Spreading Magic
‘Tis the season to spread a little magic! If you’ve ever read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Father Christmas Letters, you know what a gem they are. Full of beautiful illustrations and humorous stories, the letters Tolkien wrote to his children from Father Christmas spanned 20 years from 1920 to 1942. Those letters inspired me to pick up Santa’s pen when my children were growing up and, years later, to continue the tradition with letters to my neighbor’s children, now ages nine and seven. I often do a little research on the North Pole to put… Read More
Holiday Rush
Forget shopping. Making and giving holiday gifts is one of the things I like best about the holidays…but the final rush is definitely here. With a week to go before Christmas, creative ideas and good intentions are flowing as fast as the hourglass fills. So…a quick post today of one of my latest projects.
The Pember Collection
A Victorian glass and cherry cabinet full of nests and eggs, collected in the late-1800s, stretches 15-feet from end to end at the Pember Museum of Natural History in Granville, NY. I’ve been going to the museum once a year for the last 10 years and I never tire of that case. The variety of the collection astounds me; I will never exhaust its sketching possibilities. I spent two hours absorbed the details of 125 year old nests before running out of time on my recent visit. If only the birds knew… Read More
Making Muffins
What could be better on a cold Sunday in November than baking, eating, and painting muffins? And while there’s no recipe for painting muffins, I scanned this several times while in progress to share how I approached it. I painted this on Fabriano soft press 140lb watercolor paper in a handmade journal, using a limited palette of alizarin crimson, quinacridone gold, and phthalo blue. That’s not a combination I typically use, but I wanted to try it. I also added a little burnt sienna toward the end. Eat, paint, enjoy!
The Things We Take for Granted
I take the beauty of fall for granted. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate it or that I am not awed by its glory. Only that I take for granted that it will be so, year after year. For those of us who live in the Northeast, it is a given that winters will be cold and long, that spring will burst forth in birdsong and flowers, that summer will be prized for its heat and fullness, and that autumn will complete the year with a cloak of gold. I… Read More
Gone, but not forgotten
The woods are falling silent. Save for the call of jays and crows and the occasional chatter of chickadees and nuthatches, our songbirds have all flown to summer in the southern hemisphere. So, while it may seem odd to be painting yellow warblers in November, I am not quite ready to take up brown and blue paint and focus on winter birds just yet. This painting began in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, where I recently sketched yellow warblers perched in display cases. Back at home, I worked from those… Read More
Tribute to Bates
For years I’ve been fascinated by the work of artists who traveled with the great natural history expeditions of the 17-and-1800s. Those artists worked in the most extreme conditions and with the most exciting of assignments: to catalog the flora and fauna of newly discovered continents. Among my favorites are Maria Sibylla Merian, who exquisitely captured flowers and insects of Surinam (1699-1701), Sydney Parkinson, who crossed the Pacific with the Endeavor and left behind nearly 1,000 finished and unfinished botanical paintings and sketches upon his death at sea (1768-1771), and the prolific… Read More
Runner Beans
The last garden vegetables left to harvest include a few scarlet runner beans that I’ve had my eye on since their red flowers bloomed in August. I didn’t make time to paint them then, but didn’t want to miss them altogether. I sketched directly in ink and then added watercolor to the foreground layer. I went back in and painted an additional layer of light watercolor vines and beans to add more depth. The shadows are really important to making this work because they create the illusion of light and depth. Done… Read More
Simple Beauties
“Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.” – Rachel Carson I love the way small creatures find refuge in and on one another in the sea. Kelp, bryozoans, barnacles, mussels– life upon life, tangled and cemented together. Tossed up from the depths, it’s a pleasure to find these beauties within reach. Upcoming Program: Drawn In Sunday, October 23, 2016, 3pm, Free North Chatham Library, 4287 Rte. 203, North Chatham, New York I will be giving a presentation of my artwork as… Read More
Goldfinch
In autumn, I like to watch for birds that are migrating south, but I also enjoy the rear-round regulars that visit our yard. With mating out of the way and young fledged, songbirds focus on the singular task of eating to prepare for the long, lean winter. A harvest of flowers gone to seed and fruit on wild vines, supplemented by bird feeders set a welcome table. Drawing birds takes some practice and a bit of study to familiarize yourself with anatomy, feather groups, and the correct placement of legs and eyes…. Read More
Drawn In 