Commission Piece-12x16-SOLD

A commissioned piece just completed. Marsh Harbour Inn sits on the harbor front and is absolutely beautiful in the fall afternoon sun.

The rest of these were painted on Bald Head Island in the last week

More to come!

Autumn Gold-6x8-SOLD

$50

Wanted to see if i could capture the glow on the marsh in the last few minutes of light. you have to really put the paint down fast for these fall sunsets. the sun is going down really really fast. mix and lay it down, no time for second guessing yourself or God forbid you should have to readjust a color, or value. no time!

the Artist in Residency week is drawing to a close. the weather was especially fickle. half the days were partly cloudy. the type where its sunny for 30 min. and goes cloudy for the other 30. not very conducive to plein air painting but we made the best of it. when the sun came out yesterday it was like the world went to wild, saturated color after being black and white for a week. you plein air painters know exactly what i'm talking about!

High on a Hill-6x8

This is the original house that the lightkeepers family lived in, who ran the lighthouse on Bald Head Island. His name was Capt. Charlie Swann, and he was here from around 1900 to somewhere in the 30's. The area is affectionately called Capt Charlie's. The spot really reminds me of the dunes and architecture i saw on Cape Cod when i was up there painting a few months ago. i cant imagine someone (and their family) living on an island by themselves without the modern convenience of electricity, grocery or hardware store on the island, or weather radios. they would never know when a killer hurricane was bearing down on them. its wild to even consider how hardy these people must have been to do it for thirty years, over a 100 years ago.

in this painting i'm working with subtle color shifts on a cool overcast day. the kind with that silvery light. i especially like the fall beach grass up the hill and the sand path works composition-wise to take the eye up to the house from bottom to top.

Fields of Gold-5x7-SOLD

How can you not love painting in a place with these kind of scenes at sundown. such a peacefulness on these vast marsh vistas at this time of day. all you hear are the screeches of beach birds high overhead. and it seems to echo miles off into the distance.

this one will probably make it into the 8x10 format for the gallery here.

this Artist-in-Residency thing is a blast. thanks shawn!

Graveyard of the Atlantic-4x6-SOLD

Got the title of this one from the fact that while climbing all over the dunes to get this vantage point, i found what looked like a human thigh bone. it was halloween and it was freaky! so i wanted to call this one Pirates Graveyard, but the area really is known as Graveyard of the Atlantic because of its shallow sandbars that claimed many a ship, when they ran aground on them in storms. the ship would be half on the sandbar and half in deep water with the huge waves ripping the ship to pieces board by board until it eventually sunk. even today with GPS and great maps people are still very very cautious in these waters.

this area was also home to Stede Bonnett and Blackbeard, two of history's most notorious pirates. they'd have made great modern day IRS agents, eh matey? LOL

Serpentine Marsh-6x8-$50

$8 s/h
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Another marsh painting done from the middle of Bald Head Island yesterday.

Overcast at Middle Creek-6x8-SOLD

Hangin' out painting on Bald Head Island as part of their Artist in Residence Program. Rena MacQueen's here too (go here to see her blog) and we're having a ball cruising around in a golf cart painting whatever catches our fancy. hey its a hard job, but somebody's gotta do it.

This (and upcoming posts) are studies for future paintings. i'm out doing quick studies to see if i might want to paint them larger the week i'm out here. Did four yesterday, and four today, six of which i'm happy with. Two of em are complete crappers (er i mean scrapers LOL) and will be painted over tomorrow. Hey if i can keep six out of eight on everything i do out here this week, i'll be happy. keep an eye out here for marsh, beach and island vibe stuff, all priced very affordably just in time for gift giving season.

Swan Quarter Repaint-6x8-SOLD

from my fave marina, right down the road from the house. this is a neat boat getting some work done, crying out to be painted by me!

i'm on Bald Head Island for the week, so look for lots of beach, marsh and island vibe stuff in the days to come.

Intercoastal Tree Shadows-12x16-$225

Framed and Free Shipping

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'07 and '08 Studio Clearance Sale

Frames out to 18x22 and went for a whole lot more than $225 when the paint was wet! What do you care when it was painted?

Cowgirl-6x4-SOLD

Playing with light and shadow and red on green color scheme. i've gotten more and more comfortable with keeping the background non-descript so the focal point takes prominence. taking less and less strokes these days to describe the scene too. just one of the many benefits of painting everyday.

Ankle Deep-SOLD

6x4

painting with as few strokes as possible on this one. there's a certain peacefulness to the scene in this graceful pose.

Sound Investment- SOLD

30x30

can finally post the commission i've been working on a few days this week. delivered it to the couple today.

pretty happy the way it came out. have never done a complicated house this large plein air before. Went to the same exact spot at the same time several days in a row to complete it.

