Planting flowers and painting brick walls

Another stroll in the garden

For about 4 hours I worked on Garden Pathways.  It's not as lose as I'd like.  In my old age, I'm getting more and more neat and organized in my daily life and it's translating to my art work.

This is to show you how I hung my reference nearby so I could see it.  This
acrylic painting business uses both hands and then some so far anyway.

Now that I see it photographed this way, I see that perhaps I should chop off
the bottom part.  Painting is like eating, I save the best part for last.
So the wet paths with maybe a puddle or two, will come at the end.

Picking up art work

By 1 p.m. I had to stop and get ready to go do a few things and pick up my paintings from the 3-day weekend show at 50 Island Street Studios in Lawrence.  My friend, Liz Peck, has a beautiful studio there and let me use the hallway leading to it which comes off the main hallway.  Today there was quite a to-do because she wants to move to another studio, a very nice big one with big north windows, but there is some disagreement over who was first in line for it.

Excerpt from today in ArtAcademy.comby Michael Britton

Steadfastly crossing deserts of disappointing painting contributes significantly to the development of an artist's voice that is honest and, hand in hand with sure technique, powerful. 
A successful passage to constructing an honest voice is fully incumbent on two pillars: first, having faith in yourself. Lacking resolve and commitment to your art guarantees that you will perish in the desert. The second pillar is a sound foundation in the craft of painting.
The craft of painting is comprised of four elements: foremost is color and composition. Painting, at base, is the arrangement of colored shape. This is as true for realist works as it is for abstract and non-objective paintings. Your first, and most important shape is the canvas: the pictorial surface.
Color and composition is followed by drawing. Edwin Dickinson epitomized drawing as assessing how wide by how high and getting the angles. Whether painting a premier coup (a first strike) oil sketch or drawing a portrait correctly establishing the overall shape is critical.
Drawing also denotes rhythm. I refer to drawing the overall shape as striking the arabesque. Terminology implies intent. Contour is static, Arabesque infers movement and velocity, hence rhythm.
The fourth element is the abstract structural patina of the paint surface. This is the expressive autographic brushwork.
A brilliant painting is the result of a wholly correspondent union of these four elements. Dickenson's Providence, Long Island, 1935, as with Adams 1923 journey, was the near instantaneous culmination of a painful slog of several months through a barren wasteland.
The reward of these difficult journeys is that singular painting that is the spark that ignites a profound body of work upon which a career is built.