Seawall Boulder (oil on canvas, 2011)

(Private Collection)
I painted this while in Southwest Harbor on the Seawall between Manset and Bass Harbor one morning as the fog was lifting. I believe that's the Cranberry Islands in the distance. I got quite a sunburn on my neck while working on this.

Red Cottage (oil on vanvas, 2011)

We spent the last week of June in Southwest Harbor on Mount Desert Island at an absolutely wonderful and lovely cottage owned by the Lesters. It's for rent and you can learn more about it here. I spent a lot of the time there working (I actually told my wife before we left that the thing I was most looking forward to about vacation was being able to work!), but did get to see some great sights and go hiking with my kids. I did this small painting on the first day that we were there, behind the kitchen of the cottage. My son was zipping up and down the dirt driveway just behind that big tree the entire time that I was working and I can still hear him making his motorcycle noises whenever I look at this.

"Home (Wright House)" (2011, oil on canvas)

(Private Collection)
This is painting I did in May of Nancy and Dana Wright's house, right here in Littleton. Nancy was retiring from her position as teaching principal at the Wellington School (see below) and Dana had asked me to do a painting of the school for her. A little while later, the faculty of the school approached me and asked if I would be interested in doing a painting of the school for Nancy. I explained that her husband had already asked me and that they should get together with him. A few days later they got back in touch with me and said that they decided they would like it if I did a painting of the house. They were worried about keeping it a surprise so I figured that the best time to work was while Nancy was at school. I checked with some of the staff to see if she ever goes home for lunch (Her house is just a couple of miles from the school.) and they assured me that she didn't. I went over to the house around noon on a day that the kids at school were performing the annual big play that they do in the spring, thinking that she had to be at school that day. I ran into a man working on their farm and let him know that I would be across the street painting and he also assured me that Nancy never came home during the school day. So I set up my easel and started to work and, sure enough, here comes Nancy driving right up to the house! I thought for certain that the surprise was ruined but it turned out that she was so used to seeing me all over town standing behind my easel, that she had no idea that I was doing a painting for her. She was even planning to buy it for her husband for Father's Day!

"Home Away from Home" (2011, oil on canvas)

(Private Collection)
This is a painting of the Wellington elementary school in Monticello. My son just finished first grade there and my daughter went there from pre-K through third grade before graduating to the Houlton Southside School last year. It's a wonderful little school and I spend a lot of time there, teaching art classes to the kids and volunteering for various things. A few years ago I painted a mural inside of Jack chopping down the beanstalk with the giant's feet coming down out of the ceiling. The school board threatened to close Wellington down this year but a large group of us parents, along with the Wellington staff, fought them and convinced them to keep the school open, at least for another year. My son's teacher, who was also the principal, retired this year and her husband asked me to paint a picture of the school. It was something that I'd always wanted to paint, anyway. The only difficulty was being able to get down there to work when the principal wasn't there, which was almost never. I went down on Mother's Day, figuring there was no way she'd be working that day and sure enough, she showed up to plant flowers out in front! Luckily, I'd brought my kids with me (giving my wife a couple of hours of peace and quiet) and they were riding their bikes around the parking lot so I had an excuse for being there.
At least half a dozen of the people who saw the painting pointed to the area on the hillside above the door and said "There's Tom Good's house." which I find interesting because it looks like this:


I like that people can look at what are essentially abstract swirls of paint and see something that they recognize.

Edge of the Wood (pastel, 2011)

Of course, I finally have lots of time to work and now the weather forecast is calling for rain over the next five days. I drew this on Monday (before it started raining). It's done on Arches Cover that I painted a layer of acrylic medium on to. The paper has almost too smooth of a surface, and the acrylic medium gives it an interesting texture for the pastels to cling to and I like the way the brush strokes show through the drawing and prevent me from being too "descriptive".

