It's been a long, cold winter. But it's also been a very productive time for me. When the snow is falling, the wind is howling, and the conditions are too rough for working outdoors, there's nothing that I enjoy more than taking a mug of hot tea into my studio and focusing in on larger scale works. It's a great time for me to concentrate without the distractions of working outside in my garden or wanting to be out on my bike.
Night on the Town 16 x 16 oil on panel
As we get into April, there is still a light cover a snow on our property (no fooling!), but it's going to warm up soon and this seems like a good time to pause and take inventory of what this past winter yielded. I'd like to introduce you to a few new cityscapes. The first is "Night on the Town," a new piece from Center City in Philadelphia. I like the juicy color in this work, and I had a lot of fun with the loose brush work to depict the distant, down-the-street horizon. If my memory serves me correctly, this was along 15th Street near Walnut.
Behold! 30 x 30 oil on panel
The second work is "Behold!" This piece continues my fascination with storefront displays, and the inspiration for this motif came from a gorgeous holiday display in midtown Manhattan. I'm captivated by how people, so rushed and so entranced by their cell phones, interact with these displays as they go walking past. I suspect that the job of a window display designer has gotten very tough over the past decade with the explosion of cell phones. I know as an artist that it is harder and harder to capture attention. But this particular design and the way in which passers by interacted with it definitely caught my eye. I loved the brilliant colors and angles.
Paris Twilight 12 x 24 oil on panel
Finally, I have "Paris Twilight," a celebration of the narrow, winding corridors that make up some of the oldest neighborhoods in the heart of Paris, France. In this piece, I experimented a bit with leaving some passages loose and more colorful. You will see more pieces that employ this approach in my future works because I enjoyed letting the medium speak for itself within these areas. The optical mixing of color, in which the artist lets the viewer's eyes do the work, is intriguing to me.
I hope you enjoy these works. If you happen to be in State College, Pennsylvania at any point between now and the end of May, you can see these new works in my "Jewel Tones" exhibition at the Mount Nittany Medical Center. For more information, please contact me. Enjoy!
