April Snow

Littleton NH had nearly a foot of snow yesterday, so I decided to head up that way to see if I could find some to paint. When I left home, it was 50 degrees and sunny. By the time I got to Franconia Notch, it was 35 and snowing! I ended up at "The Rocks," a Christmas tree farm owned by the Society for the Protection of NH Forests in Bethlehem, NH. Even though I've been a member of the SPNHF for years, I'd never been there. What a place! There were a million things to paint, but I finally settled on a view of the front of the stone house. My choice was due partly to parking availability. I can take the heat, I even like the cold (!), but no one can paint plein air in wind as blustery as it was today. So I painted in the car. My painting isn't finished, and it ended up way too warm, probably because of the reddish underpainting, but I'll show it to you anyway. It's still in the pochade box, sitting on the car. I'll post the finished version at some point. I'm also posting a photo of the part of the building I'm calling the garage, just to show the snow that was falling as I was walking around looking for subject matter. What a great day!

Oldies

I was gathering some artwork together for an upcoming show* and came across some drawings that I'd done years ago in Brighton, England. Here are a couple, slightly off-kilter in spots. The beach, which appeared often in paintings a century or two ago, was too stony to walk or sit on (what happened to all that sand?), so I opted for the town's cozy buildings as subject matter. These are pencil drawings, each about 5" x 7" or so.

*The show, Ebony and Ivory, will be shown at KAZA in Concord, NH next month. I'll post more about it later.

Beauport Easel

On this gorgeous warm day I tried out my new Beauport easel, a version of which I saw in action at Snowcamp. At $250, I had put it on my "someday" list, but then noticed it on sale at Jerry's (www.jerrysartarama.com) for $99 and change. That seemed about the best deal I'd ever get. After getting a replacement for a warped part, some help from a friend (thanks, Hannah!) and some adjustments, it's good to go. The paintbox in the photo was my mother's; it holds everything else I need except paper towels.

For the trial run, I figured the back yard would be handy in case I needed anything I hadn't thought of (I didn't). So that scratchy mess on the easel is the back of our house. I meant it to be just a little slapdash, but I'm kind of liking it. If I finish it I'll post it here.

The easel is great; a huge gust of wind came by that would have knocked over my box-and-tripod arrangement; this baby just hung on without a rattle. It will take huge canvases or panels, too. That's a 12" x 16" and it seems small. According to Jerry's website, it's on sale until the end of April (I have no connection to them except as an occasional customer).

Blog Change and Mouse

Because recently I've been receiving bunches of spamish posts that I've had to delete, I've added the (rather annoying) code-word filter to the blog. From now on, anyone who wants me to gamble or to buy certain medicinal products from China will have to at least be a real person who can read and type. This means that the rest of you will have to put in the code word you're given when you want to post a comment. At least, sometimes, they're pretty funny.

As a little consolation, here's a woodcut I did for an exchange awhile back: "Sin Nombre," a four-color woodcut, 4" x 4" on Japanese mulberry paper. Sin Nombre is the Spanish word for the hantavirus, a fairly rare but deadly disease contained in some mouse droppings. My interpretation of the virus is in the background of the harmless-looking mousie. It doesn't show well on the monitor, but in the original print the background ink is gold.

More Snow

Since it's snowing here in New Hampshire, I thought it would be a good time to post "Snowscape" (4.75" x 8.25", oil-based inks on Japanese Mulberry paper), a woodcut I did for a print exchange. The theme was typography. I had a giant wooden dollar-sign block that I got at a letterpress fair last summer (see the previous steam roller printing post) and used that as a jumping-off place for a design. I wanted to use the block just as an abstract design element, with no reference to money, the economy, etc. It looks quite plain, but I used 3 Shina plywood blocks, plus the $, and five colors to make the print. There's a version of it hanging in the "Prints of the Year" show at the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord NH until April 2, 2010.

Exciting Sighting

Today I was just sitting down to eat lunch and saw a movement outside, dark against the snow. A second look: it was a fisher (a.k.a. fisher cat), coming down from up near the garden! I grabbed the camera (handily on the table, as I'd just come back from a morning painting trip) and Steve opened the door. Out of the four photos, this is the only one that really shows the fisher. I saw one up north about 10 years ago and thought it was once-in-a-lifetime. Woo hoo!

Snowcamp photos

Here are some pics from Snowcamp, just to give you an idea of what it was like for us, painting in the beyond-freezing cold. There's one of Stape giving a demo, with Mt Lafayette resting in the crook of his arm. Another shows my setup, a Judson's box, with the mountain painting on it. There's a group of us watching Stape, so bundled we could hardly move, me in green fiddling with my camera. I took the aerial view of the other folks watching the demo from my third-floor window, the half-day I was laid low from eating some allergen or other. The last pic is of Renee Lammers, who took the photo with me in it. She has lots more on her blog at http://reneelammers.com/blog if you'd like to check it out.