News For December

It was a busy month in December and the new puppies really kept us hopping. We had forgotten how much mischief new puppies can get into, in a blink of an eye, but overall they are working out really well and are already getting somewhat housetrained, which is a big plus. We are now working on taking walks with a leash and Murray took to it right away, but Elsie is a little fearful of strange sounds as we walk along, so I end up carrying her most of the time. Our Christmas was quiet but lovely with my brother coming over for dinner on the 24th and then we visited with Jim and Nancy for a delicious brunch on Christmas day. We have been painting a little and Allan has finished a new boat painting (left) while I have finished a couple of paintings, one of which is from a photo of the Apache Lake Drive that we took with Jim and Nancy back in November and the other is of a yacht that we saw while in Maine this summer. It is my first boat painting. It was kind of a foggy day with the sun trying to shine through the clouds and I am sure it must have been a yacht that can cross the ocean, it was so big in comparison with some of the other boats that we had seen that day.

December was also the month of being rejected by the Empire 100 show down in Tucson, but we were expecting it because our paintings were really not western, having no cowboys, Indians, or horses. So maybe this year we will try to paint something that might get into the show, that would be fun. Our neighbor did get two paintings into the Empire 100 so she and I traveled down to Tucson to drop them off and had a great lunch at Tohono Chul Gardens as well. This Wednesday we went to the Phoenix Art Museum with Jim and Nancy to see the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition and while we were there we also saw a LIFESIZE PASTEL PAINTING (right) by William Merritt Chase, one of the American Impressionists who we had seen in several museums back east this summer. What was interesting about this pastel painting was that Chase wet the pastel and applied it with a brush. Some of the detail was remarkable. (Left and Right)

It was another beautiful day here in Phoenix and we all sat outside in the Cafe for a delicious lunch with Allan having the Cubano Sandwich with Garlic Fries, I had a salad with grapefruit, dates, and some kind of radish I had never seen before, but was very beautiful in cross section, Jim had a Chinese Albacore Sandwich with sweet potato salad, which he let everyone have a bite, and Nancy had Hummus with Pita. All in all it was a great start to the new year. For All Of Those Folks Out There who sent us email wishes and/or snail mail cards, thank you very much for wishing us a wonderful holiday season and both Allan and I are hoping that all of our friends and relatives had an equally wonderful December and will have a healthy and secure New Year.

News for November

This month was very sad. We had to say goodbye to our two dogs who were both very ill. Ned had cancer and was given 4 months to live, and Alice had kidney failure and had even less time. Our vet recommended that we have them put to sleep together so that neither dog would be alone in their last month, wondering where their lifetime friend had gone. They were both the best of pets and had traveled all over the US, Mexico, and Canada with us in the RV. We will miss them very much. We said that we would wait a while to get another dog, but after a few weeks went by, we started to wonder what we were waiting for. So we have purchased two puppies who will be arriving this coming Saturday Night. They are miniature piebald dachshunds and they are coming from New Mexico. Murray is a wirehair red and tan color, Elsie is a black and tan longhair. They are just about 3 months old, so I think we will be kept hopping for a while with a couple of energetic puppies running around. Allan is really looking forward to taking walks with his dogs again, he hasn't been able to do that for almost two years.

......In other news...... I have finished a couple of paintings which I am entering in the Empire Ranch 100 Show down in Tucson. Allan is entering some paintings as well and neither of us knows how it will turn out as most of the artists who enter that show paint horses, or cowboys, or Indians. But here are the paintings that I just finished. Love to hear any of your comments....

We Are Not In Kansas Anymore ToTo

Due to hints, suggestions, and outright soft pressure, I have returned to the blog for an update on what we have been up to since leaving Kansas City. With a short stay in Colorado Springs, we continued on to Taos where we had planned to stay for two weeks. The new pricing at the Taos Valley RV park quickly put an end to that idea, as it was over $300. per week. While we were there we checked on the little rv park out on the North side of town, as you head over towards the Rio Grande Bridge and it looks like our new Go To place when we are in Taos Town. As usual while we were in Taos, we hit all the museums to look at our favorite paintings and hopefully see some new ones too. We ate Green Chile Stew and Guacamole and many of our other New Mexican favorite foods including Tres Leches Cake. See Above.

We found a great route from the East to get into Taos with a minimum of grade elevation and a fabulous road which ran from Colorado over to Fort Garland and then went straight south. And the views were beautiful the entire way. . . . . . . . .

When we got back home to Apache Junction we decided to jump on some remodeling projects around the house as well as getting ready to submit some paintings to the Fall Show in Cottonwood. Since that time we have found out that Allan had all 3 of his paintings accepted and I had two of mine accepted as well. As one of the new Workshop Chairpersons in our pastel group I had to get to work on several workshops that are coming up this Winter. We were looking forward to going to the October meeting where Lorenzo Chavez was coming to do a demo painting. He chose to do a winter scene in Colorado and although it was primarily a blue photograph, the painting turned out to be quite warm in tone. See Right. . . . . . .

