New Hampshire Snow

9x12 inches. Linen canvas panel. Framed

View from the back of Sunset Hill House in Sugar Hill (Franconia) New Hampshire. Begun on the second (or was it the third) day of Stapleton Kearns's Snowcamp, January, 2013.

I put this away when I got home from Snowcamp, not liking the painting much. But over the months, it's grown on me. I did tweak the background a bit.

While I painted the scene, snow was falling fairly heavily and I hadn't rigged anything to keep it off my palette. Before long, my oils were grainy with tiny ice crystals. Working became a mushy challenge and I retreated to the hotel's covered porch at the back.

There is no roadway snaking back in the actual scene. It was put in after Stape trudged past and muttered, "Wicked stripe-y," meaning that each scene element was stacking up in horizontal ribbon after ribbon. 

Then, just a few days ago, I discovered that there probably was a road heading back that way. The original railroad hotel of the mid-late-1800s, long gone, was sited somewhere back there. The current Sunset Hill House was the hotel's Annex, with a mere 28 rooms, designed for those who wanted New Hampshire but not the crowds. The original hotel had 300-some rooms.

A note on the color - my camera loves blue, because camera sensor designers always dial up the blue in landscape photos. Who doesn't love a blue sky? But the sky that day was not so blue and neither were the mountains.

Swift River East Branch

The east branch of the Swift River on a very early fall day. This burst of color presented itself because a road cut allowed sunlight to pour into this one small corner.

The Swift River is one of the tributaries of the Quabbin Reservoir, a huge artificial lake that provides drinking water to Boston and dozens of that city's suburbs.

Well upstream of the reservoir, the Swift River Reservation is a mix of spooky and beautiful... spooky owing to the cellar holes, stone fences and other residue from colonial times... beautiful in its varied terrain, wild variety of flora and fauna, and the river itself. 

It's mid-state, near the sleepy but welcoming town of Petersham. Don't miss the country store and be sure to visit the library and the moldering former upscale girls' school next door.

Available unframed. For purchase information, see my Daily Paintworks gallery, http://www.dailypaintworks.com/artists/dave-gehman-5486/artwork 

Kancamagus Highway - birthday gift

8 x 10 in. (20 x 25 cm) oil on canvas panel.

Once, a while back, Kittie and I drove the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, about 26 miles of spectacular views of the White Mountains. Since we were there at leaf-peeping time, I mostly got to see the rear bumper of the RV ahead of us. This is one of the rare views, which I painted for Kittie for her birthday, so, not available for sale.

A stop in Whitefish and the addition of a private car

Our Amtrak Empire Builder passenger train stopped just at deep sunset in Whitefish, Montana. It's a tiny town, but well known in the northwest (at least in the past) for its posh resorts and ski lodges.

It was one of the longer stops along the Empire Builder route, allowing train personnel to top up fuel and replenish food and goodies. Passengers can debark and stretch their legs. I didn't really need it - we had boarded at East Glacier (National Park) less than forty minutes earlier. But I didn't want to miss the chance to see us on the outside. Again. I hopped off the train at all of our longer stops.

So I wandered out onto the platform of the late Victorian (and beautifully maintained) train station. I didn't see it come up, but an old. wooden passenger car was being shuttled off a siding and staged behind our train by a switch engine. The car was ornate, old, gleaming in the lamplight. A party was in full swing, visible through the large glass windows. The music could be heard, rock-and-roll.

An Amtrak worker on the platform of the old car stood waiting for coupling of the car, so I asked him what this was.

"Private car," he said. It turns out that Amtrak will attach private cars to its scheduled runs, for a hefty fee.

"Look incredible," I said.

"It should," he said. "It was the private car of [here he inserted the name of a fabulous party-animal industrial tycoon of the late 1800s]. Crystal chandeliers, mahogany interior, even has a complete master bedroom suite with private bath and shower."

I didn't write down the name of the tycoon on my trip notes - I've been racking my brains and it may come back to me... but it may, and in fact probably, will not.

I took the photo which is the basis for my oil above, then watched as a switcher gently connected the old car. The 21st century rock-and-roll audible outside it was a strange, anachronistic touch.

As it turns out, the photo was not of the scene above. The Empire Builder swept straight off to the left. But the picture was so dark that a printout made the dark shapes of one-story shops along a street masquerade as our train. It looked as though our cars curved around to the right, pointing into the wall of mountains north of town. Only after I painted the little canvas did I revisit the photo and discover my mistake. Mistakes can make far more interesting pictures than reality...

A Flurry of Still Lifes and a Floral or Two

A smattering of small paintings and (for me) a big one... at 8 x 10....

Beach Rose + Mini Landscape
6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Unframed. Available in my Etsy store
Wild beach roses are fascinating. They're all over the east coast, along beaches and dunes, bringing color and fragrance to the seaside.

The Web doesn't reveal their origin - or more precisely, my search skills didn't turn it up. The rose burst forth first in the Orient, Wikipedia assures me. It made it to England well in time for the War of the Roses, probably because finicky roses allowed a landed aristocrat to crow, "My gardener is better than your gardener."

But the beach rose is a blue-collar rose. It doesn't require coddling or attention. It grows anywhere, even (as here) in sand, beaten by salt wind and scoured by winter storm.

Did ours escape from colonial gardens? Did rose hips find their way into cargos from the Orient, back when Massachusetts blue-blood money was piling up, thanks to the 18-19th Century tea, porcelain and opium trades?

