Opening weekend at our new gallery!

Within just two weeks, a group of 6 artists have met, organized, and set up a brand new art gallery at Patriot Place and we opened our doors this weekend! The Artist's Studio and Gallery at Patriot Place will have live painting, local art on display, and activities that partner with the area restaurants such as art openings. This is an amazing opportunity for us as well as the Foxboro Art Association. We will be featuring 3 new local artists each weekend to keep things fresh and interesting. I've included some photos below of our fast paced set up.

The gallery front.

Gillette Stadium, where the New England Patriots play, is our backdrop!

Polo and I contemplating our arrangement of paintings.

Our final display is shown below with our names showcased on the wall above our art!

Live painting with Polo.

At Friday night's reception.

What an exciting new venture. I will keep you posted as things develop.

Hello Kitty

Hello Kitty
6" x 6"
Oil with a palette knife on panel
$100 unframed

I once wrote on Facebook that if I wasn't so allergic, I'm pretty sure I'd be one of those cat ladies. I've always loved cats and it's so not fair that they make me sneeze and wheeze so much. I think that painting all these cat faces has been a good substitute for me. And I don't need the inhaler.

And the winner is...

Sweety Pie!

The final tally was:

3 for Say Cheesecake

13 for Sweety Pie

2 for Tiramisu For You

Thanks everyone for voting. That was fun.

Vote for your favorite

Can you help me decide?

I am planning on entering a painting into a show at Gallery 9 called Just Desserts at the end of this month. I can only enter one painting so I need your help deciding which one to enter of the 3 choices below. What better way than to create a poll? So please cast your vote in the poll at the top of the side bar to the right by 10 pm on Wed, April 27.

1. Say Cheesecake

2. Sweety Pie

3. Tiramisu For You

Oh and the gallery is offering an interesting incentive to a lucky juried prize winner. They will have an oversized image of your painting made into a store sign (see below) to display outside of the gallery. Pretty cool huh?

Thanks everyone. Vote early and often.I hope you had a wonderful Easter weekend.

Fur Person

Fur Person
6" x 6"
Oil with a palette knife on panel
SOLD

When I was a teenager and obsessed with cats, my mother gave me a book for my birthday called The Fur Person by May Sarton. I still have the book and this cat reminds me of the cat shown on the cover. It is a wonderful story told through the eyes of a cat about life with humans. I don't remember all the details about the book except that I LOVED it at the time. I should probably go back and read it again to see what my teenage brain was so obsessed with.

Pick me up

Tiramisu For You

8" x 6"

Oil with a palette knife on canvas
SOLD

I was searching for the meaning of the word Tiramisu in Italian. I liked "pick me up" the best because that's what this little dessert will do for you. Light and spongy and chocolaty goodness all in one. I tried several colors for the bottom of this painting but they all seemed to be competing with the beauty of the dark chocolate so I settled on a subtle color. I also obliterated the shadow for the same reason. Now it kind of looks like its sitting on a shiny surface. Which I don't really mind too much.

Breaking 100

Threesome

6" x 12" x .75"
Oil with a palette knife on cradled panel
$200 framed

This is not a new painting but I thought it appropriate for this post since I officially broke 100 for my number of followers. I feel so honored to have that many people (who aren't related to me) interested in my art. Thank you everyone!

I do play golf occasionally and I was trying to score below 100 for 18 holes for a long time. Now, I have been lucky enough to have done that several times. Breaking 90 is the new target I have not reached. Perhaps this year will be the one? This painting shows my mother at the left, who was a very good golfer. She had no trouble breaking 100 or even breaking 90.

I hope everyone has a lucky, breaking 100 (or whatever your goal) is day!

Sweety Pie

Sweety Pie

6" x 8"

Oil with a palette knife on canvas
SOLD

The whipped cream edging on this was especially fun to paint with the palette knife as well as that aluminum foil pie pan edging.

Now, don't you just want to grab that spoon and dig right in?

Spring into Summer

Freshly cut

6" x 6"
Oil with a palette knife on board
SOLD

What a beautiful weekend it was. The weather was hinting with signs of a warm summer to come. Daffodils are the first sign of life after a long winter and also a sure sign that Easter is on the way.
Finally-spring is in full bloom and summer is not far behind. Bring it!

The Sketchbook Project Tour LIVE

This past weekend, we met a group of friends up in Portland, Maine to see the Sketchbook Project Tour live and in person. What a blast it was. I wanted to share a few photos from the event.

Their system is quite simple yet hi tech. You sign in for a computer gernerated library card on the Mac, then you can request 2 books at a time (we all thought they should have given your more like 5 at a time) either by asking for a certain artist or theme, or they will choose two books for you at random.

Look how many there were to choose from. I read that about 10,000 sketchbooks are traveling in all. These carts are loaded on and off the truck which travels to the next town.

When you were done, you just returned them to this desk, and the staff checked them back in. We discovered that this return table was a good place to quickly flip through books to see what you might be interested in checking out the next time you got into the checkout line.

Here we are holding our sketchbooks!

Some friends who came along, also enjoyed looking.

Afterwards we went out to one of the local establishments to unwind, where the budding young artists in our group got inspired by the show to get a jump start on their own sketchbooks for next year!

Next stop Atlanta!

