Working Toward a Solo Show

In August, “Around Here and Sometimes a Little Farther” will open in Tulare at the Tulare Historical Museum’s Heritage Gallery.

What is this? So glad you asked! It is another solo show of my art.

Pieces have sold since the show last fall in Exeter at CACHE, new pieces have been painted, and it is time to assess the collection. Do I have enough paintings? Is there enough of a spread of sizes, shapes, and subjects?

How do I figure this out? So glad you asked! (Have you noticed how many times an interviewee responds to a question with “great question”? I try to avoid clichés, so I made my own clichéd response.)

Trail Guy and I set up my display screens in the painting workshop and hung all the larger paintings. I made lists: how many of which subjects, how many vertical, how many horizontal, which ones need to be touched up or improved or finished, and what shall I paint next?

The two blank canvases will become Sawtooth paintings, one horizontal, and the other vertical. The vertical canvas is turned around because it has a painting on the other side, done many years ago by a friend’s daughter. She passed the canvas along to me, rightly discerning that my frugal self would say a hearty “THANK YOU!” and turn it into something else.

These look rather undignified, all squished together, crooked, some on the floor. Doesn’t matter for purposes of this evaluation session.

I wanted to go lie down, eat some chocolate, read a book, pull a few weeds, knit something, or just rock while staring out the window, but instead we schlepped all the paintings to the studio and replaced them with pencil drawings. Sometimes I can find my inner warrior and soldier through.

Are there enough? Are any too tired to show? What pieces need to be added? Do I have frames that will work or will I need to fork out money for more framing? (My framer is wonderful, in case you are interested. I take him pieces, tell him my budget, sometimes indicate a mood such as “formal” or “rustic”, tell him to make it look good and call me when it is finished. His name is Ed, and his business is Express Framing in Visalia. Tell him I sent you.)

This list is shorter than the oil list because I have many many many pencil drawings. How many? Glad you asked! A LOT!! (I don’t want to count.)

Currently I have 24 larger paintings, about 15 smaller ones, and 9 tiny (5×7”) ocean scenes that will sit on easels. That is 48 paintings, but there is a chance some of them will sell at Silver City this summer. There are two new large ones to paint (maybe more if the asphalt paver coming to repair our driveway decides he would like to barter), three to improve, and one to finish.

I will probably add about four more to the current batch of pencil drawings: another pier, another portrait, and two with some color in them.

What was so tough? It was a lot of schlepping, but that’s no biggie. Sometimes it is just hard to face reality: is my work good enough? How much work remains? Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Can I do better? Am I promoting my work enough? Does anyone care? Should I just go get a real job?

All of this thinking and planning is simply part of the business of art.

Forget Watercolors; Where are my Oil Paints?

The last painting of a lemon sold the day I took it to the gallery*, so I painted another one. This is Lemons on the Tree IV, 6×6”, $75. It needs a few blossoms.

Now it is time to start painting Mineral King subjects to sell at Silver City this summer. This is Sawtooth #64, 8×10”, $150. It isn’t finished. (Were you nervous there for half a second?)

The Honeymoon Cabin is very popular; this cabin is from the resort which ended up in the hands of Mickey Mouse and is the only remaining one from the big teardown after the avalanche in 1969. It is now a mini museum, operated by the Mineral King Preservation Society.

Now it is finished. Unless I change my mind. Honeymoon Cabin #49. Hmmm, I guess it isn’t as popular as Sawtooth. And fret not—this is a poorly lit photo of a very wet painting. It will look much better when it is dry and scanned. And as always, everything looks better in person (except perhaps celebrities). This is 6×12”, $145.

This will be the trail leading to Farewell Gap. The method of beginning the painting is clean-out-my-brushes-at-the-end-of-the-painting-session. It is 8×8” and will be $145.

This is not a painting. These daffodils are so heavy-headed that they fall over, so Trail Guy picked a few off the ground and put them on the kitchen window sill.

It is still April, and my daffodils are so varied and beautiful that tomorrow I will show you the immense variety scattered around the property.

*Those quick sales are a thrill and I do NOT take them for granted.

Sunrise Over the Kaweah River

Remember this messy beginning?

After finishing the new little paintings to sell in local galleries and gift shops, I returned to this 16×20” painting, which felt like a mural after those 6×6” canvases.

There was another painting session between the photo above and the next one. I didn’t take any photos because sometimes I just forget. Other times I say to myself, “Self”, I say, “No one cares”.

Sky first (because I paint back to front). These are colors I haven’t mixed before.

The improvements might be hard to locate, but not so hard if you remember that method of painting back to front. It means I paint the things farthest away first, and keep moving closer, rather than jumping around all over the canvas.

Holy guacamole, there are so many rocks in the lower left quadrant.

Nope, not going to paint all the rocks that show in the photo. I widened the river too, because I am the boss of the painting and the photo is not the boss of me.

Now it needs the edges painted, and a signature, but before either of those, I will mull this over for awhile. So often I think a painting or drawing is finished until I view it on my computer screen.

Weird, but not uncommon.

