So last night we watch Rob Roy, a wonderfully-set, large-screen movie with big name stars just eking “Scottish.” It succeeds at the box office in 1996, if $28-31.6 million is any standard. A 1995 American biographical historical drama, the film was directed by Michael Caton-Jones. Liam Neeson stars as Rob Roy MacGregor, an 18th-century Scottish clan chief and the movie chronicles his battles with an unscrupulous nobleman in the Scottish Highlands.

All the things I love about it are right—the beautiful highlands, my ancestry—and subject in my latest series, The Highland-Cape-Fear-Thriller-Conspiracy Series. The fact that it shows awesome costumery (more about that later), the great love story of a man and his wife, the warrior Highlander genre in all his masculine, swashbuckling glory, my favorite movie star of all time, Liam Neeson (I always forgive his Irish beginnings), shocking scenes which make the blood boil produced by Peter Broughan and Richard Jackson, with music by Carter Burwell and screen play by Alan Sharp.

They deserve credit for the massive effort of projecting visually the novel by Sir Walter Scott, famous Scottish novelist, which none of the reviewers seem to even realize. Rob Roy is one of the Waverley novels, says the author himself about his historical written in 1817, followed by The Heart of Midlothian. Scott writes in the literary omniscient style of yesteryear with the named narrator, Frank Osbaldistone.

Scott is of interest to me for his love of Rosslyn Chapel as a Mason, a subject which arises in my books as well.

Rob Roy lived. A historical figure. Just how historical they made him does not worry me one bit. I like a wee bit of playing around with history as you will know upon reading my series if you haven’t already. If he was low country instead of high, I prefer the Highlands, so there you have it.

Tim Roth played the fop who I hated so much I refuse to remember his name. Was he ever the master of innuendo and expression. However, it’s those expressions that make one ill.

Rob’s wife Mary was played by Jessica Lange, and again, red hair glows on many of my leading women’s heads as well. That she exists beyond her relationship with her husband is my main rave to the part and person, a character to be reckoned with but also to be loved, so unlike the snippy, snarky strong women often portrayed in sitcoms.

I don’t care how many rotten tomatoes it got, ’twas a great movie. Back to the costumes as I promised–I got a little bored with it, and I think that can directly be traced to the period and costumery. That’s why, even when I love the look, it’s so limiting to the human psyche in terms of pigeonholing them in time, I don’t do it in my books. Yours truly threads in historical chords, but the main characters are thoroughly modern in today’s day and time, reaching into the future.

I prefer a main couple solving mysteries and taking on world would-be destroyers.

No more spoilers for ye. It’s worth it just for soaking up a bit of atmosphere. And thank you for waiting for my full-blown series, Book I, Stone of Her Destiny, of which is available right now. It’s the Prequel, Inheritance Spurned and Book II, The Tarbert Legacy, that ye’ll be looking for.

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And Big Words like ‘Provenance’

I find it all kinds of fun to follow art thefts. I began doing this while I lived in Germany in the seventies and eighties, even being offered a job by one of the art retrieval outfits. I liked the TV series “To Catch a Thief.”

I’m really fascinated by all the masterpieces stolen by the Nazis, and the repatriation of stolen works to their former owners–a ticklish operation when the new owner may have legitimately paid lots of money for the work with no idea of its journey along the way through thieves (a concept called ‘provenance’).

Just recently a Los Angeles man, Philip Righter, was convicted of selling fraudulently made works to a gallery in South Florida. The contemporary artists he forged were Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring for a million-dollar steal for which he plead guilty.

An FBI special agent announced this.

The scheme started with buying art forgeries on-line, at marketplaces and auction sites. Supplied with fakes, the schemer wrote up letters with embossed signatures claiming their authenticity. Using those letters he approached a gallery, piqued interest, sent forgeries to a warehouse nearby and sent a bill for a mill, plus, requesting the money wired, which turned around to bite him in one of the charges against him of mail fraud. All told, his possible prison time could be 22+ years.

In California he tried the same thing with additional artists like Andy Warhol.

If you like collecting art and scour secondhand markets for it, it might pay you to learn as much about provenance, the word and especially a written description of the painting or sculpture’s ownership journey, as you can.

Picture: Book II, The Tarbert Legacy, baking. Pix: Seals and Castles Speak Authenticity

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Renewal by Icon

Already Thinking New Year? Yes, if you’re anything like me.

1. My signal to change is hearing myself whining about appreciation, sales, reads, time. All that good stuff creatives need. Do you have a process for changing direction mid-flight?

2. The first thing I do is write it down. I have so many scraps of paper. Don’t laugh, you “just-do-it” folks. That process is proven to imbed the thought in psyche as a precursor to action. Keeping the slip of paper isn’t the point. Writing it is like a pushpin to memory.

