Santa Claus, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Usually, I write about one painting on Friday, but this week I’m stretching my rule. Here are four small still-lives with a common theme.
I’m indifferent to the aesthetics of Christmas, but I do love seeing my decorations come out each year and remembering the people who made them or gave them to me.
Santa Claus was a gift from my dear friend Judie. She’d gotten him from a German exchange student, and he has a luxurious platinum blonde beard, which was jarring to her sensibilities.
“He’s a very old man,” I told her. After all, Father Christmas was born in the 16th century. “Unlike my grandmother, he never knew about blue rinses for white hair.”
Judie wasn’t convinced, which is how he came to live with me.
I was raised by forward-thinking parents who didn’t believe in Santa. He may not be ‘real’ in the way literal-thinkers put it, but he’s a symbol for generosity, love, and kindness. We can always use more of that.
Burlap Angel, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, private collection.
The second painting is long gone from my inventory. It’s a burlap-covered, plastic-headed, cardboard angel that I made in 4H about 55 years ago. My pals Diane, Beth and Sue have similar ones in different colors. My mother gave me an exquisite porcelain-and-satin angel to replace her; I promptly gave that to my oldest daughter and kept my happy, handmade angel for my tree. She’s worn in places, but so am I.
Toy Reindeer with double rainbow, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435 framed, includes shipping in continental US.
The black velour and pink boa reindeer buck has pride of place in my creche set year after year. This was a gift from my sister-in-law Kathy. As different as we are in almost every way, we both love that deer.
In recent years, he’s been joined by a glittery red doe with a white boa. And this year, I bought a sparkling coral fawn for a gift exchange. “Would it be wrong for me to take home the same ornament I brought?” I asked my daughter Mary.
“No, but there might be something even better,” she said. That’s hard to imagine.
When I painted Papa deer (or Papa Dear), I decided he’d be happiest out-of-doors, so I put him by the birch tree in my front yard. I gave him a double rainbow because that’s the kind of fella he is.
Toy Monkey and Candy, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping and handling in the continental US.
The toy monkey belonged to my friend Marilyn’s son. My kids had a similar one. It was passed from oldest to youngest, and I thought for a while that it was lost. But, no, it lives in the toy-clutter under our front stairs, and my grandkids dig it out when they visit.
Painting these was pure happiness, for they blurred the lines between fantasy and reality. That’s just how kids see Christmas. If you feel that joy and want one of these paintings, use the code THANKYOUPAINTING10 to get 10% off your order. And don’t worry about it being something you can only bring out at Christmas. The angel painting lives 365 days a year on a wall in its forever home.
(By the way, my holiday discount codes are all at the end of this post. They come to you via my daughter Laura. This week she figured out how to make drop-down menus that give a choice to pay a deposit or full fee for a workshop. It’s particularly slick on Sea & Sky at Schoodic, where the buying options are complicated. I’ve been having so much fun toggling the options that I’ll probably accidentally buy one of my own workshops.)
Marshes along the Ottawa River, Plaisance, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Last Friday I did my first virtual art opening. Later, I was talking to a clothing designer friend about whether that would work for her. After all, clothing was one of the first things we started buying online.
“I’ve always been wary of returns,” she said. “Clothing is such a particular and personal thing.”
She’s right, of course. We are used to buying on what my friend Gwendolyn called the ‘American Plan,’ or taking it all home and returning what we don’t like. That’s built into the cost of doing business for large corporations, but could easily undo a small couturier.
No Northern Lights Tonight, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
At one time, we didn’t like making significant purchases online, but today people buy $3000 handbags without ever seeing them in person. In 2021, we saw a surge of people buying homes remotely, sight unseen. Roughly half of car buyers buy online; moreover, online buyers tend to be more satisfied with the transactions than those who go to a dealership and haggle. COVID accelerated the trend away from bricks-and-mortar shopping and it doesn’t seem like there’s any going back.
