Jellison Cove Study, Oil on canvas, 12″ X 16″. $350.00
After hanging my show at the State of the Art Gallery in April, I had a bit of a dry spell. Most of my energy went into travel and visiting friends during the spring and summer months. I was in some incredibly beautiful locations in the northeast – the mountains of New York State, the coast of Massachusetts and Maine, Canada’s St. Lawrence all the way out to Nova Scotia, and some wild places in southern Florida. I thought I’d be painting in all of these lovely places, but that was not to be, except for the trip to Maine, in the company of my long time painting buddies, which yielded one plein air painting. I had to accept that the friends I was visiting, some of whom I hadn’t seen in decades, deserved all of my attention. I took hundreds of photographs and thought for sure I would return to Ithaca to be a veritable fountain of creativity, but in fact, nothing moved me to canvas until I resumed my daily walks along the Cayuga inlet waterfront trails. The multitude of subtle color shifts in greens and yellows in the tangle of vine and woods, the slow unfolding of bud and seed, along with the dramatic skies of a wet and stormy late summer caught me and lit my fires again. Painting requires time and space of mind to let creativity wander in.
During December and January, at CSMA, I will be exhibiting a new landscape in oil, Jellison Cove Study, in their Annual Open Show. It was painted outdoors on a June morning last summer in Maine, as the tide came in. The sun shone brightly, the seagulls soared overhead, quarreling with each other about which fish rightfully belonged to whom, and the strong wind almost carried away the painting, easel and all.
