Ora Pro Nobis

16X20
Oil on canvas
This year's Christmas card.
From an image of a Christmas ornament.

Delicious Quintet

18X24
Oil on canvas
I've been experimenting with color.
This old canvas has had many pictures on it but like this one, so I think that it will be its last.

Waiting For Dinner

 

16X20 Oil on board
An upcoming show will feature animals.
It's been a long time since I've tried a horse and it took a while till I got into the groove, but I like this one.

Grapes Provencal

12X20 Oil on canvas
My wife and I spent many happy days in the South of France.
She had accumulated a nice collection of place mats from the region that feature its warm colors....
The colors here are all taken from the placements. The bowl is actually bone white and the grapes, well, I just imagined us looking at them in a lovely café in Nice or Cannes.

Portrait sketch

8X8
Graphite on paper.
The incomparable Juliette!

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.