The little landcape here is of the beach-rose-lined walk that heads past Clarke Pond to Gray Beach, part of the Coolidge Reservation in Magnolia (okay, Manchester) Massachusetts. Only the outline of the foundation is left of the once-fabulous Coolidge mansion overlooking Massachusetts Bay - Boston is visible, and so is Cape Cod on a clear day.

Off Gray Beach is Kettle Island. Artistic license allows me to bring it a lot closer to make a sort of interesting background.

It's a great place to gaze at the Bay, and at the fabulous coastal homes in the area. And to ponder why the marble Georgian-style mansion existed for less than 50 years, built and later razed by the modestly-named Thomas Jefferson Coolidge. No, I dont know if he was related to President Calvin. Silent Cal, he was called. T.J. is silent as well, having passed away in the 1960s.

Bedding Dahlia Study
4 x 6 in. (10 x 15 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Available in my Etsy store

I'm planning to capture summer on canvas, as Fall grows on us in the Northeast. This is a quick study of a couple of our bedding dahlias, caught on a sunny day. Even at 6 x 4, they are painted larger than life size here... bedding dahlias are a grand, enthusiastic if tiny celebration of form and color.

Still Life with Gardenia

8 x 1o in. (20 x 26 cm) Painterly still life on commercial canvas panel. Available in my Etsy store

I'll be building my skills for years to come, if the time is allowed me. I'm happy with this one, which is sort of impressionistic, and it's a lot larger than most of my oeuvre.

The vase is a jar from my days as a professional potter in the 1970s. Its form is a cross between 19th C. American stoneware canning jars and Egyptian alabaster forms, both strong, expressive geometries.

By the way, in my future still lives, you'll see this jar in varying proportions - here, I've made it low, chubby jar. In real life, it's stocky, but a lot taller.

The glaze is the rich shiny red-brown of Albany slip, no longer mined; raw iron oxide dabbed on the pot under the slip blooms into a beautiful deep iron red in spots. The apple is a Gala, and its red bloom plays endlessly with bright yellow areas.

In the painting's background, I've played a little with complementary colors. If anyone cares, it's a tip of the hat to the improbably named Merlin Enabnit, who authored two very quirky books on color for Walter T. Foster.

(I like to tell people that I've studied extensively under Walter T. Foster. He produced hundreds of $1 how-to-paint books from the 1940s through the 70s - and his publishing house is continuing to offer low-cost painting manuals. Some of Walter's original line is quite good; some of them are just shovel jobs, many just galleries of examples of Walter's personal art collection or borrowings from earlier publications, without much redeeming pedagogic content.)

Still Life - Ginger Jar, Apples and Dahlia
6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Sold.

A little still life with another of my pots from my stint as a potter, 1969-1981 or so. The pot is this a white (actually oatmeal) glazed vase in the classic shape of a small Chinese ginger jar. On it is a leaf pattern in a soft cobalt blue, a mix of cobalt oxide, manganese carbonate and black iron oxide - and based on the natural cobalt ores of China, wih all the "impurities" that make it so much richer than the brash, blaring blue of pure cobalt oxide.

Michael Cardew, a great man and a British crafts potter from early-mid 20th C. described the role of the hands in wheel-thrown pottery. The right hand is controlling. Without it, the volume of the pot would disappear; the wall would simply slump. But the left hand, the one inside the pot, is the one that will confer life to the shape. A final, often whisper-gentle pass with the left hand alone will belly out the shape. This ginger jar benefited from Cardew's touch, with its gently outcurved sides.

Lying on the mahogany is an orange dahlia, which is about to find a home in the jar.

I took a shot at a Dutch-ish dark background. You likely wouldn't have a wall this color. But it's a nice gray.


Still Life - Apples and Stoneware Bowl

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Available in my Etsy store

A Gala and a Honeycrisp apple cluster around a little stoneware bowl with only "USA 5 in." molded into the bottom. The rim is clear of the gorgeous blue glase, so these would have been stacked rim-to-rim, then foot-to-foot, then rim-to-rim and so on, many feet high in the giant high-fire kilns of (probably) an Ohio stoneware factory anywhere between 1920 and 1950.

The relatively tiny diameter would make it ideal for tucking in and around bigger pieces. They served to increase the density of wares in the kiln. You don't want open areas in a high-fire kiln, because there's a huge fuel economy gained when at white heat, the pots radiate heat to each other. They have to be fairly close together for that to happen.

I kind of like the polished mahagony table in this setting, a rich offsetting color for the apples who are basking (complementarily speaking) in the blue of the bowl.

Still Life - Mum in Glass Vase

6 x 4 in. (15 x 10 cm) original oil on hand-made canvas panel. Available in my Etsy store


I've just discovered Eduoard Manet, who is not - to the bane of all beginning art history students - Claude Monet (but without Manet, no Monet). Manet, with an "a", did incredible still lifes toward the end of his too-short life.

Ed copied Old Masters when he was starting out. Now he's the old master, and I'm trying to copy him. My effort is a little crude, but charming. To me, at least.

Under the vase, a white silk handkerchief with an openwork pattern, part of a collection from my wife's aunt. Aunt Tish never went a day dressed in anything other than crisp, classic and gorgeous high-fashion clothes, pointed up with carefully selected accessories. This is one of the latter.