For the artist, there are specific difficulties. Paintings are tricky to photograph. Images look different on different screens. While Toyota has unlimited resources to tweak their digital imaging, artists don’t.
Pensive, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Openings are events, not just an opportunity to buy paintings. Going to a gallery on a dark winter evening, drinking a glass of wine, eating stale crackers and chatting with your friends is an experience I can’t replicate on the small screen. We tried to work around that by having me speak about individual paintings and answer questions. We sent out suggested wine pairings as well as a mocktail recipe. Most of the participants said they’d like to do it again, so I’ve tentatively penciled in another for January 19.
One of the advantages of a virtual art opening is the ability to reach a global audience. We had people from around the US and Canada represented. However, I can’t figure out how to include my British collectors. 6 PM in Maine is 11 PM in London, and that seems like an unbridgeable gap.
Many galleries and studios are not handicapped-accessible. Online openings seem perfect for people with mobility issues. As we enter flu season and continue to trudge wearily along with COVID, that’s also true for those with compromised immune systems.
Cypresses and Shadows, 11X14, $869 includes shipping and handling.
Laura created a virtual gallery where people could peruse the paintings at their leisure. How could I make this gallery more accessible, effective or easier to navigate? (While you’re pondering that, remember that you can have 10% off a painting with the discount code THANKYOUPAINTING10. Or if you buy two or more, I’ll frame them for you at no charge. That’s good until the end of the year.)
The hard part of looking at paintings online is not understanding their scale in relation to your own space. I don’t think I’m capable of creating virtual reality or interactive 3D models, but I am looking into visualizer apps.
A big believer in the hive, I invite your ideas and/or comments about how the virtual opening experience can be improved. You can either leave me a comment below or email me here.
I draw every week in church, riffing off the sermon. Today’s was about persistence and hard work.
Nobody can master painting until they master drawing. That’s true for both abstractionists and realists, because drawing is how you express depth and dynamism. Painting is really nothing more than drawing with a brush. To build facility in paint, you first must draw.
Tens of thousands of years before there was written language, there was art on cave walls and cliffs. When words started being written down (around 3000 BC) they were first written in the form of pictographs. That tells us something about the importance of drawing to humankind.
I can draw things out of my head because I know how to draw from life.
Drawing is liberating
Drawing allows us to express ideas, emotions, and narratives non-verbally. For painters seeking to escape being literal, that’s critical. I can’t think of a single great painter who couldn’t draw. Vincent van Gogh famously taught himself, and his early drawings are bad enough that they should give us all hope that we too can do better. “Drawing is the root of everything, and the time spent on that is actually all profit,” he wrote.
It’s not just about putting pretty things down on paper. Drawing tightens up our observational skill. We develop a keen eye for details, shapes, proportions, and visual relationships. That helps us analyze and map both the world around us and our inner world.
All I need is a sketchbook and a #2 mechanical pencil. Anything else is just a refinement.
Much of drawing is about translating a three-dimensional reality onto a two-dimensional surface. That teaches us about structure and spatial relationships. If you don’t see the value in representing depth and space in a painting, take a deep dive into the work of Edgar Degas.
A lot of us stopped working on hand-eye coordination when we mastered cursive writing. Then we let it go when we started relying on computers, which is why so many of us have terrible handwriting. We need that hand-eye coordination for painting, and we develop it through drawing.
This is partly from my imagination, but the window is high up in our church building.
A study showed that drawing helps memory in young and old alike. Researchers speculated that it was because drawing draws on varied brain paths simultaneously. I think it’s because in drawing we must attend much more intensely. That reaps benefits not just in art but in life overall.
There is a gap between what we draw or paint and what is ‘really’ there. We like to think of that gap as a shortcoming, and to some degree it is. But it’s in that gap that we develop style, and where we do a lot of non-verbal creative thinking. Tracing from photographs will never allow for the soul to creep in like drawing does.
This was drawn when I had to sit in the foyer because there were no seats. I amused myself by imagining what was going on inside.
