Golden Wetlands Sunset

9" by 12"

Well, November is over - another month of staying home gone by! 

Melissa and I are generally happy at home, but what I miss the most are simple pleasures, like being able to go out to breakfast or lunch at our favorite places. Still, it's a small price to pay for staying safe and keeping others safe too.

Most of my mornings are spent painting or doing other things art-related. In the afternoons I read books on my Kindle and nap. Melissa introduced me to the Philip Craig Martha's Vineyard mysteries, of which there are 19 books in the series, and I'm on number seven, so they will keep me busy a while longer! Our weather has improved - we are out of the sultry heat and hurricane season,  and enjoying a few cold spells that make for lovely afternoons in the sun on our lanai. All in all, I would say I have a pretty nice life and I am grateful!

Here I am enjoying the sunshine on our lanai:

Folks often ask how I go about starting a painting, so I'll tell you how that happens. 

Most of the time, I work from photos and my imagination to create what I call "Mindscapes." These are visions in my head from memory of real places, with the addition of my imagination in the areas of color and mood. So, the scene may depict a real place, but it is not necessarily that place at a real moment in time, depicting the exact color of the sky or shadows, or even the season. I adjust based on what I am feeling when I take brush to paper or canvas. To me, art is all about emotion - exact replications of a scene are for cameras, not paint brushes!

We lived in the southwest U.S. for 12 years, so many of my visions are from there. The magnificent landscape is burned into my memory, so no photos are required! This one, "Purple Clouds Make Purple Shadows," is a good example of a Mindscape - the landscape is a real place, but my goal was to play around with the impact of using the color purple in the sky and in shadows on the ground.

Purple Clouds Make Purple Shadows

My New England ocean scenes come from memories of our life on the coast of Maine, where we lived for 20 years - first in York Beach and later in East Boothbay. I just finished the one below, "Lighthouse on the Bluff." 

Drawing is not my strong suit, so I do what can be called "loose sketching" to get started. I don't use a pencil; I use a long-handled paintbrush and dark paint! Sometimes I just place directional lines to indicate the flow of the landscape. In this painting, I sketched in the buildings in a fairly sloppy manner, using the brush. Once I had the shapes, I just started painting, adjusting the scene as needed.

Lighthouse on the Bluff

9" by 12"

A painting has three areas to be reckoned with: the background, midground and foreground. I always being with the background first, which is the sky and anything else above the horizon line. Then I move to the midground and end with the foreground.

Below are a few more samples of my work in November. My main site is at JRSecorFineArt.com, where you can view more of my work, organized into collections such as landscape, seascape, and still life. The paintings shown on the blog are all for sale, so email me at rvpainter@gmail.com if you are interested in any of them.

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, Joyous Holiday Season and a Happy New Year. 

Warm regards,

JR