I live in rural Maine and am surrounded by woods but I generally avoid this kind of subject because it's virtually impossible for me to stand in front of a bunch of trees with a box of pastels and not feel like I'm standing in the shadow of Wolf Kahn, whose work I have admired for many years. However, perhaps in striving to transcend the influence of the masters whose work we admire, it's better to take on similar subject matter, rather than avoiding it, and work through it until we find our own voice. I do know that as a subject, the woods, especially at this time of year when the snow is gone and the leaves haven't come in yet, provides a very alluring combination of deep, atmospheric space and gestural, linear elements that offer a wealth of possibilities to the artist. It also reminds me of my childhood, when I spent countless hours exploring the woods near my home in Massachusetts, all of which have been cut down to make room for suburban sprawl.

Spring in the Air (pastel, 2011)

April was not a good month for making art. I had a 9 day trip to Disney World at the beginning of the month, caught bronchitis on the way back and spent a week in bed and then spent most of the past two weeks building and painting sets for the Houlton Children's Theatre's production this past weekend. Going out to draw on Sunday felt like drinking a big glass of ice water after spending a month in the desert.

Nice Day for a Walk (oil on canvas, 2011)

Working from landscape motifs in the brutally cold weather of northern Maine presents a myriad of challenges. The strong, bitter, icy winds make setting an easel up outside almost impossible and I am usually forced to work quickly, standing with a sketchbook in one hand and a pencil or pastel stick in the other. Working without gloves on is very difficult, but sometime a necessity, but drawing with gloves on can force one to work more loosely, which isn't a bad thing. I've noticed that the colors are more apt to change, both throughout the course of a single day as well as from day to day. I think this is because all of the intense, saturated colors have been drained from the landscape and the many neutral grays and the white of the snow are more apt to appear different colors depending on the position of the sun. In the absence of the vivid greens of spring and summer, the sky takes on a greenish tint, having no stronger greens to compete with it. This painting is based on a view looking south on the Currier Road here in Littleton, where the big hills of Danforth and Orient, 50 or so miles away, are visible in the distance. I did a painting called "Mailbox" a few months ago looking back down this road from the opposite direction. I worked this out in my studio from about half a dozen pencil and pastel sketches that were done over the past few weeks, out in the freezing cold, clutching my drawing materials between purplish-blue, semi-numb fingertips.

Leaving Russell Rock (oil on canvas, 2011)

I took my kids sledding about three weeks ago. We initially went to the big hill behind the Wellington School, which offered some great sledding. My son Damien talked me into going down with him on his sled and I reluctantly agreed. I enjoy sledding, but wasn't dressed for it. I had been out in my studio all day and was wearing my "painting" jeans, unlike my kids who had water-resistant winter coveralls on. So, of course, the sled turned around half way down the hill and we ended up crashing backwards into 18 inches of powdered snow and I ended up with quite a bit of it up under the back of my shirt and down the back of my jeans, giving me more than a bit of a chill. The kids wanted to continue sledding so I told them I was going to wait in the car and warm up. We left about 15 minutes later. I was ready to go home, but they wanted to check out the hill on the road to Russell Rock, which we had heard offered good sledding as well. I agreed to drive over and just have a look, but once we got there, they begged me to let them take a run down the sled trails. I conceded that they could take one quick run down while I turned the car around. As soon as I turned the car around, I found myself looking at this view. Having a sketch book and pencils on the passenger seat, I yelled out to the kids to sled as much as they wanted and then proceeded to draw. I finished this painting a couple of weeks ago, but had some difficulties photographing it.

Homecoming (oil on canvas, 2011)

(Private Collection)
I spent all day a week ago this past Saturday working – finishing up another painting (I had intended to post it before this one, but the photos came out very grainy for some reason), doing some drawings out on the Currier Road for the painting that I'm working on now, and stretching and priming a canvas. At the end of the day I went for a much-needed run and saw this view on the way back home, on the corner of the Framingham Road and the Shaw Road. I hurried back to the studio and did a quick pastel sketch of the color scheme from memory and then I went back to the location the next day and did a pencil drawing to work out the composition and the structures of the buildings before heading back to the studio and doing this small (10 x 12) painting. I spent about an hour and a half mixing the colors but once I started painting, it came together very quickly. I wanted to avoid over-working the cloud shapes while maintaining a sense of their transparency and I found the solution was to just slap the paint on and push it around a little. The little pastel sketch that I had done the day before, although done very quickly (a minute or so) and very abstract, was quite effective and I wanted to maintain the same type of energy in this painting.