Gessoe Rack

No painting to post today. ive been working on commissions all week and then it was cloudy all day today, so i did some gessoeing and dropped off a painting at a gallery. thanks for lunch Ray!

this is my homemade rack i just made that can hold up over 40 panels on a card table. i took peg board i had left over from my painting storage rack (yesterdays post) and put one over the other with a 1x2 in between. then i stuck dowel rods in where i could stand up panels after i coat them with gessoe.

i love this homemade setup. i used to lay them around to dry and it took up A LOT of room and got gessoe all over everything. now 40 panels fits in a 2'x2' space.

they say "necessity is the mother of invention"

i coat masonite with four coats of gessoe and sand that last coat to make it nice and smooth. the gessoe allows my underpainting to soak in and stain so i can lay other colors on top and not mix. sometimes i'll underpaint the sky orange. if you lay blue on top of orange and it hasnt soaked in, it'll gray out the blue and it'll turn to mud. not good. but with this gessoed panel it doesnt do that. plus i love the fact that my paintings are all handmade from start to finish. i get consistency and that gives me confidence that every panel will act like i want it to.

oh yeah! did i mention that i can get 50 panels for a $15 sheet of masonite? but if you know me personally you know that had absolutely nothing to do with it. yeah right!

View from S. Front St.-6x8-$50

$8 s/h
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Done in the charming town of New Bern, NC.

Loved the way the afternoon light hit the tops of everything.

I made a neat little adjustable painting rack yesterday. i took 1x2's and made a shelf system with pegboard and dowels. now i can keep my paintings all in one shelving unit, and its totally adjustable by sliding the dowels out of the pegboard and moving them. got the idea off the internet. took about 2 hours to make but well worth it.

Orange Ride-6x6

contact me or Woods Gallery on Bald Head Island for this one

From some photos i took this summer. i like the loose brushstrokes and my figures are improving every one i do. they used to look really stiff and "gumby-like".

just goes to show that doing the things that you arent so good at, over and over, helps.

and so does taking classes with Luana Winner who helped me get the problem under control. thanks Luana!

Wilmington Waterfront 2- 6x8 -framed

SOLD

Old Homestead-9x12

$350 framed

$8 s/h

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Also available at Tidewater Gallery in Swansboro

i recently read an article online where they hooked a machine to peoples head and could tell where they were looking when they were shown a picture of something. seems alot of what we learned you HAD to do in compositions was wrong. the people didnt follow around a certain way from this to that in a flowing manner. they looked in order of prominence from the greatest value change, sharpest lines, and most saturated color. it didnt even matter if a figure was looking off the page. these people's eye didnt go off the page but instead went to the next sharpest line, value change and brightest color. this article has changed the way i think about "flow". my take on this is that most of these composition books were written in the early nineteen hundreds (or earlier) before "moving pictures",TV and videos and that we've learned to look at things in a little bit different way? jumping from most interesting to next most interesting instead of linearly. just my guess. it has liberated me tho' i'll say!

Flowing White-7x5-SOLD

Revisiting this girl with the flowing white dress. there's something so fun about painting them so i'm sure there will be many more.

Paintings Going to Woods Gallery on Bald Head

Overcast Middle Creek Marsh-6x6
to purchase contact me or Woods Gallery on Bald Head Island

Middle Creek Clouds-6x8

to purchase contact me or Woods Gallery on Bald Head Island

Middle Creek Cloudburst-8x10

to purchase contact me or Woods Gallery on Bald Head Island

Middle Creek Afternoon-8x10

to purchase contact me or Woods Gallery on Bald Head Island

Painted on Bald Head Island recently.

Paintings Headed to Woods Gallery

Capt Charlie Triad- 8x10

to purchase contact me or Woods Gallery on Bald Head Island

Capt Charlie Grouping-8x10

to purchase contact me or Woods Gallery on Bald Head Island

Bald Head Glimpse-8x10

to purchase contact me or Woods Gallery on Bald Head Island

Atmospheric Morning on Bald Head Island-8x10

to purchase contact me or Woods Gallery on Bald Head Island

These four are from my recent trip to Bald Head Island where for the first time i got to wake up there several mornings in a row. this really gets your head into the place and i think this is some of my best stuff done on island. i'm heading back there in a week for another week of painting.

Woman in a Straw Hat-6x6-$50

$8 s/h
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I fell in love with the pic this painting came from. i'm obsessed by it. i've looked for something like it on Flickr for a year. then one of my workshop students showed it to me in her pile of photos she thought she might want to paint. she was nice enough to make me a copy of it to paint. i love backlit ladies in beach hats. theyre so california impressionistic from the 20's and 30's. they capture my imagination.

This one will go thru quite a few renditions while i play with it, i'm sure.

Thanks for the pic Cookie!