Forward March

11 X 8 1/2
Graphite on paper

 

It had been a while since I'd been to NYC and I've started taking day jaunts over on the train from beautiful downtown Hamilton, NJ.
The last was to see Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring at the Frick Museum.
Charlotte loved that painting ...and the movie.
TGWTPE is one of a nice group of paintings from that period in Veldt and Amsterdam that has been loaned to the Frick.
The Goldfinch, one of my favorites, is in the show.
The star for me, though, was a STUNNING portrait by Rembrandt.
The Frick is much smaller than the Met, which is right up the street, and I enjoyed it more. I always feet that I'm missing something at the Met, because we could never see everything there.

One of the nicest sights in NYC, though, is the young ladies who live and work there.
They seem to GET the latest fashions all at once and they wear them with an elan that makes the observer's heart beat faster.
And the SHOES!

What's up with the SHOES?

I saw an ad in the NY Times for some shoes and it inspired me to sketch it.
I loved the lines and negative spaces.
How do they walk in them?

I'll probably do a painting of this soon.

 

Grapes in a bowl

8X10
Oil on canvas
I saw the morning light on those 3 grapes and had to try to capture this setup.
Someone once told me that still life paintings belong in funeral parlors.
I think that's true of a lot of them. They tend to have dark, somber backgrounds.
I've been trying to use lighter backgrounds with the past few that I've done.

Jazz Trio

8X8 Oil on Canvas
I've always loved the magnificently unpredictable colors of Jazz apples
Looking for something I could paint relatively quickly, I landed on these three apples.
I had an "underappreciated masterpiece" on these stretchers with lots of nice violets and blues in it, so rather than stretch a new canvas, I painted the apples over the existing surface.
Quite a bit of the old masterpiece is showing here or peeking thru and those colors set the tone of the painting for me

Rocky Mountain Morning

16X20 Oil on board
More work with the palette knife.