So why don’t we do it? The sad answer for many of us is that we’ve never been taught, so we’re frustrated and afraid to try again. We don’t grant ourselves the grace and patience to persist.
I’ve butted my head against this since I started teaching. Drawing and painting are closely related but I can only teach one at a time. That’s why I’m breaking a promise to myself to not work six days a week and offering a Saturday class on Fundamentals of Drawing, starting January 6. By Ash Wednesday, you’ll be well on your way to good draftsmanship. That in turn will lead to better painting.
Athabasca Glacier, 14X18, oil on linen, $1275 includes shipping and handling in the continental US.
I’ve spent a lot of time this year working on projects without roadmaps. Such is the case with today’s Virtual First Friday. Not only have I never done one of these, I’ve never attended one. (You can preview the paintings here.)
My daughter Mary (the soapmaker) is riding shotgun for this. That’s a funny coincidence, since she is the kid who crossed Alaska and Canada with me. We didn’t follow a map then, either. She and her younger brother love geology; when she was feeling well, she spouted Rock Facts on the dating app Tinder, to the frustration of many young Canadian men. They didn’t understand that to some of us, geology is sexy.
The Whole Enchilada, 12X16, oil on archival canvas. The red-roofed building is Hosteria el Pilar. I just realized none of my Patagonian paintings are on my website; I’ll get right on that.
Mary tells me that the American Cordillera is that chain of mountain ranges that forms the ‘backbone’ of the Americas (and also the volcanic arc that’s our half of the Pacific Ring of Fire). It runs from Alaska’s Brooks Range, through Central America, along the Andes, and all the way to the very tip of Antarctica.
I’ve painted at both ends, in Alaska and Canada, and in Patagonia. While preparing for North to Southwest: A Plein Air Perspective, we considered the relationship between those trips. In one way, they were both defined by illness. Mary spiked a fever as we reached the Arctic Circle. It was mononucleosis, and she didn’t start to recover until we were in Quebec.
Athabasca River Confluence, 9X12, $696 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Our trip to Patagonia started the day of the world’s lockdown for COVID. Instead of hiking and painting in Argentina’s Parque Nacional Los Glaciares before heading out to Ushuaia, we were penned into smaller and smaller places, until we ended up in a hotel with an armed soldier at the door. Somehow, we all managed to get giardiasis. I don’t recommend it.
At six to ten million years old, the Andes are just babies; the mountains of Alaska and Northern Canada predate them by fifty million years, but both ranges are wild and fantastic.
Los Glaciares is located within the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, and I was able to paint the edges of several glaciers from the hostel grounds before we were sent to our rooms. On our trip across Canada, we brushed past the Kluane/Wrangell-St. Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek Ice Field (that’s a mouthful) and stopped to visit the Columbia Ice Field, where I failed to paint the Athabasca Glacier. Conditions were just too miserable, so I did it later, in my studio.
Mary and I are already scheming about another Great Adventure. Hopefully we’ll encounter new geology, new friends and no new illnesses. It’s not too late to attend tonight’s virtual opening of North to Southwest: A Plein Air Perspective. And if you’re interested in a Great Adventure of your own where you’ll meet awesome people and do beautiful paintings, registration is currently open for my 2024 workshops. (Use the code EARLYBIRD to get $25 off any workshop except Sedona.)
Brilliant autumn day, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $696 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
“Black Friday sales usually involve 25-50% off, but you and other artists only offer small discounts on paintings (if any),” a reader noted. “That doesn’t seem like much, so why do you bother?” The answer boils down to margin and markup.
Tamaracks, 8X10, oil on archival canvas, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Margin
Margin is the difference between the product’s selling price and the costs to make and sell that product. High volume businesses, like your grocery store, can afford to work with low margins, whereas a bespoke tailor needs a higher margin to offset his costs.
