High Tea with Friends, oil on linen, 36" x 36"

 This painting was a particularly enjoyable and successful collaboration between the client and myself because she is a designer and we speak the same visual language. The first time we chatted on the phone we hit it off and it was clear she had studied my paintings closely and really understood the formal elements- composition, geometry, perspective and color. She had a wall in her dining room picked out so that determined the size. She also wanted a deep space so that it felt like another window. She liked the painting I did a few years ago titled "Rabbit Summer" so that helped us with the narrative and structure. She also had some wonderful palette ideas that would work with her dining room. Springer Spaniels have always had a place in her life as well as a beautiful garden behind her home in West Virginia... and she is known for her baking talents.  The outcome is "High Tea with Friends".

"High Tea with Friends"

color samples for the palette 

Thumbnail sketch

Alfred and Friends on the Farm, oil on linen, 20" x 24"

 

Alfred is the fellow sitting right in the center foreground of the painting looking out at you and he is a very lucky guy. He was adopted by a wonderful family who had recently lost their beloved Spaniel so in a mutual arrangement he filled their hearts with joy again, and they are giving him a life any dog would envy.

Next to Alfred is his buddy Lily. Lily is a demure city girl living in a nice building on the upper east side of Manhattan. She goes to the beauty parlor regularly and lives a posh life with her mum. But when Lily goes to visit Alfred on his farm, she becomes quite another beast completely, and has been known to get appropriately muddy for a farm dog. 

Behind the pups in this pastoral setting are Mason and Jake, Alfred's very curious donkey friends. Whenever Alfred is near they watch him closely and appear to be amused by his antics.  

And back in the field are the beautiful farm cows grazing peacefully. 

This painting was a surprise for Alfred's family from his grandmother who is also the former director of the Tatistcheff Gallery NYC where I exhibited by work for many years and my close friend. She  stealthily collected photos of the farm from her son and sent them to me one my one. As a writer, she had an amazing ability to describe all the subjects' personalities in great detail so that I could get them on canvas. It was  a cheerful project to work on together and now I look forward to meeting all the characters in person one day! 

"Citizen of the World"

This painting was a surprise for the recipient. I am always a little wary of doing paintings as surprises because art is so personal. But in this case I knew that the fellow commissioning it for his wife would have great insight into what she would like. AND she is a dear, long time friend of mine- which made the experience especially wonderful. 

She grew up in Malta and from a very early age she knew she wanted to make her life about travel. She went to school in Switzerland and ultimately became a leader in the travel industry. So her husband wished to make the painting about that and call it "Citizen of the World" because that is how she has always felt, and lived her life. 

"Citizen of the World", oil on linen, 24" x 36"

The painting shows a young girl, looking at a globe and writing in a journal- perhaps planning future itinerary or writing about the journeys she has already taken. Some of her favorite books as well as books about travel and an atlas are in the bookcase below. Golden Retrievers have always been their family dog.  In the distance between the arches I melded together New York, Paris and Malta, all places where she spent time and which are dear to her heart, as if they were one landscape. 

In the middle distance, there are two luzzo, traditional maltese fishing boats, which visually help make the transition from foreground to distance.  In the foreground architecture, on either side of the arch are a Maltese Cross, and the emblem from the Rosey School in Rolle Switzerland, which she attended. The school emphasizes an international atmosphere which obviously had a big influence.  A family of swans floats near the steps, symbols of her family life. I based the color scheme for the painting on Maltese tiles. 

Here is the watercolor study for the painting 

And the painting in two stages- the underpainting in progress, and then with the first glazes

A Maltese cross, The Rosey School logo, and a Maltese Tile 

"7 pm with Hopper and Bonnard" (If Edward Hopper's Model had lived during the Pandemic and had Pets")

2020 has been a very strange and disorienting year so far with lots of new phrases and expressions being added to our lives. One of these is the concept of "Staying Home" in order to "flatten the curve" and slow the spread of the COVID 19 virus. Besides sometimes being challenging- staying home had some silver linings mainly because people slowed down and had time to try things and do things they didn't have time for in their normal full and busy lives. Many people were sheltering alone which reminded me of the Edward Hopper paintings of single figures isolated in a room. Other people saw this relationship and many Hopper paintings were shared on social media. 

One of the last little trips I made before the pandemic hit, was a road trip with two friends to see the Hopper Hotel show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. I have always been a Hopper devotee. My uncle, an art historian and painter, was a lecturer on Hopper at Washington University in St. Louis, and since I learned to paint from him, I looked at a lot of Hopper paintings over many years. I even named one of our dogs after him... The show in Richmond was fantastic and I fell in love all over again with the painting "11 am" which I have depicted on the left hand wall in this painting.  I also stole  the wonderful figure from Hopper, reversed her pose and made her the woman isolating alone in "Staying Home".

"Staying Home" oil on linen 36" x 36"

But she is not alone at all. Another silver lining to the pandemic was that many people realized that it was the perfect time to bring a dog or cat into their lives. Pets are companionship and comfort and that is what we all needed. A record number of animals were pulled from shelters and placed into loving forever homes. So the woman in this painting is surrounded by her dogs and cats in the warmth of a cozy interior. The other painting on the wall is Bonnard's "Woman with Dog" -another favorite painting of mine. 

Other activities that people were doing while staying home are represented in the painting; such as learning chess, (I think the cat is winning), making sourdough bread, and doing hours of handicrafts such as knitting and needlepoint. My daughter was staying home in Brooklyn. She described her experience being in the city and sometimes called us to let us hear the nightly 7 pm ritual of people coming to their windows, shouting and beating on pots to thank the healthcare workers for their hard work, devotion and personal sacrifice. So that is what is going on in the buildings outside. 