3. Fussing has begun. Upgrade everywhere, in studio, students, subject matter, styles, and products.

4. Inquire. When I began writing and painting, I asked those further along for advice. For ideas. My nephew Peter Granucci told me to determine my icons. So I began making lists of things I loved visually, like owls, butterflies, dragonflies. I kept idea files from newspapers or jottings from journaling that piqued my interest for a plot or a scenario for a book.

When faced with the daunting task of filling a 3-year-long contract for a month-long 2-person show in Southern Pines, I asked what smaller works would shine and sell. Medium range prices were the Exhibiting House’s specs. I’m reviewing these now. Which are repeaters?

5. Make a list, even if you’re not a list person per se. It’s a magnet for related answers called the cluster method.

6. Throw anything you’ve outgrown or never want to see again away. Organize subjects below your pictures. Coordinated clutter looks less cluttered. Throw some pictures away. Hurt, but felt better later. There’s a time to gather stuff, and a time to throw stuff away.

7. Think in series. Enhance what you’ve already begun by doing a new painting in similar colors and subject to extend or form a series. Ooh, that’s good for writing, too. Resonance works as well as novelty. “Airworthy” is the painting propelling my change this year.

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The Winning Attitude

Paint-through, a new term that I think I’ve created is cannibalized from the book marketing sector to apply to painting. Besides being a writer, I’m an art teacher of 30-some years. Writing webinars that tell you about click-through and read-through referring to number of one-author books a reader reads through prompted the term ‘paint-through,’ or what it takes to finish a painting, an art course or a stretch of growth as an artist. As a lifelong artist and art teacher, I have taught thousands of students. I’ve had art school graduates return for lessons–in one case, to learn how to paint a pearl that was three dimensional. She began lessons with me for a second time and took art several years before returning for her art masters to UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate School. I have the advanced knowledge and taste discrimination that a teaching visual artist needs to guide those who want to learn art basics. I have helped develop artists’ skilled expression of their talent. But I had a foundation of many years of art training in high school, college, correspondence art school, and then in Germany, in Old Masters’ watercolor (Polish master Leon Jonczyk) and oil painting  (German master Bergheim). Plus, I came from a supportive family–but a critical one. My grandmother thought an artist was born, not made. Even as a young person I argued with her, “Grandma, artists are made, not born.” I’ve taken a multitude of lessons over the years to back that up (and grow). In my years of experience, what keeps so many would-be artists from actualizing hinges more on attitude than talent. Yet what is the number one question asked me by parents, but whether or not I think their child has talent. Frequently, the boosting agency of parents as in ‘she has so much talent’ I find more harm than help, a vaccine against input from those experienced enough to teach you more. Talent is a given. A starting place. Skill is what you want to achieve with the talent you were given, not the ‘fun’ or pleasure you derive from it, also a given, I would hope. It is disheartening to a teacher to get a student who only wants praise and never input, who cries at the drop of a pencil. Many times they want a particular artist’s style, or a pretty look, but they aren’t willing to work hard to get it.  They don’t even care if they understand or not. They get discouraged and blame it on someone else who didn’t give them what they wanted. Many put their talent into cold storage. Would-be artists put their talent in the deep freeze in one of several ways. Seven good ways not to develop talent: * Never use it. * Don’t take courses, after all, it’s just a matter of drawing/painting what you see. * Never-ever listen to your art teacher. I mean he or she still makes mistakes, doesn’t she? * Never take critique. All your friends tell you just how great you are, how dare anyone mention a new idea, direction, art concept, way? * Counting a sale as a statement of artistic merit, rather than the boost to ego and pocketbook it is. * Cultivate the noble savage notion–that greatness springs forth from babes like a trial run of America Has Talent. *Take from a teacher who only praises you, plays, and never shows you anything new. So what sort of attitude is one that will enhance your art growth and create healthy improvement in your art? First of all, you need to look at good art. Educate your senses–disputing taste is different from developing your taste. That’s the basis of experiential art knowledge. If you refuse to look beyond coloring books and bad illustration, it’s hopeless. You need to view paintings and drawings of truly great artists, not only commercial, not to discourage but to inspire you. And above all to train your eye. Delight in nearby museums, galleries, and ateliers growing up around the country and whose artists’ works you can access on-line. Look at them daily. THE SIX “D’s” or DECISIONS THAT GUARANTEE GROWTH Number 1. Determination. Is that a synonym for paint-through? Partly. It certainly takes determined effort to make it past the potholes of life and art. Determination is a hard factor that may grate on personality and impinge on creativity over time. It may translate to action, but it doesn’t of itself guarantee the action will be coordinated, planned or building-block. Without more it might just be a scattershot, hit or miss thing, sporadic, this determination. Number 2. D for Dogged. That’s quite similar in many ways to determined, but says more repetitive attempts and new trials. It’s sticking to it with a glue-like persistence which is admirable. You can get so dogged that your brains fall out, your insights dull, and your patterns become non-productive. So now, we add dogged to determined, but there’s more. Number 3. Delivery. This attitude lifts you up to the high spots, the aha moments, the tripping lightly from stone to stone in an ever-increasing stairway to the stars. As long as you are on an emotional high this can carry you quite a-ways. So we can add delivery to dogged and determined. But there’s gotta be more. Number 4. Delight. Now here’s a new idea altogether. Delight. What delights you? This is worthy of a great deal of morning pages (thanks to my book friend, Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, I’ve been doing this most every morning for years and years. By doing this exercise you explore your psyche and learn to be honest with yourself and turn into your own best friend. You tell yourself all your secrets. You see what irks you beyond belief, what makes you actually smile when you think of it–the feel of pain, the smells that evoke certain emotions, the particular images you like and speak to you. So we add delight to our attitude, and that’s it?  Not really; there’s more. Number 5. D for Discovery. Exploration, adventuring forward on a question is a way of turning the control knob down on fear and trepidation. it’s a way of opening the door to new ways of expressing old loves, not waiting until you’re ready but plunging in, diving into it. Waiting until I have money, waiting until I have my project defined. Waiting, waiting, waiting, until the cobwebs form. We want each new project to be a voyage of discovery, exciting and unknown. Add all these things together to give yourself a lively attitude, but you also need the discipline of an apprentice. Number 6, Discipline which comes from disciple. You need to make yourself a loyal apprentice to someone who knows way more than you do, learn solid principles of color, design, perspective, figure and face drawing. You need humility not to be prickly, to take tips from an expert who can teach you. That will keep you from embarrassing yourself and from being a dilettante or turning out half-baked as an artist. Hard words to live by in a ‘do-it-yourself’ world with an attitude of ‘you can’t tell me anything.’ Growing up and achieving “paint-through” results in a satisfied student with an excellent portfolio who brags on her teacher and the corrections and teaching they have honed their art through. Hmmm, another coined word, ‘art-through’?   Learn more »