The problem for artists and other small businesses is that we cut it fine. We’re often working with both low margin and low sales, which gives us very little room to maneuver on price. “Wait a second,” you say. “All you have invested is some canvas and paint.” Not true. We have all kinds of hidden costs ranging from insurance and transportation to the rent and/or upkeep on our studios.
Saskatchewan Grain Elevators, oil on archival canvasboard, 8X10, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Bloated pricing
Another daughter and I both have the same floor cleaner, for which we each paid about $200 as a regularly discounted price. We were surprised to see the same model in last week’s ads at half off, or $200. Yes, it lists at $399.99, but I doubt many people have paid that in this world of competitive online shopping.
You could buy it for as low as $165 this week, but that’s a far cry from the ‘59% off’ at which it is promoted.
Artists can’t and shouldn’t raise and lower their prices willy-nilly. Part of the tacit bargain we make with collectors is that we strive to make their artwork more valuable over time. Inconsistent pricing undermines that and irritates collectors.
That doesn’t mean we can’t have sales, or have an in-studio bin where we get rid of sketches and old work. But unless we bloat the list price, we can’t offer deep discounts.
Up Ship Creek, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Technical snafu means a deal for you
I wanted to end this thankfulness series by offering a deal where the buyer got one painting at 10% off, two at 15% off, and three at 20% off. However, when Laura started to develop the software to drive that, she found it was impossible with the tools we currently have.
I felt badly. But since I can’t do that, how about I throw in frames for anyone who buys two or more unframed paintings today or tomorrow? Laura will never know; she doesn’t read this blog and it’s really a better deal than those discounts would have been.
As November draws to a close, the last ‘gratitude’ offering I have for you is a recital of all that I’ve offered so far:
10% off any painting, with the code THANKYOUPAINTING10.
$25 off any workshop except Sedona, with the code, EARLYBIRD
Free frames with the purchase of two or more unframed paintings. No need to enter a code, but this absolutely expires on November 30, 2023.
That’s because on Friday, December 1, I’m doing North to Southwest: a plein air perspective which is my first Virtual First Friday art show. As I’ve written copy for each of the paintings in this show, I’ve found myself remembering many lovely happenings along the way. I’m getting excited to tell you about them.
If you haven’t registered, please do. Laura will be sending out the Zoom link shortly.
Marshall Point, oil on archival canvasboard, 9X12, $696, includes shipping and handling in continental US.
The first time you sell a painting to a friend, you feel a little guilty, as if it’s a pity sale. (That’s different from pity marketing, which is when artists relate their struggles to generate sales. Manipulating others’ sympathy is exploitative, it makes all artists look bad, and I wish people wouldn’t do it.)
The second or third time that person buys a painting, you start to suspect that, against all odds, they actually like your work. You have a collector. As you get more well-known, you’ll collect more collectors, but those first ones are everything to the fledgling artist.
Quebec Brook, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.
My first serious collectors were Dean and Karolina. We went to church together and were friends. I knew they collected art, so when they bought their first painting from me, I was flattered. Then Dean asked me to paint a portrait of his children as a gift for his wife. He gave me an absolute deadline. That was a great lesson, as I realized that I could finish a painting with the same professionalism that I’d once finished design projects for customers.
Karolina was a great support when I was a mother of young kids without family nearby. Once she helped me pull all the wall-to-wall carpet from a house we’d just bought. As you can imagine, I’d love her if she never bought any art from me, but in fact she bought a painting just last year.
Eric’s Barber Shop (midnight walk), oil on archival canvasboard, 9X12, $869 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.
I met Martha when she came to my house at 0:dark:30 to watch William and Kate’s wedding. Our mutual friend Mary brought her, but we’d been corresponding for months. Martha bought her first painting from me at a Black Friday sale shortly thereafter. By the time she got married, we were close enough friends that I was invited to her wedding in Scotland; I brought them a painting as a wedding gift.
Her husband asked me to paint her portrait. It turned out to be as much a portrait of their drawing room as of Martha and her dog. Later, the room was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, which makes the painting that much more meaningful. I’m currently in the early phases of another painting for him.
