Brittany Cottage, reworked, like my mind.

My last post was an indulgence of self pity, I confess. But it was also my first step towards regaining inner equilibrium. All my self-talk, as good as it was, needed to get out of the mental raquet ball court and into the objective ears of others. And as often is the case, the things we fear are rarely the frightening things in life.

Garden Cat, also reworked, like my mind.

By the time I got to the venue meeting, I had my plan. Having overcome impulses to flee, I was on solid enough turf to realize my best allies were fact and truth. So after a sultry hour touring guest house and grounds, dodging watering sprays and random gardeners, I’d managed to stake out a couple of vantage points for a plein air painting demonstration as wells some moody interior spots to paint.

A ray of hope.

At last, near the end of the foray, our gracious host mentioned the portrait painter, giving me the opportunity I’d been waiting for all along. His name? That was all it took and she extolled his illustrious career painting the rich and famous as well as his monied(my word) “middle class”. Having asked just enough other questions about how he worked(by sittings or photos?), I was pretty sure I was over the hurdle. I smelled a really good salesman peddling lots of glitz.

Jumping on the computer tout de suit,BINGO! There they were: portraits that looked more like commercial photographs on steroids than moody, introspective paintings like those I adore: Sargent, Morrisot or Rembrandt. I came back to my senses, smiling.

When we talk “shop” that day, happy to be me, I’ll be digging more into how he built his career and client base than developed his painting style. Just what I need!

Knowing my place: A really good thing.

Until Monday.

Monday, my friend and co-founder of the society called to arrange an appointment with the high-powered venue owner, which I’d anticipated like a final check-up before giving birth. “Yes, Thursday at one will be great,” I agreed. I couldn’t wait to see the place again and get inspiration for what I would paint on site- en plein air. As we were bidding goodbye, Val p.s.’ed, as casually as if commenting on the weather, that Cynthia’s portrait painter from Naples would be at the concert, too. “It will be quite an artistic event” or something like that was the closing comment. I think.

I clicked off my phone and felt an overwhelming surge of intimidation. “Quite an event alright.” Two red flags: artist from Naples and portrait painter. Ugh and ouch. It ruptured an acute inflammation of all the childhood insecurities which lie dormant in my happy life. Dormant but obviously there, waiting for a crack in the psyche to attack. That grinding tidbit of news has changed my disposition as if I were waiting for medical test results for a biopsy.  Having this other artist there feels like rain on my parade, no matter what positive spin I try to turn on it. The joie de vivre of the project has drained out of the balloon. I brace myself for inspection. What if I choke?

This dose of self awareness, in a creative way, is what it takes to paint a self-portrait, which Griffin and I have been doing a bit of this summer to balance out painting en plein air,before we go to France. Looking for the shapes and shadows which make us, us, as well as part of the human family. Yet, how disarming to discover lifelong insecurities in those shadows, no matter how we’ve triumphed. But then again, such things may be the very things which give our eyes a certain light, our eyebrows a particular arch or our mouths their unique turn.

I think I’ll go to the garden and weed. It’s a lovely day, after all.

Cottage Garden, Brittany. oil on linen 24×36
$1800 unframed

Mother’s Day holds garden memories for me. First and most obvious, it come in spring when the garden is bursting forth. But second, Mother’s Day and Easter were days when my mother and I would walk the garden together to delight in the hope of every little sprout. It was one of the few times she was unguarded about her response to life. In spite of the intervening years since her death, I still remember those strolls down our garden paths and trips to the nursery each spring. My first childhood memories of the garden came from her.

My adult garden muse is also gone now. Carol was an amazing force of nature. Her garden was an English fantasy filled with alpine-lined paths, hedges and stone walls. She would have loved this spring as much as I. It’s not only been a glorious gardening season, but also a time for me to pursue capturing gardens on canvas. Visually organizing the riot of plants with a brush on canvas is the two dimensional version of digging the trowel into the earth to move plants about to get the perfect composition in an ever changing scene.

Painting gardens brings me to my third muse: Berthe Morissot. As much as I love Monet, Morissot’s brushwork is even more exciting to me. The open, free strokes are just organized enough to make objects recognizable sometimes. Her paintings remind me of a book Carol gave me years ago: A Gentle Plea for Chaos, by Mirabel Osler. Twenty years ago, Carol saw the rustic element in my garden when I was trying to be so organized about it! It makes me wonder how Berthe saw her own paintings. Probably the way I see mine, they just are.