“Executive Shoe Shine”–Clin-ton

Two days ago I finished a new full sheet watercolor painting! Plus, I’m getting another watercolor, “Grooves,” ready to show in West Jefferson, with the Watercolor Society of North Carolina in their upcoming October annual juried art show, but more about that, later.

In answer to a long-term friend, Rebecca Graham’s question upon seeing my work, “Is this a still that you painted? Where did the inspiration come from?” I have to say, this latest watercolor I’m calling a figure painting launch as it’s my first, makes it, of course, a portrait painting as well. However, I’ve done watercolor portraits before. I’ve done figure painting in watercolor before too, but I haven’t entered any of them in shows. They were done mostly as sketches in figure drawing classes on inferior quick-sketch paper, or as preliminary studies for my oil portraits.

The subject of this painting is a man I met in the downstairs lobby of the Reston Hyatt-Regency in Washington, D.C., or Reston, Virginia, to be more accurate on the very weekend of the Portrait Society of America’s annual convention and International Juried Show. I introduced myself to him and he to me. His name was Clinton, pronounced in a much stronger way than usual, indicated by the dash, Clin-ton. He was so friendly and delightful. I was tired from racing to seminars and convention specials, between venues temporarily. Being the good salesman that he was he wanted to shine my shoes. I looked down at them and saw that, indeed, they could use a good shine, so I said yes, but then remembered I had no change on me and told him I’d have to come down later.

He named his price but told me I could pay him later. Wow, I’m not sure I’d have been so trusting, but he assured me it was okay. I climbed up the massive piece of furniture to the leather seat and watched him shine and polish while we talked random subjects. He told me he hailed from Selma, NC, originally and I was amazed he had lived so close to me. I grimaced a bit and said, “where all the race riots were.” He acted as though he didn’t know what I was talking about.

We talked about Southern delicacies like okra and other good foods he ate when he returned to family reunions in Selma. He asked me why I was there, and I told him I painted portraits. Probably showed him a few I’d done. I had a new business card with a portrait on it I gave him which he exclaimed on and gave me his card for Exec-U-Shine, his second business. He was retired, but he needed the business for his sanity he said, which I understood a hundred percent. I didn’t notice the quote under his business name Exec-U-Shine until after I was home, but I laugh with delight now at “Politically Correct Shoe Polishing.”

When he finished, I was refreshed, my shoes looked great, and I’d made a new friend. He was beautiful in every way, and I asked him if he minded if I took a picture of him. At first I didn’t think he was going to let me, but then he gave me permission to do so along with permission to paint him. I can’t wait to contact him and let him know I think it’s done.

