Words & Pictures

Max Bohm Revisited

10 x 8 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Girl in Paris

8 x 10 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Far to the Marina

12 x 9 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Christmas Shed

8 x 10 Inches, Oil on Canvas Panel

On the eve of Christmas Eve.

Clearing in the Sugarbush

8 x 8 Inches, Oil on Gesso Board by Knife

Old Road

16 x 20 Inches, Oil on Linen Wrapped Canvas 2007

Distant Faces

12 x 9 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

George Reynolds

11 x 14 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

A study of the painting by Thomas Eakins of the Civil War veteran and Medal of Honor recipient, George Reynolds who went on to become a student of Eakins and a frequent subject in his work. The original hangs at the Yale University gallery not far from my home.

Mesa at Copper Rock

10 x 20 Inches, Oil on Canvas Panel

In the desert of St, George, Utah, are magical mesas and buttes where Sev and I got to play numerous rounds of golf surrounded by this remarkable landscape in the days before the virus madness took hold.

Winter Grasses

10 x 10 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

I love how in the grip of winter the tall grasses get to live a second glory, turning into summer blondes, basking in the snow as though it were sand, tossing tresses in the wind and leaving something of warmth for the deer, the weary eye and the heart.

Sky Over Jetty

8 x 16 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel Knife Painting

Late Summer Marsh

8 x 16 Inches, Oil on Canvas Panel Knife Painting

Horse walks into a bar...

 

Portrait Study

8 x 8 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Farm at Twilight

8 x 10 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

A favorite farm. Credit to photographer Sarah Johnson for the lovely original image and inspiration. 

 

The Sandbar Tenders

8 x 8 Inches Oil on Linen Panel

Sandbars hasten reflection, especially in a world that shifts underfoot as much as the tides and the sands.

 

 

Late Summer Beach

6 x 6 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

It's time for empty beaches, full skies and dog swims in the salt sea. Knife and brush.

Field in Love

11 x 14 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Every Summer field prays for Summer rain.

Joseph at the Well

20 x 20 Inches, Oil on Linen-wrapped canva

Clouds and Pearls

18 x 24 Inches, Oil on Linen Wrapped Canvas

Rarely do I regret selling a painting. I wish I'd kept this one for myself. 

Freighter 1

16 x 20 Inches, Oil on Linen Wrapped Canva

Freighter 2

16 x 20 Inches, Oil on Linen Wrapped Canvas

Freighter 3, Masts in Mist

20 x 30 inches, Oil on Wrapped Canvas

Early freighters on Lake St, Clair, Michigan.

Road to Clouds

18 x 24 Inches Oil on Linen Stretched Canvas

East of Cove

30 x 40 Inches Oil on Wrapped Canvas 

Cove at Light

8 x 10 Inches Oil on Linen Panel

To Take My Waking Slow

12 x 16 Inches, Oil on 3/4-inch linen wrapped canvas

From the Theodore Roethke poem, The Waking.

L'auditeur

24 x 18 Inches, Oil on Linen Wrapped Canvas 

A Christmas gift for Kaley and Sev, to hang at their dining table. The composition is borrowed from a work whose painter i sadly cannot recall. 

 

 

Marsh on the Eve of Christmas Eve

30 x 40 Inches, Oil on Stretched Canvas

A favorite Connecticut Marsh in progress. It will be a gift for Kelly's & roomie Meg's apartment.

The Alcazar at Segovia

11 x 14 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel, Recent Commission

The pines, the stones and the spires -- everything reaches to heaven. 

Field after Rain

11 x 14 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Storm over Spanish Farm

8 x 10 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Marsh in Autumn

14 x 18 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Morning Prayers at the Marsh

8 x 10 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

 

Waking Sky

10 x 10 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Dinner at Weir Farm

14 x 11 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Sunset falling on a stone shed at the nearby farm of American Impressionist, Julian Weir.

Dear Julian

14 x 11 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Julian Onderdonk, after the portrait by his instructor, William Merritt Chase. Julian went on to become the preeminent West Texas landscape painter. I struggled to express his sympathetic eyes. Onderdonk loved to paint bluebells and three of his paintings hung in the Bush 43 White House. 

Papi

10 x 8 Inches, Oil on Linen Canvas

 

Dear John

10 x 8 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

After a self portrait by John Singer Sargent. 

Near the Gloaming

8 x 10 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Scottish Girl

10 x 8 Inches, Oil on Wrapped Canvas

 

Leftover Paint

8 x 10 Inches Oil on Linen Panel

Evening at St. Cloud

10 x 8 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

I find the Scottish clouds and grey skies are as fine as sunshine most anywhere else. Between Guardbridge and Cupar, just west of Saint Andrews is Saint Cloud, where Robert Burns was moved to recall:

Few happy hours poor mortals pass
then give those hours their due
and rank among the foremost class
our evenings at Saint Cloud.

The Morning Passions

8 x 10 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

Standing on the pier at Saint Andrews, the one where the students in their red robes walk in procession , the one from which the morning after graduation some are know to leap with full hearts into the North Sea.

Wishes from the Headland

10 x 8 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

It may be you will come again, before my hair is grey
As the sea is in the twilight of a weary winter's day.
When success is grown a burden, and your heart would fain be free,
Come back to Saint Andrews -- Saint Andrews and me.

The final verse of  Come Back to Saint Andrews by R.F. Murray.  

Sev in Nantucket Light

18 x 18 Inches, Acrylic on Linen Canvas

 

Himself and His Stetson

10 x 8 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

My Tio Luis at Lauren & Kyle's wedding last week. You can take the cowboy out of Cuba, but you can't the cowboy out of the cowboy. 

Field in Full

8 x 10 Oil on Linen Panel

I have found something in Rose Quinacridone, or it has found something in me. How it plays to ultramarine and to certain French yellows and how it insists so earnestly on joy. I'd not really thought to lend it to a landscape, to just let it go. But as I painted this I thought of fields. Of fields painted by Frost,  of a one where Whitman to his father called. But when it was done, the field itself and all this color said it belongs to Rumi. And so, it does.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.
--Rumi

Max Bohm

10 x 8 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

I painted this with imagined color. It's based on the only known photograph of American painter Max Bohm 1868 - 1923. The photographer is unknown. Bohm in his later years lived and worked in Bronxville, NY and summered in Provincetown, MA. My favorite of his paintings is this portrait of his wife, Zella Newcombe Bohm.

 

Dear Eugene

10 x 10 Inches, Oil on Linen Panel

A small, rough knife and brush take on the self portrait by a young Eugene Delacroix. His attire feels ecclesiastical, which is fitting for a  high priest of the French Romantic painters. Unlike most romantics, Delacroix was driven by a sense of individualism sans overt sentimentality. Baudelaire said "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible." For Eugene, we enjoyed a La Chapelle Bordeaux, large helpings of Melody Gardot, Keren Ann, original Norah Jones and  Amy Winehouse, finished with a Romeo & Julieta Montecristo white series. Sometimes painting is pretext for other pleasures.