We were surprised this last week to have some RV friends come through our town to visit. We are always thankful to have Rose and Mike, the first of our Rockport, Texas friendships that we made on those memorable winters down on the gulf, be here in Mesa where they also have a winter home. And then we got a call from Renita and Mark, the second pair of friends we made at the same rv park down in Rockport and who we have since met up with on the trail, come for four days this last week. But then we got a call from Nancy and Jim, another couple that we have met up with out on the road and our third friendship from down in Rockport who called to say they were staying here in Mesa until the first of January. Well we had to have our 2nd Biennial Rockport RV Reunion and it has been so great to see everyone all at the same time. Everyone has been busy with many different things; Rose and Mike have become grandparents to Charlotte, Jim and Nancy have finally completed all 48 states and have gone up in a balloon in Albuquerque, and Mark and Renita are finally turning those rocks into gold, well almost.... they are making the most extraordinary jewelry and becoming quite successful marketing it as well. In addition to our reunion dinner, we also have been out visiting Organ Stop Pizza and heading out to Tortilla Flats for the scenery and the burgers. In the above photos you can see Mark, Allan, Nancy, and Jim looking out at the Bighorn Sheep (see below) and then in the lower photo is Renita and Mark checking out the scenery.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO

Heading into Missouri, Allan realized that the truck brakes were not functioning as well as they should be, so when we got to Kansas City we checked into a KOA for three nights so that he could take the truck to a brake shop. While we were here we decided to go to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art which turned out to be a lovely museum with free admission. We headed straight for our favorite sections of European and American Paintings. One of the first paintings we found was Van Gogh's "Olive Orchard" which he painted in the last year of his life while he was living at the asylum where he had committed himself with what was thought to be mental illness, at the time. Now there has been renewed investigation into his symptoms and it is possible he had Meniere's Disease, which is an inner ear disorder which causes everything to spin around you, a feeling of vertigo accompanied by a roaring in the ears with feelings of panic and depression. The swirling effects that are seen in his skies, trees, and shrubbery could be what he is actually seeing during an episode of this disease. . . . . There was an American artist from St. Louis, MO who spent 15 years in Paris and then an additional year in Giverny with Monet in 1907. Richard Edward Miller had two paintings in the museum, both of women and both in an impressionist palette but with a couple of differences. In "The Sun Porch" you can see the bright palette and the dabs of color or loose brush strokes except in the figures face and hands which are carefully modelled and are reminiscent of Gustav Klimt. Neither of us had ever heard of this artist before but we really liked his paintings. The light coming in the window and falling across her clothes was lovely and it was done with blotches of paint placed carefully. The blotches were so thick that they looked as if you could peel them off the canvas, but the hands are painted delicately, more like what you would see in a Sargent portrait. . . . . There was a John Singer Sargent portrait there of "Mrs. Cecil Wade" who was one of his first commissions in London after he was shunned in Paris for painting Madame X. In the Mrs. Cecil Wade painting he is at his best in his brush strokes which are unparalleled in evoking satin, pearls, lighting, wood, metal, textures of any kind. A close up of her right hand will show how delicate he is with his brush strokes, they are so fine, they are barely seen. We were especially interested in how Sargent painted edges. We have been learning about lost edges and found edges in past workshops. Here we got to see more of a penumbra effect along many of his edges. In the close up to the left, there is a ghost image of her sleeve against the dark background. And the background intrudes softly onto the upper portion of the sleeve as well. Everything Sargent does in this painting is subtle but it all adds up to a painting we just stood and looked at for almost half an hour. But Sargent was not always so precise. And he probably took extra care with his commissions, but on a trip to Majorca he painted a portrait of an Argentinean artist and you can see all of the impressionistic brushstrokes and lighter palette emerge. . . . . There were many more of our favorite artists and we had a wonderful afternoon visiting with them all. But we were getting hungry and we decided to go out for Kansas City Barbeque. We found the SmokeStack right down the street from the just opened Trader Joe's. Allan had the rib basket and ordered the corn cassarole as a side. A corn cassarole is canned corn, canned cheese, cream cheese, bacon bits, and garlic. It was not something that I cared for, but Allan ate the whole thing. I must be a barbeque wimp because I like Famous Dave's and haven't had anything that would replace it so far. Today our brakes were fixed by replacing the vacuum pump so we will be on our way west again tomorrow morning.

