portraits and salon de Refusé

Seventh Annual Door Prize for Portraiture
Miller Art Museum, Sturgeon Bay WI
June 4- July 25 2016

Some may have noticed, there are no portraits at Chez Cheryl Artspace this summer.  Instead, the Miller Art Museum has graciously hosted this exhibit which has doubled in size this year. Opening In early June with a public reception, the exhibit runs through July 25. I must admit great pride in seeing this exhibit grow and to such an exquisite level of talent and expression. The opening reception was wall to wall, food and drink ran out before the reception was over. My face hurt from smiling.

The following week I presented my talk  to the Miller Art Museum volunteers and general public, Speed Reading the Portrait;a brief history, which went well thanks to Michael Nitsch and Elizabeth Meissner Gigstead for their help with my images I requested for the talk.  I had spent most of the winter months reading and  compiling information to make my talk thorough yet not bogged down with too much linear thinking. My audience laughed when they should and I felt confident that no one fell asleep during my hour long  excursion through art history.

 I stopped back at the Miller the other day and attendance seemed to be very good that day, the count was at 56 and that was noon. More people in one Saturday than I would have had in a week at chez Cheryl.   Best in show award went to Craig Blietz for his self portrait, with two cats, honorable mentions included Sharon Delvoye, Shelby Keefe and Bonita Budysch. I felt strong pieces included a painting by Buttons Wolst, also a self portrait by Emmet John's, and last but not least, an incredible portrait of her granddaughter, by Jan Comstock.

Next year the show will go back to the farmhouse studio at chez Cheryl, and may introduce some new people, wih possible sabbaticals for a few others who have been regulars since its inception. It's fun to stir the pot now and then.

 I struggled to make a portrait this year, working on a tiny ampersand clay board, with gouache, over and over again, until I was sick of it.  Learning to handle gouache, and working in such a small  format, I found the combination of those elements too challenging but learned a bit of handling a media that tends to dry quickly.  At the 11th hour I went back to larger format, oil paint and a bigger brush and the self portrait Touch of Grey/ The Green Scarf evolved in a matter of two days. This painting evolved with the joy of the paint, and brush strokes were allowed to take over the  image for their own sake. It is all about the movement of paint, less about the actual likeness, yet I feel an image and expression  of some small degree of accuracy in this selfie.

TOUCH OF GREY/GREEN SCARF 2016
water based oil on canvas
at the Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay WI

CAT WITH SPIDERWORT 2016
waterbed oil on canvas
Community Mosaic Project
Hardy Art Gallery, Ephraim WI

 MOSAIC PAINTING PROJECT
The fundraiser known as the Community Mosaic  event is happening at the Hardy gallery in a few weeks. I have submitted a piece again this year.  A still life with cat and spiderwort, with space divided into flat color fields, the piece is inspired by Japanese prints, with no visible light source, no shadows, just the articulated forms of the cat and the arcs of the spiderwort leaves to give it interest.









COLLECTION INVITATIONAL
HARDY GALLERY- July 22- August 2016

APPROACHING STORM 2016
water based oil on canvas
for the Collection Invitational Silent Auction
Hardy Art Gallery, Ephraim WI

I have donated a piece to the Hardy, for their annual silent auction. Two pieces go on exhibit, one for show and one for sale. I chose to submit  for sale, APPROACHING STORM in water based oil on canvas. It  is a good representation of the recent storms that moved through quickly  the last several nights. Inspired by the view from the farm house studio windows looking west toward the Peil creek valley and Door County Land Trust property on the McNeil Farm. The view has been painted by many but probably not as often or as intensely as i have studied it through seasonal changes, in snow and rain, in summer blossoming and autumn golds, the view is my muse.

SALON DE REFUSÉ or What Steve calls THE HARDLY, with no ill feelings or malice, we have decided to honor those rejected each year, or for the next year at least, by holding a pop up show for one day only, with a party, for artists who bravely enter the Hardy annual salon each year, and face rejection, because the show is so popular and  hugely supported with entrants each year, nearly 50% of the entrants do not get accepted into the final showing.

A memory

Song of the Lark by Jules Breton, Art Institute of Chicago

July 6, 2016

What inspires me?  What gets me back to the studio, or out in the field with a french easel?
I have thought about that a lot recently and have to say I  just marvel at the fields of hay and oats in my neighborhood, the  gentle green hills and the lake, the blend of pine and maple  timber and the shoreline that bless this strip of land in northeastern Wisconsin.
Lake Michigan is just a mile to the east of us.
Today,  I write from home with window views to Kangaroo Lake.  There are families of Canada geese and merganser, kingfisher and herring gulls, and in the winter, a lone otter runs past.
When I drive to my studio in the old farm house two miles away, I pass through Land Trust property, farm fields and old cemeteries.

The changing light, fickle in its forms of expression, continues to intrigue and bring moments of wonder and awe. On one side we have the vast waters of Lake Michigan, and on the other, the more contained but equally wondrous waters of Green Bay, not the city, the actual bay. This place has both the sunrise and the sunset covered, crowds gather on either side, while others seek solitary  hikes to places like Tofts Point, Anclam Park, or the waters end roads on the Green Bay side of the peninsula.

When I was a toddler, I  discovered the joys of a tulip, it is my first memory, standing outside our home on West Harrison street, there is my brother beside me, reaching to the blossom encouraging me to look into it. I  was enchanted from that moment, by light, by color, and by the miracles of the universe.

Sometime after that we moved to the country, to a farmhouse that provided a roof and four walls, and vast fields of corn, beans and pastures, unencumbered by visual distractions.  There was a large pasture, cotton wood trees falling over a creek provided a natural bridge to exploration. I was horse for most of those years, and lived in perpetual joy of  the outdoor life. Each day the sunset with  new glory, and at  night the stars would rotate around the barn, with frequent glimpses of throbbing northern lights. In the winter the house would sway and moan, as Mother stuffed rags in the front door that was never used during the cold season. The sky and the weather  which filled it became a crucial element of our daily lives from season to season.  This was necessity for farm life, but also became necessity for the artist's eye.  I entertained myself with activities out of doors. One summer, I discovered  the luminous quality of tiny  wet stones in our gravel driveway and would spend hours with the  garden hose, trickling tributaries of water into the gravel, creating my own universe of tiny blue butterflies which came to drink and taste the minerals of the wet gravel. Hundreds of them would land and linger there, I was deeply impressed.

Other activities there included painting the sidewalk with a bucket of water, which my Mother devised as a distraction. Treasure hunts around the yard and Hide The Thimble also seemed like fun at the time. Another memory came to me the other day. I had a little round plastic mirror when I was very young, the  flip side of the mirror was the painting I posted at the top of the page.
Song of the Lark by Jules Breton is a painting of a peasant girl out in the field, the sun is rising I would guess,  and she may be singing, or perhaps there is a bird in there somewhere and she has stopped in her labors to just listen.  I knew larks, and this little mirror was hardly the same as looking at the real thing but I spent a lot of time staring at this reproduction. Is she  weeding a field much like I did as a teenager, walking beans for my Dad and my Uncle?

To be overwhelmed on a daily basis by beauty,  That is what it is like to live where I live. I don't paint every day, I spend a lot of time thinking about it, and about why or what I should paint, but it all boils down to this,  singing, painting, writing, its all the same, its all about gratitude and honor, and most of all, praise.

I found a youtube item on this painting, Bill Murray attributes this painting to saving his life one bleak day in Chicago. The painting is hanging in the Chicago Art Institute. As an adult, I  have seen it hanging there,  but its the memory from my childhood, of that little plastic mirror that stays with me.