Blanket of Snow (oil on canvas, 2011)

(Private Collection)
I painted this view of the old Schools barn, across the field behind my studio, last Saturday, January 15th, which I just realized was the five year anniversary of the day that we moved into our house here in northern Maine. Coincidentally, the first art that I did after moving in was a pastel drawing of the same subject. I can see this barn out of the window over my kitchen sink (where I probably spend more time, washing dishes, than I'd care to...) and it amazes how different it looks every time I see it. At different times of the day and during different seasons of the year and depending on the ever-changing northern Maine weather, the sky and field take on a multitude of different color combinations. I had some paintings in the house yesterday, preparing them for an upcoming show, and my daughter asked me what I'm going to do when I run out of things to paint. I pointed out that many of my paintings are based on the same subjects and that I could quite easily spend my whole life painting any one of them.

View from Ross Ridge (oil on canvas, 2011)

This painting is based on some drawings that I did standing in the snow at the top of Ross Ridge, looking east over northern Littleton and on into New Brunswick. I haven't had heat in my studio for the past week and working in the cold has forced me to work at a much faster pace, more akin to when I'm actually working outside and have to capture the image before the light changes. Not that I enjoy working with frozen hands, but the process of working in the cold gives the work an urgency, causing me to focus on the essential and minimizing the temptation to overwork the painting and fill it with unnecessary descriptive information.

Misty Morning, Clouds in the Sky (Pastel, 2010)

(Private Collection)
I did this a couple of weeks ago but have been too busy with holiday activities to get it posted.This was done in a field not far from my house on a Saturday morning after a couple of warm days and lots of rain washed away all of the snow (which has since come back). Working in the cold is never very comfortable, but the urgency to finish before I can't feel my fingers anymore always seems to give the work an energy that I like. I was standing in quite a bit of mud while I drew this and I learned that I should add a small tarp to my backpack that I can lay on the ground for working in such conditions, to keep all of my pastel boxes from getting covered in mud.

Home Before the Monsters Come Out (oil on canvas, 2010)

This is the old Henderson barn, on the ITS trail where it crosses the Wiley Road. I've drawn and painted this subject several times over the years. I was out for a run one evening about 4 weeks ago and, having failed to anticipate how much shorter the days were getting, I found myself with three miles still to go before reaching home and darkness quickly approaching. (Since moving to northern Maine from suburban Massachusetts, I have developed a strong dislike for running in the dark - way too many wildlife encounters, including several skunks and a large bull moose!) As I approached this old barn, it was silhouetted by an amazing pink and orange sky. I never saw skies like these in Massachusetts. I've drawn the barn itself so many times that I could easily do it from memory. I did several unsuccessful color studies in pastel – I think the problem was that they had too many colors and the barn wasn't dark enough. Then, one evening last week, I was walking out to my studio from the house and looked out across the street and saw a similar pink and orange sky behind my neighbors field, with a row of trees in back. The trees were almost black and the field was barely discernable. I grabbed my pastels and a scrap of paper and did a quick little drawing, which became the impetus for the color scheme in this painting.

The Light Is On, But Nobody's Home (oil on canvas, 2010)

(Private Collection)
I was out walking on the trail that goes through the woods around Deep Lake, where I have been numerous times before. I ended up staying straight where the trail turned left to circumvent the lake and ended up at the base of Front Ridge. I climbed the steep ridge and came out across the street from this old house. I did several drawings and a couple of color studies in watercolor before embarking on this painting. I've driven by this house many. many times, but never noticed it. That's why I prefer to go out looking for subject matter on foot rather than in a car, which is the reason that most of the subjects of my paintings are within walking distance of my house. It's evident that nobody lives in this house (In reality, those reddish plants in front of the door extend all the way up the facade to the second story windows, but I "trimmed them back" for compositional reasons.) but, interestingly, that big light that sticks out from the top of the garage comes on every night when it gets dark.

