Pryor Mountains -- waiting for the horses!

This is a scene from a photo sent by a friend -- but the place is very familiar; it is the Pryor Mountains south of Billings! We'll see if I'm able to paint the small herd of wild horses grazing on the grass in the foreground of the picture!

So Much Fun!

This is an apple out of my refrigerator. It's also the first oil I've ever done directly from the subject without using a photo or a drawing. I like it a lot -- it's Gamblin Oil Paints on a 5 x 7 inch Ampersand Gesso Board. So much fun!

Small Paintings, Getting Ready for the Arts and Craft Fair November 19

The River Glatt, Wallisellen, Switzerland

Willow Leaves in Early Summer with Indian Paintbrush Blooming Behind

In the summer of 2000 I was in Milan. It was the kind of adventure no one wants; I’d gone in pursuit of promised love that wasn’t there. I found myself having to salvage a good experience out of a bad one. I wandered around the city every day and surprised myself constantly by what I thought I knew but didn’t, for example that there is no way of reproducing Leonardo’s Last Supper.

At the Sforza Castle -- which was filled with art before 2001, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent war, which Italy joined on the side of the Americans -- I saw a couple of fresco panels. One was St. Francis and the other Vulcan. I learned some years later where most of the paint had come from, the caves near Verona, but at that moment I saw fresco for the first time. It was luminescent, gorgeous, reflective, alive. Compared to the oil paintings hanging nearby, the frescoes were multi-dimensional, vivid while the oils were flat; greasy paint rubbed over a rather arbitrary and uncooperative surface. That’s how it seemed to me.

I resolved (partly because of the novel, Martin of Gfenn, my novel, the protagonist is a fresco painter) to take classes in fresco painting. I did this in 2006.

It was marginal. There’s a lot of work involved in fresco that has nothing to do with paint. Just getting the plaster to stick to the painting surface is hard work. The rest I liked; I liked the time limit (paint now or forget it), I adored mixing the pigment and I liked the surface. It was clearly NOT practical for a little person who lives alone and has a full time job, though. The school was in Howard Hughes former airplane hangar...

Recently I tried a new painting product, Ampersand Gesso Board. It is hardboard (like masonite) coated on the rough side with true gesso; gesso is the Italian word for chalk. In other words, it’s a “fresco” surface. I have been painting in oils and have seen how this amazing surface returns the luminosity of the frescoes with which I fell in love. The colors don’t flatten on this surface as they do on canvas. Ultramarine blue retains the miraculous sparkling beauty of the Virgin’s robes in medieval fresco, Giotto’s frescoes, for example. I paint WITH this surface whereas with canvas, I paint ON it.  I think the difference comes through clearly on these two small paintings, each 5 x 7, on Ampersand Gesso Board.