I’m about to enter it in a show, now, under my title which I tested on Facebook and got rave reviews from Rebecca Graham that went like this: “Oh My Gosh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!???????????????????? joANNA ?????? This is flipping INCREDIBLE!!!!!!!!!  “I loooove ‘Executive Shoe Shine.’ Gosh, I’m so struck by him. You have drawn me in and made me want to know everything about him… his birth story, his childhood, his injustices, his triumphs, his great loves, his favorite foods, his view on God, his world view. I just want to connect with him. And is that a cup of java I see?? Ha! Every good gent needs his fuel! Wow. Jo, you make me feel like I’m right there in front of him. I can smell the shoe shine and hear his old man breathing grunts as he positions himself to shine on. His tennis shoes, those chairs! The detail is phenomenal. I can’t quit looking at it!”

Well, here it is, then. Wish me well on my show entries one of my students Allison Coleman who attended two PSoA conferences with me commanded me to do after saying she thought it was her all-time favorite work of mine.

Oh, and I just remembered, Clinton gave us a shortcut home that probably saved us three hours travel or sitting in traffic time. Thanks, Clinton. ‘Til we meet again, because I am sure we shall!

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Gothic Novels–Dark, Supernatural, and Plenty of Spies

When I write books, usually there are Gothic elements in them, even if they are not primarily Gothic novels. One of those elements is spy stuff. All the old Gothics have spy stuff in them…and it is to those earliest examples I have returned in my own writing while keeping the new eNovels thoroughly modern.

With that in mind, one look at current news will show you how current and thoroughly modern spying is just now. There’s the 69-year-old political exile Nikolai Glushkov as an example, the Russian found dead in London on a not-too-distant Monday night. His demise was said by the British police to be a murder–a compression to the neck. And Nikolai had been very open in telling people he was on a Kremlin hit list. Glushkov had been a close associate of Boris Berezovsky who was a Russian oligarch and prominent Putin critic. Boris was found dead on the bathroom floor of his ex-wife’s house in Ascot, southeast England back in 2013. After the death of his friend, Glushkov claimed to be on this hit list that far back, and named another victim, Alexander Litvinenko who had been killed in 2006 with polonium poison.

When we did our mission work in Europe and traveled behind the Iron Curtain, we knew a man, a very young man named Sergei Kourdakov who escaped a Russian trawler and swam to political safety. We first met him in the U.S. at church services. He was on a circuit telling everyone his story and his conversion–no one would believe his freedom would only last a few years. While his early death looked accidental, no one of us who knew him believed it was anything but murder–a hit from the then-KGB who operated freely all over the world.

In my novel Veiled in White,

the spy element was part of the inherent fabric of Estonia, its setting. Near St. Petersburg (in the USSR), the small country of Estonia was occupied by the Russians and has always been a target of spies, so the story of the North Carolinian artist who became an art student there and whose American outspokenness got her in trouble on the issue of spies is very accurate and believable.

The spy element is alive and well in the novel A Deadly Provenance. In this case it is connected to the former Nazi network with entanglements into the present and emerging one. Its tentacles reached back into the earlier movement in the USA where a movement of the same Nazi element was born, as well. So when you read about these things in the novel, you can know just how serious, treacherous, and deadly those forces were. There is a love story along with the spy one which brings in a redemptive element.

Yuletide Folly has no spy feature in it per se, but Stormclyffe, Weep! has Irish spy stories in it, and Czech Point recreates the spy scene rather accurately that we ourselves encountered in our tourist trips into the Communist East Bloc.

The spy element of nations is similar to the spying done by secret societies rampant in

Stone of Her Destiny, from Cape Fear to Kintyre, and provides the impetus to a plot to infiltrate and commandeer the Christian Church. Spying is what secret societies do, and a group or nation only has to value the rewards of doing the lurking, stalking, listening, and recording to set aside the funds to do it, and the game is on.

I watched NBC’s live broadcast of the Russian Ambassador to the UK’s talk on Syria and the latest chemical event, and can only say, how can people not acknowledge the many faces worn by the many interacting countries? If only simplicity and innocence were possible…but then, we would have no books.

On to romance with a mission.

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My art students are like family.

When they fall short on maximizing their art potential, I get so sad, I can’t believe it. Sometimes I have whole families of students come in. I race the clock, trying to pour in as much as I can to each individual, seeking to pull out as much as I can while I have them. I always believe they’ll stay with me the ten years of many of my art disciples (Old Masters’ painting is a master-disciple system based on loyal imparting of pertinent skills). However, sometimes they just don’t see it my way and I am ineffective in imparting my vision to them for themselves. Sometimes, they just have another vision.

Sometimes I Cry
When a student I have primed and prepped to really make it begins a portrait, and leaves before I can show them how to paint the face, the agony is palpable. I show my disappointment or come close to showing my hurt beyond what is socially acceptable. Maybe there’s even a little bit of anger that what I hoped and dreamed for a finish we will never see.

