Hockey Game

I set out to paint at a favorite spot hoping to catch a good snow scene. There's a really nice pond near where I live and I thought that the icy surface and the snow scenery around it would make a good picture. When I arrived, several young teenage boys were clearing the ice and getting ready for a fun neighborhood hockey game. I decided to set up and paint them. They were very nice about it and were quite curious about what I was doing. How lucky I was to have such a interesting diversion from my normal everyday landscapes. The players' clothes added a punch of bright warm color to the blues and purples of the winter snow. I am finding that I enjoy adding people to some of my paintings. I feel like they add life and enhance the surroundings.

Street Painting of Guilford

I finished this painting of the market in Guilford on the green. I love the way the sunlight bounced off of the buildings. Guilford has some quaint old shops in the center of town that are usually very busy and fun to visit. This painting is featured at the exhibit now on display at the Woodbridge Town Library, Woodbridge, CT.
Guilford Market, Oil on Canvas, 16"x20"

Abandoned House

I started this painting a couple of years ago and put it aside. I just didn't like it. A couple of months ago, I worked on it some more and I like it a little bit more now. The house is owned by a farmer who lives next door. It is getting pretty old and sad looking, but it has some nice features like the side bay windows. I can imagine a large farming family living in it and growing corn and other crops and raising black and white milk cows in the surrounding fields back in the early 1900s. I hope that some day someone will tackle its remodel and restore it to its glory once more.

Finding Your Horizon Line

Perspective is a very important thing to grasp if you are a landscape painter, or for that matter, for any type of subject, even still life. However, to properly figure out vanishing points, aerial perspective, and reflections, you must know where your horizon line is. Understanding how to find the horizon line and to line up buildings and other objects properly to get the correct perspective is something that a lot of artists forget to do once they set up their easels. It’s very tempting to just throw some paint on the canvas and guess at the proportions, but you will end up spending more time scraping paint off and redoing your work if you don’t. Or, you will be disappointed at the results and not realize why it just doesn’t look right.

The first thing that you should do after you prepare your canvas is find the horizon line. To do this, you will need a straight object like a pencil or flat sided stick for measuring. I use a square edge dowel that is marked off with colored lines at one-quarter inch intervals. This dowel is about 12 inches long, with different colored marked lines for every inch. I use the different colored markings to measure and compare proportions of items in my picture. To find the horizon line, hold the stick or pencil out horizontally as straight as possible in front of you at your eye level. This will be your horizon line. If you are looking out from a high vantage point, your horizon line could actually be in the sky. Likewise, if you are looking towards a high point in a land mass, your horizon line will often be below certain aspects of the land mass or object.

You might want to do a few quick thumbnail sketches to figure out your design and where you would like to put your horizon line on the canvas. In most cases, it is best to avoid cutting the picture in half by centering the horizon line on your canvas. When you are ready, use a thinned transparent oxide red or brown or burnt sienna and draw the line, keeping in mind where your center of focus will be in your picture.

For my painting, Ship's Harbor, Maine, the horizon line is marked in yellow. This line was at my eye level from where I stood. I placed it high on my canvas so that I could focus on the rocks and grasses nearby and also so that I could include some of the water.

Tilcon Rock Crusher

Last year, I went on a tour of the Tilcon facility in Northford and got an eye opener view of what has been one of the town’s largest industries for many years. Tilcon Connecticut Inc. is a leading supplier of crushed stone, hot mix asphalt, and ready mix concrete in Connecticut.

Giant rock slicers pierce big slabs of rock in the nearby quarry. Using monster front loaders, workers load the rock into huge dump trucks. The dump trucks deposit their loads into the rock crushers at the top and collect it at the bottom. I have long wanted to paint this enormous rock crusher, one of two in this location. It is a huge iron green machine, able to crush very large blocks of rock into various sizes of stone, depending on the order. Workers are able to enter and climb the rock crusher through a system of doors and stairways.

I was unable to get access to paint en plein air, so I was restricted to photos that I took from the bus and from across the street. I made up a couple of drawings before I started to paint just to get a feeling for the composition. I tinted the background with a mix of thalo green, ultra marine blue, and transparent oxide brown. I began by blocking in shapes starting with the darks. The overcast sky and serenity of the scene belied the powerful force of the rock crushing jaws, and heightened the strength of the greens and shadows of the structure. The American flag, the only spot of bright color, is a tribute to patriotism probably put there just after 9/11.

Painting: Rock Crusher, 12x20, Oil on Canvas, $350.