12x16 in. oil on cotton canvas panel
A late summer day looking south on Saxonville Pond. It's a ponding of the Sudbury River that provided power to the Saxonville Carpet Company, which pounded out those brown, dark green, and indeterminate-but-murky-colored rugs you'll see in museum reproductions of middle-class rooms circa 1910. The mill itself is now a warren of small shops, an artist enclave, a harpsichord-maker, various engineers, and a couple of storage companies. Eerily, water still flows through the sluices to the mill's multiple water wheels, giving a watery-rumbly ambience when you're inside the mill.
That New England barn isn't really there. What's really there is an unbelievably garish bright turquoise raised-ranch house.
This was painted in an afternoon shared with Brother Eugene DiLauro, a local painter in his late 80s with (no surprise) a deep spirituality about him. Long ago, he spent more than ten years in South American poverty-ruined areas, where he alone or with another Brother supplied guidance, education, and through his religious order, goods and necessities of life.
He returned with a heart problem, having given his heart to his villages. The local Diocese reciprocated with a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design.
It was an honor to paint alongside of him in one of the very few classes he has offered.
6x8 oil on cotton canvas panel
Something has interrupted a nap. A bit more staring and she'll drop back to sleep.
This is a lilac-point ragdoll cat, so named because they go limp when you pick them up. We are not owned by one.
We are owned by a long-haired tortoise-shell and white cat, Precious, who will rip your arms off if you pick her up. There is a cat-psychological category, tortitude, which Precious has studied and adopted tortitude in all points: talkative, short-fused, strong-willed.
(This paintng is my first foray into Dailypaintworks's auction. I'm starting it at $20.)
From a Creative Commons-licensed photo by Mike Lawson, found on Flickr.
8x8 in. Oil on canvas panel
From our annual backyard dahlia display - amazing flower. I clipped one and took it to a festival that I knew would afford me time to paint in the booth.
8x10 inch, oil on canvas panel
Jericho, Vermont is a small town north of I-89, maybe 20 miles east of Burlington... and smack in the middle of the winter painting grounds of many a Rockport and Gloucester Massachusetts painters of the 20th C.
This was from a fall trip we took to find the motifs of these painters, introduced to us by Stapleton Kearns - and they appear regularly in Stape's incredibly interesting blog.
Local painters regularly capture the red mill in their works, though I don't see any versions among the Massachusetts group (see below). Officially the Chittenden mill, it was in its last stages a grain mill. Portions date to before 1855, but it was added to throughout the 19th Century.
The Mass painters include Aldro Hibbard, Emile Gruppe (whose daughter runs the Emile Gruppe Gallery a few miles south of downtown Jericho), and Alden Bryan (whose memorial gallery is in Jeffersonville, a few miles to the east of Jericho)... and a bunch more whose summer quarters were on Cape Ann.
Price is framed. For unframed, contact me.