Turning West

After leaving Acadia NP, we headed down the Maine coast to Camden where we had intended to stay at the State Park. We drove through pouring rain and arrived to find that we could not fit into our intended site, the only other site they had was filled with mud, and the weather forecast was for continued rain during the remainder of the week. They put us out into a field for the night while we hastily made some different arrangements. I called Lake Ivanhoe in New Hampshire to see if we could arrive two weeks earlier and they said "no problem", so the next day we headed up to visit with our friends who live across the street from us in Arizona during the winter. They have a beautiful cabin on Lake Ivanhoe and live right next door to another couple that have purchased a winter home in our same park in Arizona. We had a great time getting shown around the area by both couples and meeting many of their friends and relatives. One of the days was full sun and we took the opportunity to do some plein air painting. The top photo is our friend's cabin on the lake and the photo above right is Allan doing a painting of their rowboat at the small dock. It was a very relaxing time and we sure appreciated all of the hospitality and good eats we received from everyone. We started west on Monday, heading to NY to spend the night, and encountered nothing but drenching rain all day. The highway was puddled with water and on one of the interchanges, we had an idiot cut right in front of us and slow down so that Allan had to put on the brakes and we started to hydroplane and skid to the side. Allan was able to get us out of it, but it was a scary moment. These 3 photos are taken in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. Can't remember which is which, but as you can see it was a very rainy day and the big trucks throwing up all their spray just made it worse. Today we are in the middle of Pennsylvania and the sun has decided to come out for the day. We decided to spend an extra day so that we could visit the Amish Flea Market in Belleville. It was a beautiful drive through rolling hills and several state parks to an agricultural valley where many of the farms are owned by the Amish (and also the English, which I guess is the rest of us). The flea market was very large and we were able to buy fresh peaches, plums, and small fruit pies and moon pies which are crescent shaped. I got a bird house made of bark and Allan got jars of jam, a hacksaw, and a book. It was fun prowling around all the funky stuff that everyone was selling and it was the place to be if you wanted a hunting rifle that is for sure. There were so many people selling rifles we could have started a small army right there in Belleville. Of course it was the English selling all of the rifles and flea market stuff, the Amish were selling the produce and pastries. We saw numbers of their horse and carts out on the road and those horses are really stepping out. Allan was very taken with the area, he said it reminded him of New Zealand with all the green fields and villages down in the vales with the hills beyond. We then took a different route to get back to Bellefonte where we had lunch at the Gamble Mill Restaurant and Brewery. Allan had a pastrami sandwich and I had baby back ribs, which were both so good that we wolfed them down before I got a photo of them, even though the camera was sitting right there on the table. But the best part was the beer. We had a Sessions Ale and it was the first beer I have ever had that was perfect, malty and yeasty, smooth and refreshing, none of that bitter hoppy taste, it was the best beer ever. We told the waitress we would add a couple of six packs on to our bill and were told that they do not bottle their beers. Oh well, it was a beer and a day to remember.

Mt. Desert Island

For the last week, Allan and I have been exploring the second most popular national park in the U.S. and it certainly has one thing in common with the most popular park (which is Yosemite... in case you didn't know), namely numbers of people. There are certainly some places on the island that are not as popular, such as most of the western side, but for the most part, there were bumper to bumper traffic jams (even with the bus shuttle system running every half hour), people standing in long, long lines for ice cream in Bar Harbor, or bicyclists from every bicycle club in America. They were especially numerous on the park loop road and there were hundreds, if not thousands, of bicycles at Jordan Pond where all of the carriage roads seem to converge and the hot popovers are served for Tea. This was the high season for the island and every pathway was an endless stream of people from just about any country you could name and probably a few that you couldn't name. Aunties from India teetering along the rocky cliffs after the younger members of the family, French youths all with the physiques of bagettes, elderly women with makeshift walking sticks made of branches, children fast asleep in their strollers, dogs walking doggedly along behind their masters; all were there. We were there too and spent the first day exploring Bar Harbor, which is mostly restaurants and gift stores, but charming.... very charming with pots of flowers everywhere and of course the harbor full of boats. We had lunch at the Bar Harbor Inn and although the food was good, I think that they thought we should be on a diet because there was not much of it. On one of the days we had to drive back into Ellsworth to take care of some errands and there we had a proper lunch at Finn's Irish Pub (left). I had shepherds pie and Allan had corned beef and cabbage. Both were delicious and the helpings were so large that we had leftovers to take home. As it turned out, right across the street from Finn's was a cafe where we had breakfast a couple of times as Allan really like the Corned Beef Hash and I was sold on the platesized Blueberry Pancakes which had little crispy edges and were filled with blueberries in the middle, with plenty of butter and Maine maple syrup. On our last day on the island, we took a cruise on the Sea Princess with a National Park Ranger who gave a nature talk while we were crossing over to Isleford on Little Cranberry Island and then up Somes Sound and back. We were able to see seals, bald eagles, osprey, and several kinds of ducks. But the best part of the boat ride for us, was getting photos of the harbors, the boats, and the scenery along the shore. Altogether between the two of us, we took over 600 photos while we were here for the week. Not all of those came from the boat ride, we got many photos from SW Harbor and also NE Harbor. Unfortunately we had to take many of the photos in the fog or drizzly rain since we were only here for one week and we only had one day of sunshine during our visit. But now that we have had a lesson from Michael on creating fog, we should be OK. One of the final places we had to visit before we left the island was the Atlantic Brewery. I had promised our friends Mike and Rose that I would bring them some Maine brews, so we stopped by and had some Mainely Maine Barbeque and picked up a sample of Maine beers to bring back to Arizona. Hopefully it won't get too hot on our trip home, it would be a shame if we needed a cold one before we got them to their intended recipients.