Garden Cat 20×24 oil on stretched linen
$1200 unframed

The day before, the hour before, the moment before, all hold a certain excitement and an ounce of anxiety alike. Whatever the event, when you’ve invested your energy and soul into something, you just want it to be appreciated. All the years I performed, I remember waiting offstage feeling like a racehorse ready for the gates to raise. Days before art shows and sales are very much the same.

For over a week, as I finish paintings, fire the last birdhouses, and frame still-a-bit-tacky paintings, I’ve found myself checking the weather channel on my I-Phone.  It’s been an exercise in keeping my rosy colored glasses polished because until last night, it looked like sure thunder storms for my Art in the Garden Day. Not that the event wouldn’t have been fine inside, but I love having the spring show outside in the garden, which has been rather spectacular this spring. All my positive thinking has paid off, weather-wise, and it looks like a perfect day tomorrow.

Now for the right mix people falling in love with the perfect piece of STEBNER…

“Wellies and Trowel” still to be framed!

Abri is the French word for shelter. I like it. So much of my work is about it: homes, doors, windows, rooms, food. The things that surround us daily. I remember my exhilaration as an art student when we got to Chardin in art history. Not that I hadn’t adored medieval art, but when the kitchen became a sanctuary worth painting, I got pretty excited. And no high priest could compete with the French maid wielding a butcher knife over a bountiful tableful of food, in my small-town mind.

This week we completed our own new l’abri in the garden. It’s an arbor right at the back door. It will not only provide a shady spot for al fresco dining, a la Judy Dench’s Chocolat birthday party, but also drop cool morning shadows across the furniture of the garden room, indoors.

Isn’t it amazing that before we’ve even basked in the yin of summer sun, we fantasize over the intimate yan of cool shadows? Shadows are the things that make both great paintings and parties, alike. And according to legend, affirm our existence…

Which brings me to another Shadow. As our l’abri neared completion  this week, my dear friend, Cindy’s feline Shadow approached the end of her eighteen year reign. That’s a long time. As our friend Suzanne said earlier this year on loosing her Siamese princess of nineteen years, it was her longest and most successful relationship. And a certain shady house in the woods in Suwannee, Georgia will miss the comforting shadows of a fine, black lady at feeding time as well as bed time for a long, long time. In my mind’s eye, Shadow will always be casting her image across the coffee table as she sits on her throne, reigning quietly in front of the fireplace.

Looking Back, oil on museum wrapped linen
18x24, $750

Stebner Tulips, oil on 12x12 panel. $375 unframed

Rembrandt has become to my spring what the mistral was to my winter: an unexpected thread, weaving together random events. My last reference to the Dutch master will be the part of him I loved first: tulips. Rembrandt tulips. As a young boy, tulips were the first flower I learned to recognize and draw and as a young gardener, the brightly painted Rembrandt variety were the first tulips I planted. This year I’ve planted them in pots I can port about the garden where needed.

Monday they hosted us in the garden morning ’til evening, surrounding us like a visual chorus, as we drank coffee outdoors at breakfast, gardened away the afternoon and finally relaxed at days-end with cocktails, surrounded by them tucked beneath flowering trees.

With designs on a dinner al fresco in our Patois Eden, we meandered to the kitchen to leisurely putz away together, assembling a porterhouse steak with bourbon cream sauce, baked potatoes and a summery cucumber-tomato salad with capers. It was to be the first dinner of our twenty-third year together and time to celebrate. Like any relationship crossing decades, we’ve risen victorious over some difficult years and Monday we deserved a reveling of cocktails, steak and champagne.

But every Eden has its fall and ours came the minute Jim laid the salad on the table by the fish pond. A swarm of those tiny black, vinegar-loving bugs lit onto the salad like an inedible Dada garnish. Without loosing a beat, we turned heel and set our portable feast, sans salade, at a small, ancient oak table in the living room, just big enough for two. With a view of the garden, a centerpiece of forced Rembrandts and three little dogs sniffing in hope at our feet, our candle-lit dinner evoked the timeless aura of a happy moment borrowed from Dickens, the Brontës or E. M. Forster. In the gloaming light of a day well-spent, our contented hearts reveled equally in recent hours and spent years: not a bad way to end a day or begin a year. Our own Howards End.