Painting is a living thing. You can’t just toss aside a painting one day, pick it up 5 years later, and expect a viable image to emerge. It might, but more than likely you will have grown past it or in some way find yourself unable to patch the time frames together. Or the paint will have aged beyond good adhesion. So I have to yield, give up, and have a good cry.

 * When a student fails to finish the face after working on it for months. I can’t fathom it, you know, when only a few lessons would do it. Why won’t people pay for the little extra stretch the professional is waiting to give? To me, it seems like false economy.

*  When a mom leaves her son’s sketch book in my studio and I save it for years, and she finally tells me to throw it away. It’s unbelievable that discarding it causes me more pain than the mom!

* When a student quits before a final lesson would complete her absolute masterpiece, and won’t even pick it up from my studio.

* When parents and grandparents won’t pick up their daughter’s framed, beautiful art work to hang at home. I still have one. It makes me cry, since her sweet grandmother wanted so badly for her to study art with me. Now she has died, her hope, with her.

My Failings as Teacher

•  I regret the days I am sad, preoccupied, or so tired I can barely move–even when it motivates the student to push harder.

•  When I am so into the art medium’s struggles that I fail to hear some current struggle, major or minor, that the student is going through.

• When so much is going on I fail to mention their prom night pictures, which were awesome.

• Making students struggle on his or her own. I know so many teachers cut it up finer and finer to make the bites smaller and more appetizing, and somehow, instead, I try to get them to fight their medium and push and pull it beyond their current capabilities without much demonstration and with just a little help, by prodding and a well-placed idea. Sometimes the student finds this unforgivable. Once, telling a student to go to the bathroom to study her eye in the mirror hurt her feelings so badly I lost her.

• Not going to all of the extra things my students are interested in. Some weeks it is all I can do to make it through my own paintings, framing, struggles, roof leaks, some sort of showing, texting, posting students’ art pictures to Facebook.

• Talking to future student possibilities or makeups at 10p.m. at night.

Surprised into Joy: Other times this art teacher is surprised and delighted with unexpected pleasures like the following:

• an old student walking in just because they knew and loved me, just wanting to catch up and remember old times.

• A 10-year student bringing his two children to art years later for a year.

• A former student returning for adult lessons, wanting to really go far, knowing he and the teacher left a lot on the table.

• Amazing conversations with people on the deepest of levels, at vulnerable moments when they want a meeting of souls.

• A granddaughter picking up her father’s discarded art talent and loving doing it with me.

• A daughter painting a funky painting on her own and hanging it in her house.

• Someone pinpointing in your paintings what you hadn’t even seen yourself.

• Turning a student’s tragedy into a raging success. I don’t think Thorne Gregory would mind my telling his story of working on a beautiful rendering of a fish from an educational coloring book. He had almost finished his free-hand version in pen and ink, when the pen nib (the medium is always a pain), hit a bump in the paper and ejected a filled pen’s worth of black ink onto the paper.

Poor Thorne; I thought he would have a nervous breakdown. It was all I could do to keep him from tearing his work up. It was all I could do to calm him down. He was devastated and despairing. His mamma came quickly. She helped calm him. I had no idea what I would do, so I asked him to wait until the following week.

Meanwhile, I did research. I looked up exotic, deep-sea fishes on the web. Finally, I found the impossible, the unthinkable: the existence of a creature called an ink fish! The ink fish’s quills looked just like the spikes in the projectiles of Thorne’s black ink. So we painted the first fish’s shadow companion, the Ink Fish, which went on to win a show prize, it was so good, better, even, than the original!

My Number One Goal is to turn good art students into master art students. Step One being to sign them up today. And then to find a way to write, draw, or paint a happy ending.

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Ahh, well. Today we’re gonna talk about something big: the Portrait Society of America. You see, I just came back from my 10th year at the event.

I’ve been looking at others’ pictures of features offered there, and I have to ask. Were you at the same conference? I’m beginning to conclude this annual is not just one event, but multiple conferences rolled into one. The unifying code was the featured honoree, Richard Schmid, so that’s definitely where I was, in the right place. It’s just that in every corner of the Atlanta

Hyatt at Buckhead on the lower level, something else was going on which could be a whole conference. There were little groups painting a model–oh, that’s besides the huge Thursday evening Bake-Off, excuse me, I mean Face-Off, with at least 4 models and fifteen or more painters of some renown. We lifetime portrait painters, gallery owners, and occasional newcomers to the scene got to walk around in circles the whole evening watching how they all progressed. Or sit in one space and watch only one.

That event insures we’ll make it to the conference early.

Those paintings are then sold at silent auction. At the 6 x 9 auction-of-another-kind on Friday evening, the price remained the same, the identity of the painter was hidden, the mystery was how quickly you could pick the number off of one of many boards containing maybe 25 of these, and actually get the painting. I buy one every year, but this year, I didn’t go. Here’s the reason: I was so bombed out with the mega sessions in the big auditorium with big art celebrities and those teaching from apostolic ‘schools’ of those great teachers, I just had to collapse before enjoying the evening session with artists demonstrating. (Later, I found out I could have gone into another room and had a whole other experience.) Actually, I already knew that from Gordon I met in the great lounge of the Onyx’s legère restaurant and bar.  He was a scheduled model for a session.

