Prints for sale!!! I often get requests for prints from my paintings. Some are up at fineartamerica.com. More to come, slowly.

This is what I found out about digital print on demand: I had to go back to the original photograph, direct from the camera, of the paintings to get enough resolution for the printing process. Sometimes I have to reshoot the painting. The process works if the original image is color-corrected in Photoshop, but not downsized or re-sampled.

I took a master class in egg tempera painting in England in October, 2012. Wow, Koo Schadler really knows how to take a good painter and move forward to excellent and amazing. The excellent painters moved forward to mastery. Two of my classmates, Sara Harding and Paige Barry, are on facebook, and you can see their work.

One of the things that Koo does is to really spend time on her prep work. She sets up her still life with an eye to what a painter from 1450 would reaching for. The focus is on directness and simplicity. She then takes a photograph lit with a single light source.  When she has the composition resolved to her satisfaction, she works mostly from the photograph.

The result is intimate and masterful. Egg tempura is both translucent and precise. The image glows in way that it cannot be acheived in any other media.

Of course, it's tremendously painstaking. Egg tempera paintings are tiny and time comsuming. No wonder the impressionists would rather glob on oil paint. So much less work and a larger scale for the emotional impact.

After Koo's help, I came home and spent several hours redoing my last egg tempera painting. It's called "Mudmask Luncheion." It's a goup of somewhat improbable people having an improbable picnic. The lady in the mudmask is the beauty that you always have to invite to the party.

A visit to Seattle

Yesterday, March 20. 2012, I took advantage of my SAM membership to see the Gauguin show in Seattle. Kiki Cardarelli went with me. Much of it was spectacular. As always with shows including works borrowed from other collections, no photos were allowed. I bought the catalogue. We had parked at a public structure a couple of blocks up the hill from the museum and daunted by the size of the book, I asked them to ship it home.

Kiki led me to a restaurant at Pike’s Place market, where we watched the grey water slosh under an equally gray sky and admired the red accents of cranes waiting there for containers to unload. The ferry arrived to snug against the buildings cluttered at the water’s edge and I decided against eating another French fry. Traffic was light going home.

I look forward to the catalogue arriving so that I can study the images and reference them against the experience of seeing the actual work. The ferocious impact Gauguin made upon me when I was nineteen has weakened some, and I see him as more adroit than savage, but his urge to dig out emotions at that layer below the everyday social world is, oh, so worth holding onto.