Dawn Light, Live Oak

When the sun hit this Live Oak tree in Oldfields SC. it cast a rosy, orangish glow that gradually faded to gold then disappeared. I started it on site last summer but didnt quite get the shadow colors the way I wanted. Tweaked it in the studio last weekend and as a color sketch I'm satisfied now with the result. 9x9in oil  

Dawn on the Severn

Here is a view of the Severn River looking over to the Peninsula, a view I have painted many times but never drawn in pastel. I started this about a year ago but never completed because I couldn't resolve the foreground. I got inspired by the many pastels at the MPS show and decided to tackle the sails. It was an interesting dawn. The day was hot and overcast. The light was a pinkish white. The "white" sails were salmon pinks and deep chocolate browns. The photo of the drawing is a bit on the pale side. It's a little warmer in good light. I treated the sails like my rock drawings, just building up layers of lines and colored textures. I tried something new in using water on a brush and painted the darks in using the pastel then drawing over the underpainting. This view is my "Chapel Pond" down here. a very peaceful, unique piece of land that never ceases to give me pleasure in watching how light plays over the surface of the land like the human body. 18x24 in pastel on sanded paper.   

SHADES OF PASTEL- National juried show

Maryland Pastel Society’s “Shades of Pastel” National Juried Exhibition, October 24-November 20, 2011, at Workhouse Art Center, Lorton, Virginia. Juror: Liz Haywood-Sullivan.

One of my pastels was picked to be in this years exhibit ("Vista", a self portrait of me on Noomark Mt) If you ever thought pastel was a a medium subservient to oil paint then this show will change your mind. The color nearly jumped off the walls. There was such  variety in style, technique, and subject from pieces that echoed Post- impressionist paintings of the 19th and 20th cen to bold modernist color abstractions. Truely inspiring. These are  paintings of pure pigment that glow.  My first juried exhibition where I had to ship my work and it made me quite nervous but everything turned out ok. The gallery is beautiful as well. The Workhouse Art Center is a spacious renovated historic site like Alexandria's Torpedo Factory where many artists work . I hope folks get to see it.

Storm Along Pocock Rd

Another one painted between rain showers last week on the Leake farm.  Of course when I finished up so did the storm and there was incredible light. No matter. Being in the moment was incredible and pushing paint around trying to capture those scudding clouds was feeling alive.  .

Bud Leake's Barn

Painting in the pouring rain, it was still great fun. One of the little oil sketches I painted out on the Leake property. Looking at his work gives one great permission to just jump in and paint. One good thing about painting in overcast  or rainy conditions is you don't have to worry about changing light conditions.And when it begins to rain you don't have time to think. You just get it down.  Another reason to compare oneself to a flyfisherman. They're out there in the rain as well. I think I got a small one but a keeper, none the less.  10x10in oil

Robin Hood Beach

Finally got it the way I wanted it. This little oil sketch was begun on site at about 5pm and the setting sun was painting the beach in warm peach colors and casting great blue shadows from the trees behind me. Most of the foreground was blue so I took some out and put some back trying to get the right balance. I had to do most of  this in my studio from memory because as I was painting cars started arriving and parking right in my view. It seems there was a big party going on and everyone was parking at the beach. Always a party in Sherwood Forest.   The pavilion is on the Severn River. You can just make out the bridge in the lower right corner. 12x12in oil on birch panel  

Painting at Eugene Leake's Farm

MAPAPA (Mid Atlantic Plein air Painters Assoc) hosted a very rainy day of painting at Eugene Leake's farm in Baltimore Co.Eugene "Bud" Leake was the much revered president of MICA in the '70's and a formidable landscape painter who sought to tie together both the Impressionist landscape with the  modern Expressionist world. He passed in his 90's a few years ago but his studio and house look like he just stepped out for a coffee. I met Mr. Leake many years ago at a workshop he gave on his farm and he influenced me profoundly. His brushwork was bold. Details did not exist and he took scenery as it was, leaving street signs, poles and wires. He didn't "pretty them up".   He came at the landscape with a moderinst sensibility but  honoring the traditions of the Barbazon painters (pre- Impressionists) and his hero Corot.  

Eugene Leake (detail) 

Leake's Easel 

                                                                     his studio space 

Eugene Leake

                                                               photo by Robert Stark

                                               the down jacket he always wore in the field

                                                                         living with art

              MAPAPA members Michael Gaudreau, Bruno Baran, David Diaz

My work on the easel during a drenching rainstorm. I kept thinking "What would Bud Leake do?" He would just keep painting away and so I did , thanks to a great Utrecht umbrella.   

                                                                my pallete after the storm