A Room with a View, and a Family

I recently finished this portrait for a family. It is 44" x 64" oil on linen. The family lives on a lake and they asked that the landscape out the window  be painted in winter so that the lake would be visible through the trees. The room was yellow, so a relationship between the warm interior tones and the violet and blues in the winter landscape happened naturally. Various other elements note things from their personal and professional lives. The boy is an accomplished musician so I gave special attention to his beautiful hands and long fingers- in the painting he is playing Chinese Checkers, but in the painting within the painting, on the right- he is playing the piano. The painting now hangs in the same room that it depicts, so even at night when the sky is dark, they can still enjoy the view.

A Dog's Life and Lucky Dog Animal Rescue

This is a tiny painting I did of my dog Rembrandt who is actually rather large.  It is one of my "A Dog's Life" paintings in which I am trying to express how a dog enjoys a particular place or environment just as we do. In this painting Remy is lying in the field below the Spring House Hotel on Block Island. He has his head lifted slightly to catch the sea breeze. If you could get close enough you would see that his nose is twitching, taking in all the interesting smells that the breeze carries with it- at least for a dog.  Because I love dogs, and love looking at dogs, I have started fostering rescue dogs, until they get adopted. I am fostering for an amazing organization in DC called Lucky Dog Animal Rescue. They rescue dogs from high kill shelters in the south and bring them to the Washington area to find homes for them. Last week they found homes for fifty-four dogs. Seeing the dogs get lifted off the trucks into the arms of people waiting for them, is one of the most moving things I have ever witnessed. The dogs enter their new life looking a little timid. Some of them cower and crouch when their feet touch the ground. Then they look into the eyes of the human who is reaching for them and you can almost hear them sigh.  They know they have been saved and given a second chance at life. I am so moved by this endeavor that I have decided that part of the proceeds from all my A Dog's Life paintings will go to Lucky Dog Rescue so that more dogs can get lucky.

Mrs. Paisley's Night Up

I love this poem by India DeCarmine and it inspired me to do this painting.  In the painting Mrs. Paisley takes a break about half way up, to catch her breath and gaze at the moon. The painting is oil on canvas 36" x 36".

The Gift: Wherein Mrs. Paisley

Rights One Wrong of Her Misspent Youth

When Mrs. Paisley was a child

She wasn’t what you would call wild.

She never deigned to skin her knee,

Bake with mud or climb a tree.

In short, for all of her young age

(when beastly girls were all the rage),

her main aim was taking care

not to disarrange her hair.

Mrs. Paisley eyes an elm,

hitherto within the realm

of things she’d not meant to ascend.

Yet lately she’s discerned a trend

whereby categories shift.

With fine, long limbs, this tree’s a gift.

Mrs. Paisley’s not elastic,

and the angle is quite drastic

of that first limb. While she heaves

her butt up towards  the new spring leaves,

she thinks of neighbors with a view

and hopes they’ve better things to do.

She strains, she gains the branch, how sweet

to feel its curve beneath her feet.

Yet soon she knows that sweeter still

is the second branch; a thrill

attends each branch in turn. Her knee

is skinned as she goes up the tree,

but Mrs. Paisley doesn’t stop

until she’s reached the tippy top.

Here she grins and looks around.

How pleasant to have left the ground. 

The Calm before the Storm

oil on linen 36"x48"

 In this painting a cellist plays alone in a quiet room. As she plays, the room metamorphosizes into an enchanted forest and birds begin to fly in and congregate on the tables and chairs. The cellist’s dogs listen  and are seemingly undisturbed by the visiting birds. Outside the window the sky is getting dark, and storm clouds move in over the city, in contrast to the calm silvery interior. I was inspired to do this painting after reading about birds displaced by the high winds during Hurricane Sandy. Gannets were spotted in New York Harbor, Jaegers at Cape May, NJ, and Petrels on the Hudson River.  I started thinking about the room as a sanctuary, like the calm before the storm, in the face of impending chaos.

The Attraction of Fishing

My initial concept for this painting was to create a “floating room” as if it had just drifted onto the sand at the edge of the water. I have always loved the image/idea of mermaids and all the mythology and folklore that go along with them. I have done several other paintings with them, including the painting “Water Music” in which a mermaid is sleeping in a chair listening to a pianist. While I was working on that painting I did a drawing in which the mermaid was stretched out on the top of the piano and the shape of her body and tail and the long shape of the grand piano just seemed to fit together like the pieces to a puzzle.  In composing this painting I became intrigued by how the shape of the back of the mermaid also reflected the rhythm of the dunes in the landscape behind her.  The title comes from a quote I read from a filmmaker in which he said  “life can both be explained in the same way someone might explain the “attraction of fishing”. I interpret this as our desire to go forward in life is motivated by not really knowing exactly what we might catch if we keep casting our line.  In the painting there is a fisherman in a rowboat, fishing with his dog. There is an interchange of dreams here. It is possible that the fisherman is daydreaming that he may catch a mermaid, and the pianist is dreaming about fishing as he plays, and thus the mermaid has materialized on his piano. The dogs in the painting are not dreaming, but instead they are enjoying the simple bliss of a comfortable chair and the pleasure of being out in a boat in the water, unencumbered by the more complex dreams and desires of their human companions.  The heron in the foreground with the fish is frozen in the moment, one foot in the “real” world and one foot in the dream world of the “floating room”.  The painting is 30" x 42" oil on linen.

Rabbit Summer

"Rabbit Summer" is the third of my three moon paintings composed on a square. The moon in this one has just gone down and the sun is just rising. The woman gardener on the yellow striped sofa tried to stay awake to keep the intrepid rabbits from eating her vegetable garden. But she dozed off....not even her faithful dog knows how to handle the situation. The painting was inspired by my own gardening challenges this summer when a bumper crop of rabbits sprung up in our neighborhood and devoured all our lettuce, radicchio and green beans. Fortunately the tomatoes were spared.

"Rabbit Summer" is oil on linen, 48" x 48".

Goodnight Moon

This painting is titled "Goodnight Moon". It is oil on linen, 48"x48". It is the second in my summer series of moon paintings. ("Moon River" is in an earlier post)

 Many of the elements of the painting are inspired by the wonderful poem/children's book by Margaret Wise Brown that has lulled so many children to sleep.  It starts off:

"Goodnight Moon...

Goodnight room 

Goodnight moon 

Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.