A little explanation of the blog

A mouth atomizer, I intend to try the gamvar we were talking about yesterdays, but I will also experiment with blowing it on with my mouth atomizer. I also intend to research and find out if Winsor Newton or another manufacturer puts up a similar product in a spray can. Hewre are a couple of links back into the archives on the mouth atomizer which is what artists sprsayed paint with before the spray can, They work pretty well too. The links are mouth atomizer and cleaning mouth atomizer.

Today I have am supposed to have a post published at the Fine Arts Studio Online. That means that a lot of people will come to this blog who have never been here before. I want all of you regulars to put away the magnetic beanies and moth abdomens and try to appear halfway normal, OK?

One of the things that seems to be different about writing a blog than writing a book is the serial nature of it. Someone said in the comments that they had just finished reading my entire blog. It took them weeks. When you write a book, (not that I ever have) you can write chapter thirty assuming the readers have read chapter eleven. But on the blog you guys parachute in wherever you damn well please. Sometimes I will include a link to something I have written months ago that relates to the subject at hand. Tonight I am going to speak a little about what I have been up to with the blog and the order in which I have done it.

I am a professional oil painter. That means I make my living painting pictures. I have done that for about thirty years. I began the blog because my wife and computer guru suggested that I would be ideal for it. I had been reading James Gurneys fabulous site Gurney Journey which he posts every day,and inspired by that decided to do my own. I have done some writin and speechifyin before and have been around the New England traditional painting scene for a while. No one else seemed to be writing about that approach to painting and I decided I would. I wanted to try to write down every thing I knew about painting. I decided that I would do it as a New Years resolution. It actually took my wife a week or so to get my blog designed for me. It is an original design on blogspot with my own signature logo and color scheme. I have always done advertising in magazines on black so I continued with that. I like the look, although now and then someone complains it is harder to read.

My idea was to post every day for a year. That year ends in about a month. I have written 339 posts in a row without missing a day. Since I often travel to paint I have written in motels rooms and from different parts of the country. I have written on failing computers and in public libraries when I couldn't get wi fi.

I don't believe that I will end the blog at the end of the year though, I have a lot more material I would like to cover. So I intend to continue it. When I do run out of things to write about I will drop back to a less frequent schedule and write as new ideas occur to me. I will not write just to be writing though. You who read the blog know that I spew content anyway, I generate a lot of text relatively easily.

The project to write down what I know has so far been divided into a number of themes that I cycle through in my writing. They can all be accessed through the side bar to the right. They are ;

• painting supplies and paint, palettes, easels, the "hardware".
• drawing and the training of drawing painting techniques and methodology
• history of American landscape painting and a little material to provide background to that. I have paid particular emphasis to New England and its art history
  
• discussion of the artistic ideas like form and light
• philosophical ideas common in our historical painting
• my own experience, training and story as a painter
• something I call "ranting and raving" which is about what it sounds like, opinion sort of like a news paper editorial column.
• Ask Stape which is an Ann Landers style answering of user submitted, and phony questions of my own device emanating from the mouths of a handful of lovable fictitious characters.
• Demos of paintings done on location
• the business of art
• critiques of readers paintings with photoshopped suggestions for their improvement.
  

All of these post are illustrated with photos of historic art or picture s of equipment etc, The first month or so of the blog was strictly on materials and paint, easels etc., very nuts and bolts, I then did several months on paint handling, form, edges and a along section on design.
If you want to read those they are mostly in the first 60 or 80 posts.The next thing that is going to be covered is more history of the American landscape painters. I have a whole lot more I want to do on that. I also want to do some snow painting demos.

All of this is laced with cheap humor to keep it from getting TOO serious. There are already plenty of deadly serious books about nearly everything I address. I think I have hit upon an original idea for a blog; there are lots of them where an artist writes about themselves and their art, and I do some of that too, but this blog is a tutorial and I ask myself as I write it every night "did I give the readers something of value ". I hope at least most nights I have. I am not above a little self promotion though and it does advertise me, at least indirectly. People who read the blog will refer to me in conversations with their friends and dealers. But I do not post paintings for sale.

The first month I wrote, was January, I had 20 people read the blog, this month 10,000 people read it. Those are of course not all unique visitors, many of those visitors are daily or routine visitors. There are political and business blogs that see thousands of times more visitors than that, but given the nature of what I am doing, as I am narrowcasting I think that is a pretty good number.

Another thing I do is a few workshops, I offered one about a week ago that filled. It was a snow painting workshop the last weekend of January at an inn in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Actually one more space opened up for that, if you want it, here is the link.