Campobello Island Plein Air

It has been almost two weeks ago that we left Massachusetts, traveled through Maine, and crossed the bridge at Lubec to enter Campobello Island at the tip of New Brunswick on the Bay of Fundy. We had reservations at the Herring Cove Provincial Park which is within walking distance of the Herring Cove Beach (see above). Although the site had 30 amp electricity, we were sans water or sewer, so we had to embark upon a careful conservation program of dishwashing and toilet flushing. Thankfully the park had warm, clean restrooms with hot and cold running water and showers as well so we made use of their facilities as often as possible. We spent our first couple of days exploring the island, checking out all of the little harbors and taking photos of old buildings and boats. We were both so happy to finally be able to pull over in the truck and get out and take some photos without encountering a "Private Property - Keep Out" sign as we had on the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island. The weather was clear and cool, unlike the 99 degree, high humidity weather we left when we spent a night in Freeport, Maine. Freeport, by the way, is a disneyesque mall disguised as a mild mannered coastal town. They were having a heat wave, as was the rest of the country and there were so many air conditioners on in our KOA that the electricity went off for about 5 hours in the late afternoon. So the air felt lovely on Campobello with maritime temperatures in the 70's. . . . . . On Sunday evening we went to Friar's Bay Gallery to get a welcome and introduction for the week's plein air workshop from Michael Chesley Johnson (see left, photo taken during the week while we were at Liberty Point) and his wife Trina where we also met the two other students; Mike from New Jersey and Pat from New Hampshire. We were not too surprised to see Pat because one day at the IAPS conference in June we had lunch at a table with many other artists and in the conversation found out that Pat was also scheduled to have a workshop with Michael in July. What a coincidence, only 4 people in the workshop and we meet one of them by accident before we get there. It's a small world. . . . . . . . . . .On Monday at 9:00 Atlantic Time we met at Michael's gallery where he talked about concentrating our efforts on a four value color system. This was exactly what Allan was hoping he would talk about and after we drove to Con Robinson Point in the Roosevelt International Park, Michael demonstrated how to begin a painting using four colors that were in the four values of the scene. Michael had reminded all of us of Charles Hawthorne's 4 value system with the verticals (trees) being the darkest, sloped verticals (mountains) being the mid-darks, flat areas (land) being the mid-lights, and the sky being the lightest of all. Allan's painting to the left was his day one attempt at achieving this goal of a painting in 4 values. I am working on my painting of the same scene (above right) and felt that my achievement for the day was a) actually doing a plein air and getting something recognizeable on the paper, and b) capturing some of the color and value that I saw in front of me. My biggest achievement was getting over the jitters of working quickly, as I am a very sloowww painter. But Michael had a very strong teacherly instinct and was able to present material at the level we needed and adjusted his approach to be of the most help to all of us, each of us with different needs. On day two we went to Cranberry Point, where again Michael demonstrated what we needed to focus on for the session. Michael is working on a painting above while we were all doing our paintings and later he showed us the small painting he had done of me painting under my umbrella. By the way, we learned that the umbrella is not for us, it is for the pastels and the painting on the easel. . . . . . . . . On Wednesday we painted at Herring Cove Beach, which is the beach at the very top of this blog, and Thursday we went to Liberty Point, which is the most gorgeous spot on the island. Michael did a demonstration of a painting of a rock formation off shore which resembles a frog and cautioned us about making it too froglike. Allan jumped right in and started painting and the next day during the critique, we all had to laugh, as he had painted Jeremiah, in all his froglike glory (left). I escaped that problem by painting in the opposite direction (below). In addition to the four values which was on day one, we also worked on our composition, color, and atmospheric perspective. On our last day, we asked Michael if he would help us with trees and shrubs, so we all went to Little Duck Pond with the fog rolling in amongst the trees, and Michael showed us how to create trees, still maintaining the four values, as he added suggestions of bluish green trees in the distance with a sky made of light pink and mint green which believe it or not, looked just like fog. The week was the absolute highlight of our trip and will be something we remember forever. On our last day we went back over the bridge to Lubec to visit the Easternmost point in the United States. But it was surely an anticlimax to the previous week painting plein air with Michael on Campobello Island.