We've Met Before (pastel, 2010)

We had some very nice weather towards the end of last week. Of course, it's been raining all day today and the weatherman is calling for temperatures in the 20's by the end of the week and maybe some snow on Saturday. If I had any sense, I'd have spent the weekend raking up all of the leaves in my yard instead of wandering around in the woods making pastel drawings.

Vacant House (pastel, 2010)

I would love to know the story behind this house. It's about 2.5 miles down the road from where I live. Last year a crew came and dug out beneath the entire house. I used to run by it sometimes and the house was up on cement blocks with a hole about 6 feet deep dug underneath the entire house. I thought maybe they were putting in a septic system or something. The hole got filled in, the construction vehicles left and the house has sat there empty ever since. I drive by this house almost every day and the section on the left always casts interesting shadow patterns on the section on the right. I've been wanting to draw it for a while, but it's right on US Hwy 1 and there's no place to park or set up an easel. Last Friday I stopped in at the house next door and the nice folks who live there were kind enough to let me set up on their property and make this drawing.

Mailbox (oil on canvas, 2010)

(Private Collection)
Some paintings come together fairly quickly; when I'm working outside from direct observation, they have to. Not this one. I started this back in early October. I went out to paint on the first day, but it was too windy and cold to set up, so I sat in my car and did a pencil drawing and then a pastel. I went back the following day, in similar high winds, armed with several plastic shopping bags with big rocks in them that I used to anchor my easel and the little folding table that I set my palette on. It was bitterly cold and very windy, I but proceeded to work anyway, blocking in my composition and then mixing some colors. I turned around for a second and the wind lifted my palette, covered with piles of paint, right off the table and sent it flying over the fence to my right, eventually landing about 15 feet away, face down of course, in the horse pasture. I capitulated and packed my stuff up and brought everything back to the studio where I proceeded to labor over this painting for the next two weeks, making several trips back to the site. I was trying to capture an interesting sort of diffused light as the sky was mostly overcast with small pockets of light poking through a few small holes in the pervasive cloud cover. This gave everything a distinctive glow, with very few strong areas of light and shadow.

Fuel Tank (pastel, 2010)

Monticello Town Line (oil on canvas, 2010)

(Private Collection)
Tuesday was a gorgeous day – clear blue skies, 72 degrees and no wind. I haven't been able to ride my bike much in the past month since we had so much rain in September. I thought Tuesday might be the last day this year that I would be able to get a nice, long bike ride in, but it was also a perfect day for painting and I didn't have time to do both since I had to be home by 2:00 when my son gets home from school. I'm glad that I decided to paint.

October Monday (oil on canvas, 2010)

I painted this on Monday. I started working on this a little before 11:00 and thought I had enough a time to do a painting before I had to meet my son Damien's bus at 2:00 but when I pulled my watch out of my pocket to check the time it was 1:50 and the painting was only about half done. Fortunately, I was was set up on a dirt tractor path, about 1/4 mile from the road, so I was able to just leave my stuff there and rush home to meet the bus. (If I'm not there when the bus arrives, they won't let him off and he'll end taking an hour-and-a-half bus ride to Houlton and then back to the school.) I got there just in time and I had Damien change into play clothes, gave him a snack and we went back to my spot so I could finish this. While I was working, Damien took a couple of my paper towels and laid them on the ground behind be, next to a mud puddle, and got himself a couple of sticks and proceeded to make a Jackson Pollack-style drip painting in mud on the paper towels. It turned out to be a good thing that I had him change his clothes, since he was covered in mud by the time we headed back to the house.

