A recent Sketch

A bottle of red.........

Fire Island Tumbleweeds

Folks, I had to post this.  I went out with my sketch club this evening and we went to the 125 Gallery in Bellport to hear John Perreault and David Adams speak about their work.  

John Perreault did an installation that featured trash collected from Fire Island as his medium.  For those of us that scratch our heads and say "it's trash!," yes it is.  He calls the trash collected from Fire Island, "Fire Island Tumbleweeds," a phrase he came up with to describe what these sea plant-fishing line-trash-encrusted-flotsam bundles look like to him.... He says the "Fire Island Tumbleweeds" seem to resemble their more romantic and adventurous counterparts of the West, but these Fire Island bundles aren't weeds happily tumbling to find a place to plant themselves, these are fallout from a non-caring society that dumps trash pretty much anywhere these days.

For someone like myself that sketches from life and paints life as I see it, I sometimes find alternative mediums hard to take seriously, but I realized as I sketched this through John's talk about his work, that this may not be art in a Monet sense of art but it's a man making a statement through his artistic process and he used trash to make a "city."  The lack of respect the public seems to have for our environment is evident in all the trash he collected.  He commented on how these plastic bottles, containers, jars and such will be here long after we are gone.  There were even a few wine bottles....

John Perreault is a Painter, performance artist, poet and art critic... He creates paintings variously with instant coffee, petroleum-coated beach sand, and most recently acrylic....and trash.

Today's sketch

The house across the street was just begging to be sketched....it looked pretty after today's snow.

Some recent Sketches

M

These are three page spreads from my Strathmore toned grey sketchbook.  

The windmill is a sketch I did last week, the sculptures (basically the next 5 pages) were done yesterday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC yesterday with the NYC Urban Sketchers.  I had to scan these in because this sketchbook does not open and lie flat nicely. The first sketch was done in pencil, because supposedly you aren't permitted to use pens in the museum until I saw everyone else using them.

Last two

Juno hits Patchogue

IWe've been getting some phone calls from family who saw Patchogue on the news and how bad we were getting hit with this blizzard.  Actually, I am totally stoked we have snow!  I'll be out sketching and painting it!  It's a bad snow storm but it's not Sandy and thanks to PSE&G destroying trees that we all bellyached about, we didn't have very many power outages so although they made a lot of trees look ugly, a lot of us our grateful we have power.  It could have been a lot worse with the old power company.  Here's a sketch for you to enjoy instead of a bunch of photos.

During the storm...

My good friend,  Joan, has nominated me for the 3 in 5 on Facebook.   I already did a 3 in 5 in Sketchbook Skool.  There, I posted some old sketches, which, I may repost.

 However, since I am getting cabin fever, you may be treated to all new plein air work, like these below.

These three plein air sketches were done today during the storm.  I have been trying some new things, using sumi ink and a twig.  These mixed media pastels were drawn first with sumi ink and yes, you read correctly, I used a twig dipped in the ink.  I never use Canson pastel paper usually, but I wanted to try out this technique on different colored sheets of paper.  These were all done by the water, looking toward Fire Island.  I did them sitting in the car, because moisture and pastels don't mix too well.

Apple sketch

Mm mmmm! Pink Lady Apples are the BEST