The kick-off address with Jeffrey Hein was phenomenal. His theme was color, and several neighbors I sat next to in the huge auditorium and I agreed, just one of his revelations/our discoveries more than paid for the price of the tuition there. Transforming–and he had pictorial aides to proves his theses, which spoke volumes. One slide I caught, but one I should have taken a picture of, but the camera just didn’t happen to be in my hand for the few seconds the slide showed.

I had an amazing lunch with two other artists and discovered near the end that that was the time critiques were being given to portfolios, so I headed off to that with my cellphone and my ipad. The pad wouldn’t dance with the hotel’s wi-fi, so I switched to my cell phone, while waiting for whichever person was next available to critique. What a divine appointment, I actually got the lady I’d talked with earlier in friendly terms down front, and had instantly loved her because she appreciated my slightly wack humor. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the same principle Jeffrey Hein pointed out was the one place (in my dark’s) that she kept referring to: the same principle. And another area where my overly fix-it mode had made strokes in the hair too same-same. It was at the end of the whole critique session, so I got laid-back treatment which helped me more than I can say. I can even remember it without having written it down (although I did, of course.)

I always look forward to Mary Whyte’s presentation. I loved the watercolor session in which she painted on stage from the model in the picture. I follow her on line, as well. Seeing the sketchbook of Edward Raymond Kinstler on big screen is also incredible visual stimulation, and I enjoyed his stories of painting the greats like Kathryn Hepburn and Tony Bennett.

The break-out sessions were phenomenal. I participated in the one led by Kate Stone and Tony Pro. (Why couldn’t my name have been Joanna Success?) We had three nude models to choose from, or follow the teachers around and watch them work, or whatever. I came away with four new pencil drawings this year, two from this session and two from the on-stage demonstrations. You couldn’t tear me away from them. I took exactly the right tools, ones you can maneuver in a tight auditorium space with the three hands I’ve always got going. I never even spilled my coffee this time. The other was a forum of the portrait painters who sell at mega prices and travel all over the world doing so, who were kind enough to display and tell their secrets on the equipment they carry with them and pack into their plane, to the contracts they use, to what portrait painting conventions to use and what never to use. Information overload is what I love–and I devoured this like a cannibal fresh meat.

I don’t know when I dipped into the superior products arena and quickly bought some more brushes from one of the vendors–I had fully intended to talk to George O’Hanlon, owner of Rublev paints and buy the chromium yellow they’d just been talking about on Facebook, but alas, I didn’t get to go back. Too much to do. Too many faces to observe. Too many seminars at which to dance. Please understand, for an INTP Introverted-Intuitive-Thinking-Perceiver, Myers Brigs), there is never “too much or too many.” They do, however, give out at too much extroversion and show touchy-feely strain early. Please, you must forgive them for that; it’s how they were made.

Then there is the International winners’ exhibit in a separate space which you can visit as many times as you would like during the conference, but in which you get to have happy hour and speak to the painters on a Friday evening. Truly phenomenal, these paintings, ranging from huge to one mini this year from Anna that I absolutely adored (as well as her). We had to wait until the Emmy’s on Saturday night to know just which place they had won, and which received people’s choice. Don’t laugh at my calling it the Emmy’s; we listened to the Curator of Atlanta’s High Museum who spoke to us with an invigorating message on Brave Spaces and honored Richard Schmid who has made it to the top of the art and portrait arena. Worldwide, folks. As to the winning portraits, the styles ranged from moody to crisp, high-focused realism to diffuse, but the winners won out over 2000+ entries and deserved all the applause they were given, plus more.

Before my second break-out session, I got to talk with Virgil Elliott of Traditional Oil Painting fame. He didn’t come on his motorcycle this year, but flew in from California. Well, I got my own private session with him–an opportunity of a lifetime. He was not presenting this year, only signing his books. Which is another area you could spend a conference on, although I didn’t see as many doing that this year as in former years. I got to ask Virgil in-depth questions that you can pursue in person like you can’t on Facebook before others needed his audience and I needed to go to my break-out. I loved the session I was signed up for, but somehow, I didn’t want another demonstration, so I moved one door down, paused at the forum talking to a Raleigh compatriot, Luana Lucona Winner, and snuck into it, uninvited. I found out later there were several of us who had. Edward Jonas of the teaching faculty was on the panel; Ed is always so accessible and kind.

We connected with Virgil again at the end of the conference. Four of us went by hotel car to Marta, rode Marta to the airport, and got to talk in-between. I didn’t envy Virgil having to carry his guitar, but I see by Facebook this morning that he made it back. (Hey, Virgil!)

