A good start!

Late 2005 I had a show in Galerie Vlasblom in Arnhem, Netherlands. This last fall I received an email from someone who had seen the show and who had hung on to the invitation with a photograph of one of my paintings (from the Winter field series).
She told me how taken she was by my paintings and asked my permission to use one of the Winter Field paintings on her website,( she is a therapist with a private practice). We emailed some back and forth, had a very friendly and interesting phone conversation and as a result not only will my painting appear on her website (going live soon) but she also purchased the painting for her office.
Now if that is not a great start of a new year!
It also shows how long after a show results can come in, it really warmed my heart to hear how she had cherished that image on the invitation and then acted on it when she saw an opportunity.
Thank you Hilde, from Holland!

Here's a picture from the studio. Friday I got a 'new' worktable, courtesy of my studio neighbour Julie who is moving out of the building. It needed some re-arranging of the painting area but after all was set in place it turned out a wonderful addition and I had a great afternoon painting from my new spot.

Mississippi Memories

 

I'm starting the new year with one of the paintings I finished by the end of last year - an early (summer) evening view of the Mississippi river in Alma Wisconsin. The inspiration was found on a balmy July night.
As long as I remember I have always been attracted by water, be it the sea, rivers, lakes or brooks. Being born in Holland, you're never really far from water, but as it happens I was born and lived in Rotterdam for an important part of my life and there the river is a very vital part of town. Living on the south side you always had to cross the river to get into downtown so there were always bridges that opened and made you wait among throngs of fellow bicyclists, watching the boats go by.There are many, many memories of river views stored on my visual hard drive yet I have done very few river view paintings. None in fact! It always seemed too obvious as a subject, endangered of ending up being a 'pretty/lovely' or kitschy sort of painting, something to be avoided at ALL times. Yet, somehow at this time in life I seem to have developed the tools with which to paint my experiences without falling into the pretty/lovely trap.
Being a painter of "less is more", much has been edited out of this landscape in order to abstract it, but I kept the vertical "signs" of the smoke stacks of Alma's power plant and also the floating buoys that mark the swimming pool area. Somehow that takes away any possible sweetness that still might lurk in this sunset scene.

The painting is in oil on linen and measures 24"x48"