Happy New Year! A review of my 2013 art life!

Happy New Year to all my readers! Here's a review of 2013,. Grab a cup o coffee or tea and your favorite pastry. You're  gonna be here a while!

Its not been the most productive year, only 17 paintings, but a few of them have been departures from my normal subjects. The biggest one is actually putting people in a couple of them, even though I did not paint their faces. My "Dancing in the Plaza de Espana - Ronda Spain" is one such work. It was from a photo I took in Spain and had a desire to paint it, but never having painted people in the painting, I was hesitant at first, but decided to go for, expecting to have to re-do it a time or two. It turned out almost perfect the first time! No lessons or sketching or anything. Just put paint to canvas and there they were!

The other people painting was from a side trip we took to Fez Morocco. I took a picture of a fish merchant swatting away flies in the Fez Medina. It turned out pretty good, too.
Another departure was some still lifes I did - my Blue Chair with Lavendar and Birdhouse with Black-eyed Susans. There I found on various websites and got permission to paint.The Birdhouse one I just posted, so here's the Blue Chair -

In January I got an invitation to display at a gallery in Kingston New York on the strength of a painting I did of the Rondout Lighthouse at the junction of The Hudson and Rondout rivers in Kingston. I had been on a river cruise with my church group during the summer and took a number of pictures of that and the Esopus Meadow lighthouses. The Cornell Street Studios  wanted the first one for the "We Love Kingston NY" art show opening on Feb 9, 2013 with a multi media extravaganza. This is 2 hours north of me and would have required several trips back and forth, plus some financial things. I just accepted the honor of the thing and gratefully declined. Turned out there was a massive snow storm that week that would have made getting there dangerous. There's acouple of other pictures I took of the area, so once I build uo a Kingston catalogue, I may try again. Here's that painting.

There was also the Van Saun Park Art Show and Concert that has been going on for many years. This is a Bergen County sponsored juried art show that was free to enter on Oct 12th. Over 100 are artists were there, displaying their work and I joined them this time/ No sales, but go my work out there.

Then there was the First Baptist Church Summer Art Gallery that I curated. There's a large board at the entrance to our gym that is used during the year by out Christian School's art students, but is empty by Father's Day, so I got permission to us it for the artists in our congregation. Many came forth with photography, painting, crosstitch and other media. I tried to have two week shows from July thru the end of September and it worked pretty well. I issued "press releases" for each show on the church's FB ,Twitter and web pages. Hope for more response next year.  I had a bunch of other pics, but this is the only one I could find.

Finally, I sold another painting, a rare occurrance! This is another painting that I did of a friend's photo. This time it was a sunset picture from a friend's deck on the bay side of Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore. It have a sailboat sailing into it! Another friend, Marie (who also has another of my paintings) bought it. It was in a black frame and said would fit with other black frame picture and paintings above her fireplace

So here's  hoping for more good painting and more sales in 2014. it could be a bump