Where No Curtain Hung (oil on canvas, 2010)

(Private Collection)
This house on the Canadian border used to be really nice and I always loved the color of it. It's been vacant for over a year now, evidenced by the fact that the lawn has become a small meadow, some of the windows are broken and the arial TV antenna is hanging limply from the roof on one side. It's too bad, really. I'm not sure if the owner passed away or just moved. Maybe it's in foreclosure, but there's no sign anywhere. Anyway, the house being vacant made it easy for me to set up my easel in the driveway and do this painting. There was a strong wind blowing from the west, which was to my back, but I was able to park my van right behind me, which helped a little, although I found that I had to tie a plastic bag with a big rock in it (I always tie one to my easel to keep the canvas from acting as a sail and blowing the easel over.) to the little TV dinner table that I set my palette up on, to keep it from blowing away.

Easy Livin' (oil on canvas, 2010)

John Constable is one of my heroes. The first time I saw his "Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames — Morning after a Stormy Night" at the Yale Center for British art in New Haven my knees gave out and I dropped to the floor and wept. Years later I read that Delacroix had a similar experience when he first saw Constable's "The Hay Wain" in the Louvre. Despite a relatively late start as an artist, meager sales and continually being rebuffed by the "established" artists of the Royal Academy (Constable wasn't voted in as an R.A. member until he was 52, at which point the president of the R.A. stopped by his house to inform him that he had received enough votes to finally be admitted, but that he, the president, had voted against him and felt that he didn't deserve the honor.) he continued with his studies of painting directly from nature, eventually becoming one of the most important of British artists and, either directly or indirectly, influencing every painter who has ever stood outside with a brush in hand and attempted to make art based on the natural landscape.

One thing that Constable was repeatedly criticized for by his contemporaries was his, in their opinion, over-use of the color green. There's a great story about Constable standing outside on a lawn discussing art with some other painters and one of them remarked the the best color for grass was the color of an old Cremona violin. Constable went into the house and returned with a violin and laid it on the grass at the speakers feet. Once, after he had become a meber of the Royal Academy, one of his paintings "Water Meadows Near Salisbury" was mistakenly put into the room filled with work by non-members that was to be juried in. Upon seeing it, the other R.A. members, not knowing that it was Constable's painting, were quite severe in their criticism, with one remarking "What is that nasty green thing?!" Constable picked up his painting and left.

This is a painting of the back of Fred and Inez's house. It has a lot of green in it (in case you were waiting for me to get to the point). I did a series of pastel drawings of this view, none of which I was completely satisfied with, and then did this painting based on everything I had learned from the drawings.

Five O'Clock Shadow (oil on canvas, 2010)

This is a view looking south down the Currier Road, which eventually becomes a dirt road when it crosses into Houlton. I found this view while out riding my bike recently and went back and did a couple of pastel drawings at different times of the day. This was based on one done in the late afternoon. I have a drawing done early in the morning, with the sun on the other side, which is completely different color-wise, and I may develop that into a painting as well. I imagine this will be a nice spot to work from once the snow arrives.

Clouds Moving In (oil on canvas, 2010)

(Private Collection)
I did this a couple of weeks ago during a plein air painting workshop that I had in back of my studio, This is the view looking north from the field behind the studio towards the McGuire's house and the back of the old School's barn, which I have drawn and painted numerous times. It started out as a very sunny day, clear blue skies and quite warm but by about 11:00, the clouds had begun to arrive en masse. It's always a challenge to keep up with the ever-changing weather when working outside. The pressure of having to work quickly can force some interesting pictorial solutions. The field between my property and the red barn is farmed by the Fosters and has had potatoes in it for the past few years, but this year they grew wheat instead. The field had just been harvested and tilled, leaving that strip of light brown which created a nice transition from the foreground to the buildings and trees in the distance. Of course, as soon as we finished the workshop, the sun came out again.