It was good to see that the young disciples of Richard Schmid’s  lifetime accomplishments–each going in their direction–are making a second wave of younger teachers and keeping the organization revitalized. They were winning prizes and leading seminars and the inspirational hour…all wonderful, perhaps a changing of the guards.

At the end on Sunday, we got to listen to John Howard Sanden tell his fascinating stories of painting Bush’s portrait and going to the White House unveiling, and of his eight full-blown attempts to get just the right moment. Sanden is famous for his paintings and books, one of Billy Graham I have seen at The Cove, just outside Asheville. Of painting the richest women in the world. He confessed that his life work had been only 350 portraits as compared to some in our midst’s 600 already. He, like many other artists there, had been a teacher at The Artist’s League, and instrumental in turning the small class format for learning portraiture around a model and a painter into the auditorium format which turned into the: you guessed it….the Portrait Society of America (see their materials for real facts and answers to your burning questions). Several of us deemed this year’s conference of some 800 folks different. Mysteriously wonderful.

What a historical moment of intersections this was. How delighted to be a portrait painter I was when I woke up this morning. I think I am in one of the most important arenas of the world, that of portrait painting. See you next year in D.C.

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Two Paintings Hang in the Watercolor Society of North Carolina’s Central Region Show “Fluidity of Vision”

This past weekend stretched me during an already busy season.

Two of my watercolors hang along with 67 others at the exhibit  at Campbell House Gallery through the Arts Council of Moore County. Plus, I got to demonstrate my watercolor skill on the following day, Saturday, April 8, from 10 am until 4 pm, during the 2017 Southern Pines Home and Garden Tour.

The show included members from the Central Region Exhibit, on view April 7 to April 28, 2017, “Fluidity of Vision.” Our works hang in Campbell House Galleries in Southern Pines, NC. “We are working with the Arts Council of Moore County to deliver a terrific exhibit of our art in this impressive locale. Campbell House is a much-sought-after venue for art exhibits. Surrounded by a lovely, 14-acre public park and garden, the Campbell House is a stately manor which functions daily as an art gallery and cultural center. Art exhibits change monthly and the gallery offers you an elegant and warm atmosphere that will add to any special occasion,” said Beth Bale, who is the Central Region co-director of the Society.

Two of my large Sea-Escape series hang prominently in the exhibit, Crab-Net and Clam Chow-Down.  We met our friends Carole and David Hobson there for the reception and exhibit viewing. We roamed the rooms, examined all the paintings, sipped beverages and hoes-d’oevres. We met new people who complimented me on my paintings, even recognizing them by name.

We followed our friends out to eat afterwards in Southern Pines, and then, on to their home, their new house in Pinehurst in which hangs three of my paintings –one over the mantel, the other two in David’s study. The next morning over toasted English muffins and cream cheese and coffee, we talked again, and they led us out to a safe connect back to the Campbell House.

“The Campbell House is traditionally first stop on the tour and there should be a lot of people coming through the gallery. In addition to the art exhibit, we thought it would be nice to have members of the WSNC (Watercolor Society of North Carolina) in the gallery or on the property, sort of like a plein air event,” said Chris Dunn, executive director of the Arts Council of Moore County. So yours truly became one of the three exhibiting artists for that Saturday.

When we arrived around 10a.m., the grounds were already sealed off, and we had to drive through the field saved for cars to the closest entrance. I went in with my new French easel, which unfolded and popped into place immediately. I congratulated myself on having brought that. Kathryn McCrae had showed me the day before the place I could spread out. Chris Dunn greeted me, pointing me to doughnuts and coffee, just what every plein-air artist needs.

I had brought two unfinished paintings with me. Each one was a portrait of a shell. I had brought photographs of sea scenes with similar colors to inspire my expression of a background, and the bright sun that flowed in definitely affected my choice of colors, which were very bright and vibrant in the first painting. I reasoned that I would not have to struggle with my main subject and prove I could paint. The seashell said enough to give me the confidence to create the rest in front of people since this was my first public demonstration. Many people came and watched, gave compliments, chatted about the picture and themselves, and signed my sheet for future contact.

Remembering several conversations, one was with a woman who worked in a correctional institute, and we agreed it was nice to appreciate each other’s expertise. I got to share my notion that people who are creatives who do not have an outlet can really get into trouble.

Another lady, a math teacher in Sanford, kept staring and walking around the painting, looking at it in new angles. “It reminds me of math,” she said. “How so?” I asked her, but she stayed busy looking. “I guess it does have a rhythm to it,” I answered. “Yes, and it reminds me of that mathematical sequence.” I agreed, and remembered the sequence which some artists actually use in placing the subjects in their compositions. I thought of Juliette Aristides and Virgil Elliott who had written about this in their authoritative art books.