Dean and Karolina were my friends before they ever bought a painting. Martha and I became close friends over subsequent years. I’ve had the good fortune to sell paintings to my friends, and to become friends with people I’ve sold paintings to.
Birches, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Your friends are perfectly free to ignore your art career. Most of them will, in fact. You may never meet your collectors if they’re buying through a gallery or online. But anyone who likes your work enough to own it is likely to share common emotional and intellectual ground with you, or the work would never have spoken to him or her in the first place. It’s no surprise that the lines of friendship and art often blur.
No artist can survive without collectors. Beyond that, my life has been immeasurably enriched by so many people who’ve pondered my paintings and drawings, corresponded with me about them, and, yes, occasionally purchased them. Thank you all.
For any of you who want to start collecting, here’s 10% off any painting on my website. Just enter the codeTHANKYOUPAINTING10.
Sunset sail, 14X18, oil on linen, $1594 framed includes shipping and handling in the continental US.
My husband is under the sweet illusion that I can identify any boat in the Maine windjammer fleet from the top of Beech Hill. From that distance, lobster boats are specks on the water, sloops are brilliant white triangles, and schooners are a blurred sawtooth pattern.
Closer, I find it hard to identify them by their sail plans alone. Some have topsails and some don’t, and the mast heights and rakes are different. The trouble is, I can never remember which are which. I’m much better on hull color and shape, but they are often not visible when a boat is far away.
When painting a boat, the details of rigging matter. Before I moved to Maine, I had a commission to paint one of the schooners in Camden Harbor. I wrestled with it for two days and was happy with the results. Two wharf rats stopped to look at it as I packed up.
“Should we tell her?” said one.
“Nah,” said the other.
I couldn’t figure it out then, and to this day I still don’t know what I’d done wrong. But I console myself with the knowledge that the buyers probably knew even less than I did.
Sunset Sail is not intended to be any specific boat. She’s meant to be sort of an Everyman of schooners.
You can watch a thousand sunsets across the ocean and none of them will be the same. That’s also true of schooners-by the time they’ve bobbed along the coast for a century or more, they’ve developed their own character. Of course I have my favorites-American Eagle, obviously, because she’s the most beautiful of boats and I get to sail on her every year. Then there’s the ketch Angelique with her sweet red sails and plumb bow, Heritage for its beautiful hull colors… oh, who am I kidding? I love them all.
I have the great fortune to be able to watch the sun rise or set on the ocean any time I want. In this painting, sunset is an explosive kaleidoscope of color. Tomorrow’s sunset will be completely different. In fact, I could paint a sunset every day for the rest of my life and never repeat myself.
Sunrise from Beech Hill, earlier this month.
CODA: I spent some time yesterday perusing Black Friday deals on my phone. Here are my observations:
The deals I saw were heavily slanted towards electronics. How many of these does a person need?
Nothing seemed like a great deal to me; I compared Black Friday prices with commonly-available discount prices on products I know. I was underwhelmed.
Black Friday shopping is boring, whether in person or online.
That leads me to remind you about one of my current anti-Black-Friday deals: you can get 10% off this or any other painting on this website until the end of the year by using the code THANKYOUPAINTING10.
Marshes along the Ottawa River, Plaisance, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Frequently, someone will tell me, “I love art but I can’t draw a straight line,” or, “You are so talented.” I don’t know any artists who can draw a straight line; we use rulers just like everyone else. And ‘talent’ really isn’t the deciding factor in whether a person can paint or not; what makes an artist is a passion for making art.
Having said that, I appreciate all of you who are fans of art but don’t want to do art. We can’t all be nurses, computer programmers, or carpenters, but we call on their services. Our economy depends on that. Similarly, artists depend on you, our collectors.
Athabasca River Confluence, 9X12, $696 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
Since I stopped showing in galleries in 2020, I’ve had much more contact with my collectors. I really enjoy the interactions. Art is a form of communication, so the viewer also brings something to the table. Your questions, your comments, even the things you love or don’t like tell me a lot.