Shipping Container (oil on canvas, 2010)

(Private Collection)
I have been a little slow about posting images here, but I have actually been very busy working. This painting was done in mid-August and is based on a pastel drawing that I did from the field behind the shed that is in the painting "Height of Summer" below. I don't know what it is aout these hay bales, but I find them very interesting, especially during those times of day when the sun is low in the sky and they cast long shadows. This painting is bigger than any thing that I've done in a while, 28 x 42. I started working on it before going down to Ogunquit for a few days vacation, but wasn't able to resolve the picture before leaving. Upon my return, I felt that the field in the foreground was much too green. The paint had dried so I scumbled some oranges and yellow greens on top of the dried paint and was able to produce some interesting textures, especially where the original green color showed through.

Corner Fence (oil on canvas, 2010)

My wonderful neighbors, Fred and Inez, have a farm up on a hill where they raise sheep, along with some hens, cows and lots of hay. I have drawn and painted their barn from the bottom of the hill looking up. I have been wanting to get a look at the farm from the back so last Monday I went up there in the morning and they gave me (along with armloads of delicious squash from their garden and some fresh eggs!) permission to roam around their property with my paints and pastels. I headed way out back to do a view of the main group of attached barns from behind, and on the way I was struck by this solitary tree, which had a very strong presence all by itself surrounded by pastures and hay fields. It turns out that at 9:30 in the morning the view of the back of the barns meant that I'd be staring directly into the sun so I decided to focus on the tree instead. In spite of the intense heat (it was in the 90's!!) and spilling my jar of paint thinner all over my palette of colors, I was pretty pleased with this little painting. As I told Fred that morning, I could easily spend months up there and not run out of interesting things to paint. I spent the rest of the week doing pastel drawings of the view of the back of their house and the path leading to it from the back fields. I will try to post some of those soon.

Height of Summer (oil on canvas, 2010)

This is a view of a shed off of the Framingham Road. It's actually almost directly behind my house; if I were to walk a mile and a half through the woods I'd end up right here. I've run and ridden my bike past his building countless times over the past four years and have always wanted to paint it but it's very far from the road. I walked down the dirt road that leads past it and worked from the other side. I did some pastel drawings and then worked up this fairly large painting (30 x 36) back in the studio. I had to go to Massachusetts for a few days and tried to finish it before I left because I like to work up the whole painting while the paint is still wet and pliable. Plus, my process involves mixing up all of my colors before I start to paint, so I like to finish a painting before all of the colors dry up. I was unable to finish before leaving, however, so I had to work on it when I returned and, although I had to remix a lot of colors, I fond some interesting textural effects that resulted from applying layers of wet paint over paint that was tacky or already dry.

Air Conditioner (pastel on paper, 2010)

(Private Collection)
This was another image done during the "Paint Presque Isle" event (see post below). The skies were completely clear by the morning, but by afternoon large cumulus clouds had begun to roll by, periodically blocking out the sun. I did a big walk around downtown with my backpack full of pastels, without much sunshine. Just as I'd decided to head back to the car and drive somewhere else, I passed this alley and the sun came out and I saw my subject. When I was a kid, I used to go to karate lessons in an old building like this and we used to enter and exit through the back door via an alley that looked very much like this. I could help thinking about those days as I worked on this.

Maine Public Service Co. (oil on canvas, 2010)

(Private Collection)
I did this yesterday as part of the "Paint Presque Isle" event sponsored by the Aroostook Partners for the Arts. Artists worked all day in the city of Presque Isle and the work was auctioned off in the evening. This is a view of the Maine Public Service building on the State Street hill. I don't like to spend a lot of time traveling around looking for subject matter, which is why most of my work is based on subjects within a couple of miles from my house. As a result, I spend a lot of time looking at fields, woods and old barns and farm houses. It's always refreshing to be able to work in a more urban environment and I don't mind talking to the occasional curious passerby. This was done in the parking lot behind the Northeastland Hotel, where I registered for the event. I was initially drawn to the shadow patterns cast by the awnings and the compositional possibilities created by the diagonal of the hill and the church across the street.

Red Maple Tree (oil on canvas, 2010)

Small painting (8 x 10) of the red maple tree behind my studio. I did this as demo during a plein air painting workshop.