La Violinista

Solo

10" x 8"

Oil with a palette knife on canvas
SOLD

Back in January, I wrote about a trip we made to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during which we enjoyed wonderful music on the mezzanine. This is my attempt at painting the talented violinist after being inspired by the beautiful painting of Paganini by Eugene Delacroix. You can see that post as well as his painting, but clicking here.

I painted this on a sheet of canvas from Fredrix. I like to paint on these sheets occasionally because my strokes are not confined by the end of the panel and then in the end I can crop it any way I want. I was thinking of cropping in on her to make it more of a vertical composition like this. What do you think?

And here is a close up...

Going, going, gone....

Looking Up
Oil with a palette knife on cradled artist panel

8" x 8

I donated this painting to the Foxboro Library Art Auction which took place this past weekend at the Foxboro Country Club. What a well organized and fun event. There were 53 works of art auctioned off and they are estimating that they raised around $14,000 dollars for the library. Pretty impressive. You can read more about the auction by visiting the Foxboro Art Association blog.

Below are some photos from the night.

The organizers of the event.

The auctioneers with the painting that solicited the highest bid of the night-Founder's Day Parade by Jackie Canna-for $1050.

My painting being auctioned off.

I bid on several paintings and was lucky to have come home with a beautiful pastel by Cindy Kerr.

In Your Face

Cirque du Kitty
6" x 6"
Oil with a palette knife on board
NFS

The colors of this painting got a little crazy, like circus crazy. But I'm liking how it came out. This cat's eyes reminded me of the poster for the musical Cats-so striking! He has a very regal, wild, tigerlike face, don't you think? I am enjoying doing these really tight close ups of the animal faces. If you have a cat yourself, you have probably seen this in your face at about 5 am checking to see if you are awake. Isn't it time to eat?

Inspirational student work

There is a wonderful student show at the Transportation Building in Boston right now. It's the Annual Scholastic Art Gold and Silver Key award winners. I took some photos of some of the pieces that caught my eye but overall I was so impressed.

This is a detail of a drawing by Anna Viccica. I loved how you could see the texture of the paper coming through. Exquisite.

There were several large self portraits from one school in Belmont which were fantastic. This wall held most of them. Hats off to this art teacher encouraging his/her students to work this large. I don't remember ever doing something this big in high school. And the technical skill was outstanding. Below are a few close ups of two of my favorites.

All media were eligible including photography, sculpture, digital art, and design.

I loved the artwork on this boot. Take a close look at the detail if you can. Amazing. It is so inspiring to see such wonderful art coming out of our high schools.

Opera House Makeover

Boston Opera House (revisited)

12" x 12" x .75"

Oil with a palette knife on cradled board
SOLD

I revisited this painting. Something was bothering me. There was no sky and I think it was making the painting feel too yellow and orange overall. You can see the earlier version by clicking here. I thought if I added a nice blue it might make the other colors pop more. It's always scary to do something like this because, what if you make it look worse? So no one is allowed to tell me you like the original painting better. Oh-alright, I can take it.

And finally...a chunky delicious close up.

Abstract Boston?

Boston from the Footbridge

9" x 12" x 1.5"

Oil with a palette knife on cradled board
SOLD

I thought the shapes in the reference photo I used for this painting had a very abstract feel and I tried to capture that in this painting.

Of course, I couldn't resist adding just a few windows. And I tried something new in the reddish building in the back. I scraped away the paint with the knife to create the feel of a row windows instead of painting them on top.

The Sketchbook Project Tour has begun

My friend Greg took this photo of his daughter holding up my Boys & Girls sketchbook which they checked out on the first stop of The Sketchbook Project's tour-Austin, Texas. How fun is that?

The next stop is Portland, Maine. We plan to head up there with a few other artist friends to see the tour firsthand on April 2.

Click here for the schedule of all of the cities on the tour. Is it coming to your town?

And just an interesting side note...Elizabeth, shown in the photo, loves books and was the subject of this painting, In Her Element.

How much is that kitty in the window?

Le chat dans la fenêtre

8" x 10"

Oil with a palette knife on board
SOLD

There was something about the reference photo I was using for this painting that looked French to me. For my blog readers that know French (Martine-Alison, Tony, Kim) you can tell me if google translated the title correctly from The Cat In The Window.

I started this painting a few months ago and was never happy with how the curtains came out. Very difficult to get that feel of sheer doile, laceyness with a palette knife. I ended up painting a light color on top of the dark color and then scraping some away to get the effect I wanted.

Paint your cake and eat it too

Say Cheesecake

8" x 6"

Oil with a palette knife on canvas
SOLD

I bought this cute little cheesecake at Finale (a wonderful bakery down the street from our office) so I could paint it during painting class. I have to admit, I thought painting this would be a "piece of cake" but it was soooo tricky. The fork especially, was difficult to make look realistic with just the palette knife.

The best thing was, we were able to enjoy eating it after class with our chicken nachos and beer. And it was creamy delish.

Wide-eyed kitten face

Wide-eyed Kitten Face

6" x 6"

Oil with a palette knife on board
SOLD

This is Gadjo. He is Rumi's little brother. This painting was done from a photo of him when he was just a kitten. He is now a young man and fitting right in with the rest of the critters. Check him out on Jala Pfaff's blog and while you are there, take a look at her new beautiful pastels. Quite a treat.