Ruby in the Dust (oil on canvas, 2010)

This old shed is in back of the empty house that I did a painting of last week (see below). When I was looking at the back of the house for the other painting, this shed was on my right. I went out there on Friday and Saturday last week and did a few drawings and the worked the painting up back in the studio over the course of this past week. After many years of neglect, the shed is falling apart, I really like the way the roof line, which I'm sure was straight at one time, has taken on a prominent curve as the building has begin to sink into the ground, providing a nice compositional foil to the rectangle of the picture plane. I took some liberties with the doors - they aren't that white, since at least half of the paint has peeled off, but the painting felt better like this. I borrowed the title from a line in one of my favorite Neil Young songs.

Show at Wintergreen Arts Center

The Wintergreen Arts Center, 149 State Street in Presque Isle, ME will be hosting a show of my work in their Barresi Financial Gallery during the month of May, 2010. The public is invited to the opening reception on Saturday May 1st from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. The show will be on display until May 31st. The gallery will be open during regular Wintergreen Arts Center hours, Monday through Thursday from 2:00pm to 6:00pm, Friday 9:00am to 6:00pm and Saturday from 10:00am to 12:00pm.

In Back of an Empty House (oil on canvas, 2010)

(Private Collection)
This is the back view of an old house just north of the Houlton town line. I did a painting of the garage, viewed from the left of this painting, about a year and a half ago called "Halloween". This house has been empty and for sale since before we bought our place up here, four-and-a-half years ago, and it's really starting to fall into disrepair.
Once in a while a painting comes together fairly easily. This was not one of them. I worked on this for three weeks, returning to the subject many times, and scraping off and re-painting most of the picture two or three times. It's probably not apparent in this small jpeg (The painting itself is about 20 inches by 36 inches) but the surface shows a lot of the struggling and re-working that went into the process of creating it, which I rather like, as opposed to a slick, polished surface. Aside from appealing to me on a purely aesthetic level, I find that the "battle scars" on the painting capture the feeling of the subject matter.