I’m staying at my daughter’s house. As I type this, I can see three paintings: one from our Alaska adventure and two by other artists. Mary was raised in the milieu of artists and art. She understands the difference between real art, sweatshop knock offs, and mass-produced prints. She understands why a well-chosen painting will wear better than other decorations.
That’s an advantage over most of her peers. I’ve talked to young people who point out that they could buy an entire room of TJMaxx ‘art’ for what one of my paintings costs. They haven’t yet figured out the advantages of choosing quality over quantity. I was young once too, and I too didn’t think I could afford good things. But eventually we all outgrow that.
Sand and Shadows, 8X16, $903 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.
You, my collectors, are the people who’ve made this career possible over the past 26 years. Thank you.
It’s party time!
Those of you who read my newsletter know I’m doing a virtual First Friday on December 1, 2023 at 6 PM EST. But I want to be sure to invite everyone.
Pensive, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.
This show features paintings of Arizona and Alaska. Move past the radical differences in temperature, and there are surprising commonalities. In addition to a behind-the-scenes look at the paintings, you can share your thoughts, ask questions, and enjoy a suggested wine pairing (BYOB):
Arizona sparkling wines, no pants, on the couch
Gruet Blanc de Noirs, https://gruetwinery.orderport.net/product-details/1474/NV-Blanc-de-Noirs
Santa Claus, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.
Today I’m thankful for the people who support artists, so here’s a shopping guide that will make their holiday gift-buying easier.
Let’s talk about brushes:
Several years ago, my students bought me a set of Rosemary & Co. brushes. My biggest regret about my lost painting kit is that those brushes were a gift from people I love, but Bobbi Heath and Karen Ames have both sent me spare brushes. That adds another level of gratitude to my brush roll.
Brushes are where quality matters, but they’re pricey, so they’re where most artists flinch. Why not buy a Rosemary & Co. gift card? That means they’ll have to pull the trigger on a brush, as Rosemary doesn’t carry much else. Gift cards come in odd increments because it’s a British firm, but plan to spend at least $130 for it to be useful. They make oil, acrylic and watercolor brushes, so only pastelists need miss out.
One of the nicest gifts I’ve ever received was this set of Rosemary & Co. oil brushes.
Isabey is a French company that makes very nice bristle brushes that stand up to hard use. If your artists have no big brushes, buy a bright, flat or round anywhere between a size 10 and 14. Those big boys are the ones artists never get around to buying.
It’s easy to wipe out tiny brushes. This small bright and even tinier round are perfect for detail. Princeton has rebranded these brushes as Snap! But they’re the same excellent quality that the series 9700 has always provided.
I have a collection of very expensive watercolor brushes but the ones I continually grab are Princeton Neptunes. This nifty travel kit would make any watercolor painter happy.
This Catalyst wedge is lots of fun with any heavy-body paint.
Eric Jacobsen, that incomparable mark-maker, got me a Princeton Catalyst W-06 wedge. You can’t be precise, so it’s a great tool for loosening up your brushwork. In fact, the whole series of these wedges are fun. They’re meant for any heavy-body paints, including oil, acrylic and encaustic.
Gouache is a versatile and portable medium that’s appealing to artists in any medium. I did this when I ran out of painting boards while stranded in Argentina.
A great combo for mixed medium experimentation is oil paint and oil pastels. Sennelier is the clear quality winner in oil pastels. A landscape or iridescent starter kit will give your artist enough information to know if he likes the combination.
Cheap pochade boxes are a false economy. This field kit was pricey, but it’s put up with an incredible amount of abuse, including saltwater, sand, deserts, heat and freezing temperatures.
Easels: the good, the bad, and the ugly
If your painter struggles with a knock-off Gloucester-style easel, you can make him or her ecstatic by buying the Take-It Easel, which costs twice as much and is worth every penny. After breaking one of the cheap ones and then buying a second one that arrived warped, I shelled out for the real thing. I’m glad I did.
