At the Kami Shrine
oil on canvas
24"x18"

The Red Pail - 1947

oil on canvas board

20"x16"

Great-Aunt Otie and Uncle Charles Chisholm

Oil on canvas board

Work in Progress

In the Park - 1941

Oil on Canvas

(work in progress)

Spring Reflections - Chicago Botanical Gardens
oil on canvas
24"x18"

(gallery-edged)

Bandelier II

oil on canvas

(work in progress)

Chicago, Green Line, Pilsen

(from a photograph by Ania Banas)

oil on canvas

14"x17 3/4"

Dorothy - 1942

Oil sketch on canvas paper

Harvey - 1964

Oil on canvas

Harvey - 1982

Oil sketch on canvas paper

Back from Boston

I returned this past Saturday from a five-day painting intensive with artist Ann Christensen. It was a very worthwhile thing to have done - I think it has already had a big impact on how I paint. The funny thing was that though I thought I wanted to simplify my style (hers is very spare, with very effective use of color), this latest effort is anything but simplified. Thinking about it, I feel that what I really wanted to get rid of was a fussy obsession with detail that I don't have the technique to pull off. I tend to get bogged down in trying to paint realistically, and I really appreciated Ann's approach, which I felt liberated me to be more impressionistic (since that seems to all I can do at this point).

So I am putting to use some of the techniques she taught me, but in my own way. This sketch was done wet-to-wet, very loose, very quickly. The larger scale painting is proving a bit more difficult to pull of - I'm having to re-work it much more than the sketch. Maybe that's only to be expected.

Chelmsford Forest

Oil Sketch on canvas board

11 1/2"x14 1/2"

This is perhaps the first somehwat successful painting I've done entirely from imagination. I used some ideas from the copies I did of Hudson River paintings, because I love those wending rivers and distant mountains.

Far River

17 3/4"x14"

Oil on canvas

The painting below was done after a trip to the Chicago Botanical Gardens. This is as close as I can get to a "vista" at this time, in flat old Chicago. Though at first I didn't care for the painting because it's so "bright," I've lately come to like it - maybe because it's among the most successful of my pictures that aren't copies of someone else's work.

Botanical Gardens I

24"x20"

Oil on canvas

Hudson River Scene

This painting is my version of a Hudson River painting titled "Hyde Park, New York," by Johann Hermann Carmiencke, a German-born painter who spent the last 16 years of his life living and painting in New York.

My teacher suggested that I study by copying the "old masters," and for me that means the Husdon River School. I love their appreciation of the granduer of the American landscape. This painting appealed to me because of its grand vista, showing the Catskills in the distance.

"Hudson River Scene"

oil on canvas

24"x20"

After a painting by Johann Hermann Carmeincke

Dream Landscape II

Oil on Canvas

24"x19 3/4"

Work in Progress

The Dream Landscapes are a new direction for me - they grow out my little 5-minute oil sketches that are spontaneous - that come entirely from my imagination (my subconscious?) and are not based (as far as I know) on any real landscape that I've ever seen. They're the means by which I hope to touch some emotional center that has been so hard for me to reach. Sometimes I think they're about loneliness.

Dream Landscape I

oil on canvas

20"x16"