alaska birds

Shrimp on ice

My studio was encrusted in snow and ice last weekend, but after running my little propane stove for a few hours I did manage to get the temp up to 50, which is a fine temperature for painting. It was also warmer than my house was all day Saturday, after the blizzard wiped out our power. Fortunately the heroic linemen of National Grid brought the power was back by Sunday to give me enough light to finish my painting, The Shrimp Net.

While we tooled around Prince William Sound on the Dora Keen during my Alaska residency the rangers dipped a shrimp pot into the fiord. "Dipped" being about 500 feet. That's a lot of cerulean blue rope. But 10 minutes of hoisting it back onto the deck rewarded us with dozens of these lovely creatures. As fascinated as I was by their glowing orange bodies and endless legs, equally fascinating was their disembodied heads, eyes no longer waving on their stems, and turning from ruby to black. I was not able to watch the part in between. Barbara and Tim popped off their heads as quickly as respectfully as the doomed shrimps could hope for, and put them on ice for a delicious dinner. Here's to you, little shrimpies.

Oystercatchers and Ice

I'm constantly conflicted, when I can steal some studio time, over whether to do studies for new paintings or to work on oils in progress. But the cold weather sometimes makes my decision easier, as the room I draw in is in my home, and my oil painting studio is in the cold garage. So even though I've divided the garage space in half with curtains to keep my little stove's meager heat from escaping, on really cold days I spare the propane and work on studies. These two are part of my developing series from my residency in Alaska. The top one is an Oystercatcher at Pakenham Point. I never got this close to them, but they would run ahead of me on the beach with a silly little giggle. Now I realize it was probably a nervous giggle, since they may have been trying to distract me from the eggs they may have had just sitting there in the rocks. Anyway, the Natural History Museum has a taxidermied eastern oystercatcher so I spent a few hours drawing him and he didn't move a muscle.

 

This one is an iceberg study, looking toward Surprise Glacier.

So studies are in the works, and I was very happy to have the chance to exhibit one of my few finished oils in the Newport Art Museum's Member's show (Up until May 19). And happy to win an honorable mention.

And even more happy in the placement of my piece, right smack as soon as you come in, under the color coordinated wall sign.  Thank you, NAM!

Meet the beetle

Click for larger

Here's the latest specimen from my entomological illustration class, a Japanese Beetle. Who knew they had little white furry patches on their sides? Not me, till I looked at them through a great little microscope very generously donated to me. It's a little shopworn but does the job of revealing a world that was not really meant to be seen by humans, what with our big clunky eyes and all. And now it seems the lowly Dung Beetle, greatly underestimated it seems, not only probably already checked out the pretty white fur on the Japanese Beetle, but also navigates by the Milky Way, which I usually can't see either! (ok, I'll blame light polution for that one). So, he eats dung—it's probably delicious. Shows how much we know!

Hope...

... tempered by four years of reality. But still hope.

A new start

 

As much as I respect Lucy, I really hope it's not so. I do feel rather hopeful somehow, not that anything out of my control is going to straighten out, but I'm thinking what is in my control (me) might. In order to do that, I need to simplify and focus. Cleaning my studio always helps, but I also need to get rid of the physical clutter around me. So one new year's resolution is to get rid of (at least) one object a day, so by the end of the year I will be down 365 objects I can live without. I'm still working on making my list of other resolutions, one of which won't be to stop procrastinating, but one will probably be to blog more consistently.

And once I wrap up my studio cleaning and organizing, I'll wrap my painting area in plastic to keep the heat in and put brush to canvas for a change! 

Subjects I plan to pursue in 2013

 

MACRO: The most beautiful place in the contiguous United States

MICRO: An ancient fly in amber, a life cut tragically short