happy to be chosen to create the wedding paintings for four couples in late summer and fall.  The first of these was for Nil and Aveni, a wonderful couple from the Durham area.  They had a wedding based on traditional Hindu customs, but modified a bit for America.  For one thing, it was only one afternoon - I understand that Hindu wedding ceremonies can go for days.  In Indian tradition, the groom travels in a procession from his village to his bride's.  That doesn't work so well in an American urban setting, so instead, the procession went around the large building where the wedding took place.  It was led by Batala Durham, a Brazilian samba reggae drum band (that's part of the Hindu tradition, right?), and to say they were lively is an understatement.  They had entire procession of several hundred participants (and me) dancing all the way around the building.  However, they didn't have somebody in the nearby residential area dancing and the cops showed up.  Any time you have the cops called on your celebration for making too much noise, you know you're doing it right!  The wedding itself was beautiful.  I painted a moment at the very end of the ceremony that, I thought, perfectly captured their feelings for each other - and it was a huge hit for them both.

Nil and Aveni

The next painting was an outdoor ceremony on a ridge outside of Hendersonville, North Carolina.  It was held shortly before sunset with beautiful colors in the sky.  Taylor and John are very close with their families and wanted the painting to show that.  So we decided to include all of the immediate families: their parents and brothers and sisters.  Getting good likenesses, with lots of life in them, for so many people, is quite a challenge.  Taylor and John, though, loved the way it turned out.

Taylor and John

The third painting wasn't a wedding, it was a vow renewal.  Juli (the owner of Wedding Inspirations Bridal Boutique in Asheville) and Jeff had been married for 32 years.  The ceremony was held at Jeff's surprise birthday party, and to top it off, it was a surprise vow renewal.  I won't go into the story of how you can have a surprise vow renewal here, but it's enough to say that, as told by Juli, it was both hilarious and deeply touching.  I had free rein in choosing the moment to paint, and to heighten the feeling of love between the two, the painting only included them.  And here's how it turned out:

Juli and Jeff

Yesterday, I started a new painting for Klaire and Drew.  Klaire had a very definite idea that she wanted the painting to focus on a moment at the end of the ceremony when they were showered with roses.  That sounded great, but as the couple was coming down the aisle at the end of the ceremony, they stopped a couple of times for impromptu kisses.  I changed the painting's focus right then and there.  Fortunately, once they saw how it was developing, both Klaire and Drew loved the concept.  This painting is still at the very early block-in stage.  It's going to take 2-4 more weeks to get it up to the standards that you see in the other paintings.  But it WILL get there and I will post it here when done.  So here's the painting, still at the ugly stage:

Drew and Klaire (rough block-in)

So that's what's been happening with the wedding painting side of my studio operations.  The painting of Drew and Klaire is the last on my list until April, so over the winter, you'll see more of my charcoal and pastel figures, along with some small oils and maybe even one or two large artworks.  And I hope to be a little better at keeping this blog up to date.

More information on wedding paintings:
Asheville Event Paintings
Asheville Event Paintings Facebook page

A New Job

I just started a new part-time position as the director of Weizenblatt Gallery for Mars Hill University. MHU is a private college right here in the town I live in, about 15 miles or so north of Asheville.  The gallery hosts about ten shows a year.  Last week, I spent a lot of time hanging my first show there: the biennial Faculty Show.  It took way too long, of course, because I'm still learning the ropes, where the tools are, what they expect to see in the gallery, what to do with the student work-study people, who to talk to about publicity, and so on.  Tomorrow, I have to put together the plan for the reception on Wednesday.  Once the reception is over, I gotta do the planning for the next show so that thing go smoother.

Some people wonder why I agreed to do this.  After all, in addition to my studio activities, I still work  as a proposal writer for small firms trying to get federal contracts.  And I'm on the board of a small Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) focused on the Kurdish region of Iraq.  And I've been working with the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), which is a volunteer organization that mentors small businesses that are trying to get started, or grow, or whatever.  At the same time, I have a lot of "life" stuff to do: chores, walk the dog, mow the yard, fix this or that, you know the drill - lots of things that just eat up time.  I needed one more activity like I needed a hole in the head.

But this gives me an opportunity to work with the Art Department students.  I really enjoy working with the young ones just starting out: build their capabilities some, give them confidence that they can do it, show that there's a helluva lot more to art than they can comprehend right now, and help them learn how to find their voice.  I love seeing the flash of sudden insight, especially when it's something that I know will stay with them and not be forgotten in two weeks.

So to make time for the gallery, I'm cutting back on my SCORE functions and one of the tasks associated with proposal writing.  My focus is going to be more on art and art-related functions going forward.  I'm still figuring out what that means.

Living with an Old Dog

My little Soozzee turned 15 years old last month.  She's been with us since she was a tiny pup.  To say that she owns my heart is both accurate and an understatement.  She's the sweetest little dog that was ever born.  Yes, I know, yours is too, but I'm absolutely certain that Soozzee is the queen.

But she's getting old and I'm acutely aware that her time with us is limited.  Over the past year, especially, her age is dragging her down.  Her walks are a bit shorter these days and much slower than they were a year ago.  Her hearing is pretty much gone.  She's totally blind in one eye and almost blind in the other.  She bumps into things around the house.  Her hair has gone from thick and honey-colored to thin and white.  She has old-dog skin bumps, bad skin flakes, and dry eye in both eyes.  Often when she stands in one place, one or more of her legs shake.  The dog formerly known as "Piglet" has to be hand-fed.  She's gone from a hefty 20 pounds to a thinner 16.8 and may not be done yet.  She used to chase The Light (a laser pointer) around the house every single evening.  Now, I'm not sure she can see it anymore, and she only does about a half lap around the house anyway.  She has always been a world-class nap-taker, but her nap times have increased to where she's only awake maybe two or three hours a day, spread over a 12-hour period.

Still, Soozzee is hanging in there.  She still has control of her bowels, thank God, so unlike some other older dogs, she doesn't need diapers.  When she hits her favorite field on her afternoon walk, she still likes to run.  True, what once was one long run is now a series of short and slow runs broken up with rest stops, but she runs.  She likes to go for her daily ride in the car.  She still pounces on The Light when she can see it.  She can rattle the windows with her snoring.  Occasionally we'll get a good tail wag, and every once in a while, the dog that rarely gave us slurps during her whole life will give us one.

I was an emotional wreck when we had to put her sister Indy down shortly after Christmas.  I know I'm going to be an even worse wreck when Soozzee goes.  It may not be that much longer.  But I'm going to treasure every moment I have with this little dog.