Faience Stebner plate. 12". $100. Shakespeare quote.

Late yesterday afternoon I flipped on my phone thoughtlessly and the following email immediately opened onto the screen. I almost deleted it, thinking it was  unsolicited spam… Well, it was unsolicited, but hardly spam. What a perfect way to end any day or week, let alone a Friday the Thirteenth.

Thank you, Donna!

Dear Bruce, I just so happened to stumble upon your website today.  That happened because for years I’ve had your name as an automatic ebay search – letting me know if anyone ever lists one of your pieces.  A piece was listed today & in the description it links to your website.  …and there I found your email address! I want to take the time today to tell you something you’d probably get a kick out of knowing. Years ago I scrounged & scraped & saved to purchase a large round plate you made that was in a local gift shop in Manchester, Connecticut. It was made in ’97. Surrounding the rim of the plate is the quote from C. Aiken “Music I heard with you was more than music ~ Bread I broke with you was more than bread.” I utterly ADORE this beautiful piece of art that speaks to me on mulitple levels.  For one, I totally relate to the quote.  Music & it’s artistry adds so much to our everyday lives & I’m always on the hunt for an undiscovered underappreciated talent.  It’s a fun challenge for me.  Hospitality – the breaking of bread – is my ultimate passion.  We literally have hundreds of people every year around our table to share meals & share lives.  The fact that the two were brought together on your beautiful piece of art jumped right out at me.  And yes – I love the quote, but what makes it for me is your specific interpretation in painting it.  The artful simplicity - the simple strokes in just the perfect spots – I notice every detail.  This platter sits on my kitchen counter on a large stand every day.  I pack it away sadly at Christmas when I put out the decorations & can’t wait to take it back out when it’s over. I have said multiple times that if my house was on fire & everyone was out & I could run back in and take ONE THING…it would be that plate. So…that’s my story.  Your art is one of life’s treasured nuggets.  Something that has brought me such much joy. I’m soooo glad that I stumbled upon your website so I could let you know! Ever So Sincerely,

I never experienced an Easter Vigil, in the liturgical sense, until I was in my thirties. Now my children are that age, I realize I’ve been waiting through them my entire life. Dark lents have come in many forms. But unannounced, when the world is darkest, that crucial moment creeps upon us when the first sign of hope flickers faintly on the horizon. That distant glow is the object of any Easter vigil. That’s today. Tomorrow, be we theist or atheist, earth’s bursting forth from slumber will be worth celebrating. It will be paque, as the French would say. Passover and Easter, in French, are one and the same word.

To be honest, this winter was mild and this Lent I forfeited nothing. Last year about did me in. Right now I’m reveling in the glorious resurrection of relationships, family and careers. Our mild winter and early spring reflect my contented heart. And this incredible spring is, as far as I’m concerned, much needed. The frost of last night has merely perpetuated the long row of cloudless azure skies we’ve enjoyed. What pascal light could be more promising that a clear full moon at night or bright sun breaking across the sky each morning.

Good news of any kind lets us breathe deeper and fuller. Resurrected minds, bodies or spirits are new chances to create more passionately and live more intensely, having faced, head-on, the reality that nothing will last forever.

Then sometimes, you see it happen before your eyes.

Since our trip to Cleveland two weeks ago, I was tickled when Grif told me he was going back to the Utrech Art Supply in Cleveland for more materials on his own. That Saturday a text came asking if I wanted anything. On the way home I got a text reading, “Got some powdered marble and some cool things to play with. LOL.” Eureka! Pretty soon he’ll be painting as much as he plays video games.

Having been smitten by Rembrandt, the dream continues as we start painting portraits. I’ve managed to draft a friend or two as well as find a willing body on Craigslist so we can have live humans for models. The difference is like that of painting a landscape from a photo or en plain air. Real trees, hills, sky and water in front of you give you so much more information to assimilate just as real faces, arms and legs tell stories lost in photos. And the proof was in tracking Grif’s improvement in being able to create skin tones in a few lessons. To quote Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrel, “Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing.”

As for real things, next post will start to reveal the plans for our summer in France. It’s gonna be delicious.