BY MARY RUEDIG

SITTING IN A WINTER STUDIO 

"Bountiful Bouquet"

"Anniversary Bouquet"

DREAMING 

                    OF SPRING,

"Flower Snippets"

FLOWERS 

"Catching Spring"

AND SUNSHINE!

"Dreaming of Color"

THIS IS 

WHAT HAPPENS. 

Happy New Year Artists

2019 will be a great year

By DUSTAN KNIGHT

I won’t have time to paint today….I am going out of town and I will not be able to do any art…

You want me to do what -for how long?’   I haven’t been able to get to the studio in weeks!

My studio is a wreck- all the pipes burst and the mice ate my brushes.

We have all been there BUT that doesn’t have to halt our artistic flow.

I was thinking this morning, as I look ahead into the New Year, that I have a visual list of about ten new painting series just waiting to be explored.

Sometimes as I fall asleep or just as I wake up I get these ideas and I try to take a few minutes to focus on them and verbalize them - internally- .

(Some folks sketch them out on a pad of paper besides their bed).

I think this part of being an artist is important.

The time outside the studio thinking about ‘making’ and ‘seeing’ insures my time in front of my easel is much more productive.

I edit my ideas - revisiting them during a quiet moment of the busy day - while driving somewhere or waiting for something - I think about what the series is trying to get at. I imagine it with a different range of colors, or discard it as weak or put the idea into the ‘list for later’

When I get into the studio and put the most exciting ideas onto a canvas, the paintings flow, since I have already really started them weeks earlier my decision making is more confident.

Sometimes it’s so easy I realize that the best part of the creative process was the time I worked on the idea outside the studio.

Wishing my favorite artists a great 2019. Let’s make fabulous ART!

Disasters and Catastrophes

By Ann Saunderson

"Ice Melt"

I’ve been working on this series of paintings for the last year.

Initially I didn’t know it was about disaster. I was six months into it when one day I noticed that these paintings, whatever the medium, were indeed about manmade and natural disasters.

"Catastrophe"

During this time, my husband was running for state representative in our small town and so the news became central to our lives, well his life but…

"Firestorm"

I really struggle with Donald Trump. I try to understand, to make some sense out of what i going on in our country and the world with him in the White House.

"Damage Done"

 How did we find ourselves ‘here’, on what felt to me like the brink of, dare I say, disaster!

 

I remain very wary.

"Outbreak"

Forest fires.

"Urban Disaster"

Shootings.

"Aleppo"

Anti Semitism.

Racism.

Cyber wars.

Etc., Etc.

"Under Pressure"

I DO have a sense of humor.

MY life is good.

My biggest concern is what lies ahead for my three lovely little granddaughters.

REFLECTIONS

By Susan Levenson

After my retirement from three art related careers, I began painting in watercolors, something I had never done before.

I think the choice occurred because I love the freshness one derives from the transparencies that form where the paper does the work and the paint flows into one another.

Now that autumn has arrived, I watch the leaves turn and float into the air like the world is ever changing. This is part of life today and I feel that I am expressing its possibilities in my painting.

I love to paint. It allows me to lose myself into consciousness for long stretches of time, which seem no more than a few moments.

Painting allows a sense of accomplishment, where one paints for the love of it, not for selling or competition, but only for something that one owns into one’s self.

While on location in New Castle, NH, I saw three youngsters fishing in a small inlet.

I painted this busy scene in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. I loved the arrangement of pilings, the fishing architecture and the boat.

 The gardens of the Hamilton Estate in Berwick Maine, along the river.

"Contorted Bliss" Watercolor

"Vacation Bliss" Watercolor

SUMMER

2018

OGUNQUIT 

By

Marilyn Eimon

"Loaded … On to the Beach" Watercolor

"Kayak Cowboy" Watercolor

"Lollygagging on Mousam Lake" Watercolor

"Mabel With Fifty Shades of Grey" Watercolor

"Nothing New" Watercolor

"Ogunquit Beach Day", Watercolor

The Summer 2018

A year ago I wrote about our cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee, about having to make the difficult decision to sell.

The first part of this summer was spent cleaning, packing our stuff and repairing, replacing, lugging boxes to our other home (will have to deal with that this winter). We finally listed it on June 27^th of this year. A very sad moment signing that document.

Here we are still here, sitting on this beautiful deck, looking out at our beautiful view that never seems to get old.  

Even the Eagles have been so fun to watch this year, as they swoop down with their catch of the

moment, to rest on a rock by our beach and eat, or land in a tree to dry their feathers.

The real estate sign is still up. It started out at the end of the dock, then one day when a couple on a jet ski came by, and I heard them talking and trying to figure out if that sign was for our place or the one next door, we moved the sign to a tree in front of the property.

 Unfortunately the one next door is a falling down wreck, and too close to our property line, so I could see the confusion, especially where our dock is located.

 I digress.

When it is your place, that you have loved and cherished for nearly 40 years, you can’t imagine someone else not loving it too.

There has been only one showing so far, so that person who is going to love this place as much as we do, hasn’t discovered it yet.

Up until the last week or so, hubby has been still pruning and cleaning and painting toward that end, and finally, finally he and I have been able to just relax and enjoy the time we may still have out here, before we do finally have to say goodbye.

This blog is about us as painters but it is also about all aspects of our lives because everything influences the artist within. Where this island has been a big part of my life for this long, the paintings I have created out here, by myself as well as with other creative friends of mine, are memories I will always have with me.

Not just the paintings of the lake, the beauty that surrounds me has been hard to capture all these years. It is like trying to take a picture of the Grand Canyon, when you see almost immediately that you will never be able to take a picture that represents the grandeur and colors that ARE the Grand Canyon. That is how Lake Winnipesaukee feels to me. It’s natural beauty, surrounded by the beautiful NH mountain ranges.

 Every day every aspect of every day, the changes in the color landscape has been very difficult to capture, though I have tried countless times, it has never been well enough.

I guess the best thing is to absorb it all while I am still here, then maybe someday that “perfect” painting will come through.

At the Pier

Watercolor

In the meantime, I have had a few opportunities to sit out here on the deck and paint, perhaps not the mountains surrounding us, but a few scenes from when hubby and I were in Nags Head, at the Outer Banks of North Carolina with friends in early May.

At the Pier Two

Watercolor

Fun pieces of the characters we saw one day at Jeannette’s Pier, their love of fishing obvious in their stance and determination to catch that big one for dinner.

CONGRATULATIONS

MARILYN!

For selling two paintings for this worthy cause.