She thought and thought and finally exclaimed, “Yes, it’s the golden mean. And the series is the Fibonacci series.” So naturally, “Golden Mean” had to be the title for my seashell.

We laughed. “The colors are exciting.”

Another person admired the red, and said it could be the blood of the dying sea life in the shell.

I finished that background and started on my next with more subdued colors. The lights had begun to fall and shadows descend in the garden. I did not finish that one’s background, but got it up to about mid-zone under the shell. However, back in the studio, I set it up with my camera, deciding I would talk about it as I painted it to get in practice for my teaching videos. Wouldn’t you know? I finished it in record time, and made a breakthrough with techniques I can use in painting sea atmospherically, in that time. I have just named the work, “Castle Forsaken.” It looks so regal. The colors are soft and subdued, and the waves are breaking over it.

Yours truly also got her name written down on the exhibition calendar for a two-person exhibit…in October of 2019! That is a total loop, a circling around. The Campbell House held a one-person show for me years back. I guess you could say the events were a real success. You can find all those pictures at Instagram, so check them out  The new paintings will be up soon on paintings.joriginals.net/

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Some painters bore me to tears with their talk of products. This is no reflection on them, you understand. It simply means it’s hard enough for me to focus on my paintings, the colors, the color mixes, temperature, chroma, ohmigosh–and really, ideas, symbols of my own, composition, magic, aura, and a few other semi-important things.

Not to say that materials are not important; I would not insult my materials mentors/gurus in such a way. I need them too much to do the work for me that drives me batty. Even when I draw what seem to be iron-clad, irresistible, case-closed conclusions out of the principles they give, I sometimes miss. Usually, that’s because there’s a missing product that my logic did not consider, hidden in the mix. For that reason, I’m gong to explore a fairly simple product, one that doesn’t chemically change a hundred times in the space of putting it on my palette, mixing it, adding turpentine or mineral spirits or 101 other additives, getting it on the canvas, and allowing it to gently (we hope) age. Inside, not outside.

What in the world? I hope you are asking.

My new paint brushes, that’s what! Both the watercolor, water-media ones and the made-for-oil brushes are among the best I have ever used. I ‘afforded’ them when my favorite art supply retailer went out of business. Basically, this is overview, since I am including both the watercolor media and the oil painting media within my comments.

Here is a watercolor I finished using them almost exclusively, adding the occasional slightly more candletip-shaped watercolor brush. The slight more control helped me complete the linear look of this textured house while broadening the stroke into wet, wider shapes without a change of brush.

Which brand it it? you ask, dying to know by now.

“Grey MattersTM” by Jack Richeson. First of all, the color of the brushes is outstanding. The color whispers quality, class. That first impression doesn’t let you down, either, among this cluster of mostly long-handled brushes. The shaft is easy to hold, its texture a soft matte which doesn’t peel off like some of the lacquered brushes. The bristles are thick, sensitive to nuance, and yet, not floppy, like some very good brushes I have and have used in watercolor. This makes for easy, wet control, not dry, single-hair control: what I call THE difference in expert watercolors and simply nice ones.

As a European classical watercolorist, I have tended to buy no flats, as they control watercolor flow way too much. I use them now primarily for edges, sliding the straight edge along a straight passage to get a single stroke edge with wet watercolor. In this brand, however, I bought filberts, flats, rounds, shaders–every conceivable shape, simply because I could. I have to say the RichesonTM flats and filberts do not over-control watercolor flow. Nor does medium damage or alter the brush hairs when working in oils. Simply put, in opposing media usage, they hold their shape equally well. They allow for nuanced strokes and color additions. The natural-looking bristles are grey-brown, as well, and simply put, the best synthetic I have ever put to paper or canvas.

You probably got it–I am buggy over these brushes. Thanks, Jack Richeson GreyMattersTM.

This is an oil painting of mine in progress. I feel the canvas and first paint layer literally glows in welcome to the strokes from these brushes.

I am about to buy some of their Quiller Synthetic Watercolor brushes, too. Their ad copy says what I have been saying about their other line: ‘truly advanced synthetic brushes.’  It seems they are designed by a renowned water media painter, Steve Quiller. “Years ago, synthetic brushes were not much more than chopped up fishing line bundled up and stuck on the end of a handle. They were horrible for the user, especially for the young student who often received this budget-priced creation.” Yes, I agree.

Richeson discovered a way to taper fiber strands so each strand comes to a fine point. He selects 11 different weights of fiber strands, creatively mixing them into “a marvelous brush head.” Mixing weights makes the difference in getting the snap back you need, a solution to the floppy, sloppy brush, as I call it.

Here’s one happy painter. Some days your choices get you singing someone else’s praises. And that’s snap back for you, too. Check out the finished product: http://paintings.joriginals.net/product/grooves/

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