As a teacher, I see a lot of pochade boxes and easels, and can steer you away from the bad ones as well as recommend good ones. I’ve had a version of the Mabef Field Painting Easel for decades and recommend it highly as a good starter tool for plein air. It has a swing head so can be used for oils and watercolor. The Leder Easel is simple, effective and light-weight. Tell Ed I sent you and he’ll give you 10% off (and, no, I don’t get a spiff for that).
I use an EasyL Pro on a carbon-fiber Manfrotto tripod with a ball head. It is very lightweight and has survived incredible abuse (including saltwater), but it’s not a cheap combination (and thank goodness it wasn’t in my painting kit when that went missing.) I’m getting an EasyL Lite soon, which will replace my home-built aluminum pochade box for backpacking.
For studio work, I swear by the Testrite #700 Professional Studio Easel. I use its little brother, the Testrite #500, for students. The difference between the two models is in the maximum size canvas they’ll accept. They’re aluminum so they don’t warp or crack. I’ve had them for decades. The only maintenance I’ve ever done was replace parts that wandered off.
My traffic cones ride in the back of my truck, but if you drive a smaller vehicle, you’ll want the collapsible kind.
Miscellany
The danger of “park and paint” plein air is other drivers. One of the nicest gifts I ever received was a pair of safety cones. This set of collapsible ones are reflective, come with LED lights, and will fit easily in a car trunk.
I have more than one taboret cabinet but my current favorite is this simple six drawer rolling cart. Mine sits under my teaching desk and holds all the art supplies I might need while teaching. Watch for discounts; I got mine on a Woot daily deal.
If your artist is starting to frame and sell work, the Fletcher FrameMaster point driver will save him or her a world of aggravation. Mine is decades old and still works fine.
I’d be remiss in not mentioning Rowan Branch Brush Soap. My daughter Mary makes it for me, and I’ve shared it with enough other artists to know that it really works.
This page contains affiliate links for some but not all products. If you choose to make a purchase after clicking a link, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support!
Best Buds, 11X14, oil on canvasboard, $1087 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.
I’ve painted two paintings of spinning children’s rides, Best Buds, above, and Tilt-A-Whirl. Both were an attempt to capture something of the innocence of carnival rides and the warm summer days of our youth.
Occasionally, someone will question whether I did them from life, because they think it’s impossible to paint something spinning. It is doable, although it can be dizzying.
The Adirondack Carousel, which is the subject of this painting, is in Saranac Lake, NY. It features hand-carved woodland animals from the Adirondack Mountains. It was the brainchild of local woodcarver Karen Loffler and took twelve years, countless volunteer hours, and $1.3 million in locally-raised funds.
The pavilion has 24 handcrafted wildlife animals, eighteen of which are on duty at any one time. Do I have a favorite? How could I, when they’re all so perfect? (You can see them here.) I think the black bear, decked out in the colors of the Hudson’s Bay Company point blanket, captured my attention first. But each animal has its own particular charm-except maybe the black fly.
There’s a wheelchair accessible ride in the form of a Chris Craft boat. The overhead scenes of Saranac Lake were painted by local artists (including my friend Sandra Hildreth), as were the floral medallions. A local blacksmith made the weathervane and a local carpenter built the ticket counter. The building was painted and stained by volunteers. The result is distinctly local, happy, and very Adirondack.
The girl is a complete invention, vaguely reminiscent of a kid I knew in Maine named Meredith Lewis (who is now a willowy, beautiful teenager). I debated on the title for quite a while, finally settling on Best Buds. Even if my girl is riding the otter, her heart belongs to John Deer.
Best Buds is oil on archival canvasboard, 11X14 and is in elegant Canadian-made frame with wooden fillet. It lists at $1087, but you can have 10% off it (or any other painting) by using the code THANKYOUPAINTING10.