Because I had people on a waiting list I am going to do a second workshop the next weekend. The link above will let you sign up for that too. The second sesion I am calling Snowcamp W. I already have that about a third filled so if you want to go, sign up, as I expect it may fill too.

Here is a picture of the inn with the mountains behind it.

I have been painting snow outside for more than thirty years and it is my favorite subject. I think it is probably the thing I do best and I am looking forward to disclosing what I have discovered about painting it. It is of course not white.

My winter workshop will be at the Sunset Hill House near Franconia Notch in the White mountains of New Hampshire. The views are out of this world and the Inn is going to be a great place to do a workshop Here is a picture of the Inn with the mountains behind it.

We can walk out the backdoor of the inn and paint on their enormous grounds with views of the whites and we can run back inside by the fire and drink coffee if our feet get cold. If we want to leave the inn there are great locations all over the area. This is sacred ground for American landscape painting, Bierdstadt and McEnteee and most of the Hudson river school once painted in this area. The workshop will begin Saturday morning and end Monday evening. That's three days. I am charging $300.00 per person and I intend to limit the class to ten this time.

I have been able to arrange with the inn for a discounted rate for the class. So the whole show comes in at just under six hundred dollars for the weekends lodging and three days of instruction. This is a lovely, grand inn in the 19th century New England tradition. I think we should all be very snug and comfortable. Up there in the mountains I think we can count on plenty of snow.

The studio

Here I am. I took this photo myself in my studio mirror which is behind me as I work at the easel. I can easily turn and see my canvas in the mirror. That's important. As you work on a painting you become used to seeing it and its mistakes. The mirror gives you a "fresh eye". Often a problem in a painting will jump out at you when seen in reverse. If you don't have a mirror in your studio , I suggest that you get one. Even a ladies compact will work nicely and can be had at the 5 and 10. I actually don't know if there are still 5 and 10s or whether ladies still carry compacts, I will assume there are still ladies. This small mirror, I can hold against my forehead, so that looking up into it, I can see my painting on the easel both upside down and backwards.
Here's a shot of my studio, with its north light windows. I have a 14 foot high ceiling, but my studio is only 11 feet wide. It is 20 feet long. That's not very large but it does give me room to back up and see my work . My traditional artists studio faces north because the sun goes over the building to the south. I get consistent, cool light and if I set up an object to paint, it's shadow doesn't move throughout the day. Ideally I would have the easel on the opposite side of the room so the shadow from my hand ( I am right handed ) would not be thrown across the area on which I am working , but my studio is actually oriented slightly northwest and part of the year I get direct sunlight coming in through my windows on one side of the room. The sun shining in on the painting sitting on the easel would make it nearly impossible to work. The basic design is borrowed from the historic Fenway studios in Boston, where I was trained .

My studio is a tool for someone who paints every day. You probably don't have a custom built studio and may have to work in a room with windows that do not face north , that can often be dealt with by putting an inexpensive sheer curtain over the window next to your easel. You may even have to work in your basement under artificial light. I will address artificial lighting for studios in a following post. I have painted in every conceivable sort of space over the years, and almost any room can be made to work. A small corner of a room actually used for another purpose will suffice. The great French
painter Leon Gerome created his masterpiece "The Cockfight" in a tiny garret studio.
If you are a reader of this blog I would urge you to forward any questions that you have, through comments, as I am trying to guess what you will need to know and I would be delighted to hear about the things I have certainly forgotten to include.

Welcome to my new blog!

Thanks for stopping in. I am a professional landscape painter. I mean by that, I paint for a living. I want to paint good pictures and get paid well to do it. I work both outside and in the studio. I have lived and worked on the coast of Maine, in Boston and Rockport, Massachusetts and now in Derry, New Hampshire. I am originally from Minnesota , and no, I don't sound like those people in the movie Fargo.
Above you see a picture of me painting two weeks ago in the mountains of western Maine. I like painting outside in the winter better than any other time of the year.
I have been painting full time for over thirty years, and made my first outdoor painting in 1975. I still have it and perhaps I will show it to you in a later post. It is absolutely dreadful.
In this blog I will offer some of the techniques, ideas and methods I have learned over the years, and talk about how to make a living as an artist.I will present some essays on painting, art, and hopefully amuse you some at the same time. I will also tell you about some of the fine painters I have known over the years and some who died long ago. I will talk about my training in the studios of R.H.Ives Gammell and about the many artists who have mentored me along the way. I will try to explain what I THINK makes a good painting, and how to go about making one.
I guess it would be ideal to update this blog every day, in order to always have something new for you to see when you visit. I should go to the gym every day too. I will do my best to keep this blog fresh and we will see how it goes. I do enjoy writing and feel I have a lot to share with those of you who also have an interest in landscape painting and art in general.