Dancing under a dark sky

From the PuzzledDragon archives: 

This is a picture where music is integral to the subject. You can't dance unless someone or something is piping out a tune...

This work is an oil pastel/water color I did in 1992 while I was in Maine and its lovely hills are visible in the background. The guy in blue with the hair was a very odd fellow named Peter Smith who used to wear fingerless billy idol gloves and who could talk just like homer simpson. Go figure.  The fellow in the brown tee shirt is waving his arms despite his girth. He was based on a rotund neighbor named Rob Puncheon. I tried to create vivacity here with the motion of bodies, stars, sky and grasses. Even the seated figure on the far left seems as though she might jump up and join in.  The only static being here is the pensive onlooker on the right. And the picture is really hinges on her. There is all this joyful motion and one sad bit of pensive melancholy. Ah well.

This was moved from the gallery blog, where it was a Jan. '07 entry

Hairs on Fire - with an oil pastel technique

From the archives:

HAIRS ON FIRE! Not really. This is an oil pastel I did while working in North Conway, New Hampshire.  I often find the faces of people I know creeping into my work. I guess because I have had to look at them and their features are familiar. In my mind there is some facial resemblance to a fellow named Burns who was a planner there. (It's not much of a likeness.)

One of my favorite things to do with oil pastels is to lay down thick color then draw back into it with some handy implement or other. Sometimes the first layer is scraped, then a second color is heavily applied and scraped into revealing some of the first color. When I took a drawing class at Western Connecticut State University, many years ago, I remember learning to draw into  heavy pencil marks with an eraser. This is where I got the idea of removing material as a way to form the picture. 

Post Script 10/19/2011 - One of the reasons I reposted this at this time is, I recently read how Jay Defeo formed The Rose using sharpened knives as much as brushes as she cut back into the layers of paint and scraped and hacked to remove material to form the topography of the painting. Very cool stuff.

Wishing Stone (Long Pond is Cold)

Every so often I like to post a song of mine.
This one is available in two versions. One with just myself and the guitar and pictures of Maine via YouTube video. The other is via BandCamp and on this version Dickie Tilton is playing the electronic keys. He also did the digital recording - which at that time, was a brand new thing to do and the equipment was not readily available.

Painting: North Country Scene

This scene was inspired by my years in Maine and New Hampshire. I started painting this when I lived over a junk store in Cornish. I think now, finally, it's done. It's oil on an 8 x 10 canvas board. Wrong it's actually on 9 x 12 canvas board. I was close.

Painting: Cold Quiet Tranquil

There is a feeling I get when I look out the window at night and snow is falling, relentless and silent.   When my dog Oggi was alive. we often took late walks in falling snow. Sometimes I still do. In the dark snow, I feel expansively alert and connected to everything, yet also filled with a strange sense of deep peace. For a few years I lived in Maine, so I have a passing acquaintance with the desolate beauty of winter in the north country. This is an older style landscape, a bit hallmark for my taste.  It belongs to my mom who asked me recently  "Is there ever a painting of  yours that you are actually finished with?"

When I look at it now, I feel that same peaceful sense as when I look out the window in a quiet spell of falling snow ....  So yes, I think it is done.  It's oil on 8x10 canvas board.

Painting: Rural Free Delivery

This is an oil painting on a small canvas board.   This painting hung around for a year because I couldn't figure out how to finish it.

Below are earlier versions of it.  I have this debate with every picture:  when do I stop? Things are lost and others gained. Perhaps I am over painting them.

The flight for silence

When I lived in Brownfield, ME I had a great apartment on the ground floor, right under the apartment of a woman with three children, who may have also taken in a few kids for day care. I wrote the following vignette about the experience:

Living in the country

I moved from the glittery, clap-trap, honky-tonk enclaves of North Conway, New Hampshire out to the tranquil fens of Brownfield Maine - brown grasses, white birch and white pine...

Imagine my surprise when, unexpectedly, a bowling ball rolls across the floor of the upstairs apartment. Rolled by erratic spastic weight lifters unaware of their deafening strength.The upstairs, I later find, is inhabited by three children. Lovely lively maniacal children. No I am sure there must be 300 children at least. Each weights 500 pounds, no 50,000 pounds. They carry bricks in their pockets and wear lead shoes. They play tackle football for hours on end, scurrying with vibratory clatter and crash through every room. Not one square inch of ceiling is safe. No room is quiet.

My nerves have reached a degree of raw reserved for the uncooked and freshly slaughtered. My cat tears out his hair in clumps. Why did I come here? Oh yes, the tranquil country life....
______

I'd come home from work and have to coax my cat of those years, Jacklee out from under the couch. Other odd things happened. One day I shoveled out the litter box, putting the offending debris into a paper bag and carefully folded the the top down to seal it. I put this bag of treasure  out on the little deck by the front door, meaning to carry it to the dumpster. I forgot to. When I came home from work it was gone. I can only imagine little hands unrolling the bag and well - ick