Because Business Picked Up …

… it is time to produce more paintings. These are the standard small ones that sell steadily to visitors to Three Rivers and Exeter, where my three main selling locations are, Kaweah Arts, Stem & Stone, and the Mural Gallery and Gift Shop. (Because that lemon sold so quickly at the Mural Gallery, I have another one drying for them.)

They are all oil paint on wrapped canvas, which means the edges are painted and framing is optional. I just didn’t want to type that every time.

Poppy, 6×6”, $75 (Stem & Stone)
Poppy II, SOLD
Lemons on the Tree, 6×6”, SOLD
Big Tree, 4×6”, $75 (Stem & Stone)
Poppies up the North Fork, 6×12”, $145 (Kaweah Arts)
Sequoia Gigantea XVIII, 6×18”, $190 (Kaweah Arts)
Alta Peak, Moro Rock, 6×6”, $75 (Stem & Stone)
Kaweah Country, 6×6”, $75 (Stem & Stone)

P.S. If you don’t live in town and would like to buy any of these new paintings (the ones that haven’t sold already), I can retrieve them from their stores and send them to you.

TODAY IS THE SEVENTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THIS BLOG!

Working at the Mural Gallery

The Mural Gallery and Gift Shop in Exeter has been selling my work for many years. It used to only be for artists who had painted murals in Exeter. Eventually we were all old, moved away, didn’t produce smaller pieces, or dead. (Of that list, I am only sort of old—thanks for asking.)

Now it is a gallery, but more of a gift shop, for local artists. In order to have them take less of a bite out of an artist’s sales, artists can work one shift a month. Today is my April shift.

In case you are wondering what I have there, here are photos taken from my March shift, worked last Friday.

All the Mineral King paintings will move to the Silver City Store/Resort in time for Memorial Day weekend.

Yes, they sell my cards.

While there, I did a bit a display rearranging, after I took these photos. You can see that the place has more of the feel of a gift shop than a gallery. I’ve always done better in gift shop settings than galleries, so this is fine with me. The folks running the place are very in tune with what people want, enthusiastic, organized, and a pleasure to work with.

Meanwhile, I brought four new small citrus paintings. They are waiting for bar code pricing stickers in front of these two fabulous original paintings by the fabulous Heidi Steinman.

11-4 today, 121 South E Street, Exeter

Begun, Finished, Improved

Begun

These oil paintings have their first layer down.

Finished

These paintings are dry, scanned, and delivered to their stores. (And in the category of Wishful Thinking, perhaps they are sold.)

Improved

These paintings have some minor items added to make them a smidge better.

Per my customer’s request, this now has a wind machine.
I studied this awhile and added a few more poppies hanging over the road on the bottom right of the painting.

Layering, Layering, Layering, Layering Some More.

The sky was bugging me, not just because of the uneven brush strokes. It seemed to be the wrong color.

So, I repainted it. Yeppers, better.

Those hills don’t look far enough away.

So, I lightened them and made them duller in color. (a little shiny-wet here)

Then I redid the dirt and the trees.

Prolly doesn’t make much difference from your point of view.

Now I have a list of 12 more things to fix, repair, repaint, relayer, re-detail. My patient customer said she’d like it in April, but didn’t specify a date.

Because I Felt Like Drawing

In 1990, I drew the Exeter Woman’s Club. (Yes, that is the correct name—I just work here.) It was part of a set of notecards called Tulare County Landmarks. No one can find the original drawing. All I have is this scan of a notecard with a hole punched in the corner.

The club asked to use the drawing, and had an old scan or some other format, not really up to my standards. But I didn’t mind and gave my permission. (It is rare that people know the copyright law which is that the artist holds the copyright, so I was impressed and thankful that they asked.)

They are celebrating a big anniversary (100 years?) and plan to publish a cookbook. The president of the club and I are longtime friends, and we began discussing the cover of the cookbook. I couldn’t stand the idea of a shoddy reproduction of my old drawing (not that it was great 35 years ago), so my friend went spelunking, unsuccessfully, in all sorts of places trying to locate the drawing.

Because I hit a slow time (feast or famine in the art business), I asked her to send me a photograph so that I could draw it again. She complied, and I dove in immediately on a rainy day.

Before finishing, I scanned it without a background, since that is how I drew it 30 years ago.

Then I drew in a dramatic background and scanned it again.

My friend asked me to make a couple of adjustments, which were easy to do. Here it is in its final form. After growing the new shrubs into a hedge with my pencils, I photoshopped the palm trees because of a strange request to shorten them by 1/4”. (As I said earlier, I just work here.)

I love to draw (But don’t ask me for a freebie, okay?)

P.S. My friend did NOT ask for a freebie—I offered. She did ask for some modifications, and I happily complied.

The Emerging Drawing Continues

While I was waiting to hear if JM approved the house, I began one of the dogs. Just like on the itty-bitty-face drawing, I am leaving a gap between the different subjects to fill in later.

(This picture is overexposed on the left side of the house because my giant magnifying light is washing it out.)

No emailed instructions arrived, but I had time to keep working on the drawing, so I kept going.

Finally, this was as far as I felt comfortable going without further input from JM.

The dogs’ names were Timber and Tahoe, they were part wolf, and that’s all I know about them.

What a treat to be able to draw this, to pay off my old debt, to reconnect with my old friend, and to just use pencils, my favorite medium.