I titled the painting "7 pm with Hopper and Bonnard" to echo the Hopper painting titled "11 am".

"Sanctuary" oil on linen 36" x 48"

I was working on this painting at the beginning of the Pandemic so I titled it "Sanctuary". The room is a place of calm and reverie, isolated from the chaos and stress of the outside world. 

Formally the painting is a play on the Matisse painting “The Piano Lesson” which is on the wall. The real painting hangs at MOMA and I visit it whenever I am there. It is a mystifying work of art. 

In "Sanctuary" the boy at the piano is the reverse image of the boy in the Matisse. Other elements I have pulled into this painting are the arabesques of the wrought iron balcony, the angles, horizontals and verticals which are either opposing or aligning with those in "The Piano Lesson". The colors also relate to Matisse’s palette. The owls have found the sanctuary to their liking and the head of the boy in "The Piano Lesson" has always looked quite owl-like to me. 

Commissioning a Painting

I thought I would take this moment in time to write a little bit about how I do a commissioned painting whether it is a poetic realism composition, a simple portrait of a person or a pet, a complex narrative portrait, or something in between. 

"Plutarque"

"Portrait of a Young Poet"

"Toby with Jed and Bizzy"

I love painting for an individual or family. It is a collaboration and most of my clients seem to enjoy the creative process. It can be a painting similar to my "Interior Dreams", "Animal Dreams" or a "Story from the Woods" series or it can be simply a landscape or a depiction of certain place that has meaning to the individual. It can also be a narrative portrait telling the story of an individual or family.  This concept is based on portraits from the Renaissance in which the artist depicted aspects about the life of the subject as well as a painted likeness. 

The process can be completely virtual without me ever meeting with the subjects in person and when it is finished the painting will be shipped to the client. It starts with an email exchange in which I send a series of questions to get to know what the client is looking for in terms of the painting size, who or what is to be the subject of the painting, where the painting will be hung etc.

Once I have this information, we set up a phone call which could also be a facetime or a zoom meeting. And at this point I ask for a few photographs to be emailed or texted to me as beginning resource material. After that I start working up a composition. This is a small sketch on grid paper with written notations. I email the sketch to my client for changes or approval. When the composition is set, I often ask the client to take specific photos and email them to me, if necessary. Then I build the canvas using all archival materials and start drawing, then painting. If the client is interested in seeing the process, I am always happy to send photos as the painting develops.

I especially love painting a human with their four-legged best friend, or just the four-legged friend. Or all the four legged family members from a person's lifetime as in the last painting in this post called a "Lifetime of Animals.  Please feel free to contact me for more information and pricing.

Preliminary Sketch for "Shadow's Woods"

Final Painting "Shadow's Woods"

 

Preliminary Sketch for "Come for Drinks"

Final Painting "Come for Drinks"

Preliminary Drawing for "Sunday Morning with Shelties"

Final Painting "Sunday Morning with Shelties"

"A Gathering of Old Friends"

"Alfred on his Farm with Friends"

"Khaya and Sascha "

"A Lifetime of Animals"

                                       

Dance an Ode to Matisse

In recent years I have been looking back at various artists who have influenced my work in one way or another during my career, and studying their paintings by incorporating one into one of my own compositions. It is now time for Matisse. I first starting looking seriously at the paintings of Matisse on a trip to Russia in 1987. I was with my husband, who was a foreign correspondent. He was reporting on stories in Moscow and Leningrad, so I took the opportunity to go along and visit the Hermitage Museum. To my amazement, among the incredible collection there were a large number of Matisses -- none of which I had ever seen, even in books. You have to remember, back then St. Petersburg was still called Leningrad, the Communist Party still ran the Soviet Union, and the number of Western visitors to the Hermitage and exchanges of paintings between Russia and the West paled compared with today. One of the paintings was The Dance, which was commissioned by the Russian collector Shchukin, who asked Matisse to paint a second version of the one that hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The panel that Matisse did for Shchukin depicted the figures more robust and muscular, less graceful and in a strong orange-red color, whereas the figures in the painting in MOMA (which is the version I loosely copied in my painting), are lithe, simply drawn and lighter in hue, and the entire painting is imbibed with an airiness and lyricism. The Dance was deceptively hard to copy, which says a lot about the simple shapes and  elegant line which is the beauty and magic of Matisse.

"Dance", oil on linen, 36" x 48"

My painting "Dance" is another in my ongoing series called Animal Dreams, in which I am creating dreamlike sanctuaries for creatures that are threatened in the real world. In my Dance, a cellist is performing in the foreground with his loyal Foxhound and a hat set out on a chair for donations. There is a forest outside and a supernatural light pours through the window, casting a swathe of light across the Matisse. The music and the warm light attract a family of foxes who, inspired by the dancers on the wall, form a dance circle of their own. I chose the musician to play a cello because the shape of the cello and the case echo the shapes of Matisse's dancers, and because I love cello music and often listen to it while I work.  I recently read Fox 8 an exquisite and powerful little book by George Saunders about a fox who is the daydreamer in his pack and teaches himself how to understand "Yuman" by hiding in the bushes outside a home and listening to children's bedtime stories. The power of this knowledge leads him to learn that the habitat of his pack is in impending doom from developers who are clearcutting the forest and building a shopping mall. This book in a microcosm shows the way urban sprawl is affecting wildlife and even causing the extinction of some species. In my own neighborhood I see foxes on a daily basis and strangely, since I have been working on Dance a large, beautiful red fox has been keeping a close eye on me and my dogs. I make a point of nodding to him in appreciation that he is there.

The Dance at the Hermitage 

The Dance at MOMA