I could remember doing the drawings and remember the models. I love drawing, and I love charcoal. In sorting through several stacks to narrow it down to about 30 keepers, my hands got covered with charcoal. 

The wonder is that newsprint. We all use it in art school and later just because it’s so inexpensive and toss-able.

I have to say it’s tough! I have life drawing work from college, lo these 25 years or so ago, and the compressed charcoal is still strong and the paper only slightly yellowed.

Good times.

Things are sprouting down here, too. Lots of flowers on my mind these days.

But it’s crowded and more “tetrus” will be required tomorrow to find pockets to store paintings that have to move to make way for work on wiring and heating. Oh boy. I told myself just to surrender to chaos and change in this process, and so I will…and schlepping.

Just look at ‘em go! Work work work. That Caledonia crew not only whistle while they work, they also listen to Blues and Bluegrass. Makes for quick work apparently.

Now, I can feel the volume in there and see the windows-to-be. I wonder what I’m gonna do with all that light…..

While I was “working” at the beach, Caledonia Construction was hard at work on my studio. The plan is clear now, eh? The studio connects with our house.

Thank goodness I’ve got my portable art studio while the hammering and building is going on. Thank goodness for the beautiful nearby NC coast to get away to, too! 

A customer asked about this sold painting, “The Painter,” and “could you do one like it?” I really like this painting and thought ok, I’ll pick up that thread again.

This is what I got this time:

Much more illustratey, a surprise even to me, but there it is. It’s a keeper just not for that customer.

Back to the art pit….

The other task was to fill the foundation with gravel and level it out in preparation for a concrete pour this week.

What a lovely job was done by the Yow brothers, John Yow Grading and Septic of Chapel Hill, graders and earth movers extraordinaire! See how the light shines on their truck.

As a thoughtful touch, at the end of the day on Friday,  heading into a rainy weekend (think: rivers of red mud avoided), they even put down new gravel on the driveway.

Check out the yow (wow) effect of these before and after shots.

So there are several plant pix in the works. Cat-tails, hydrangea (still the ones in progress from their December or January beginnings), poppies from a watercolor study, daisies, and some swampy scenes from my Jordan lake painting day.

And then I’ve got a few that are more in the “old school” category of horses and dogs. I just snagged a corner shot of this one suggested to me by a customer. It’s of a painter painting a horse after a painting I did several years back called “The Artist.”

I think I hit the gray hair a bit too lavishly.

This horse head commission came from one of my cards of a large painting series I did a long time ago. I blogged about it earlier this year at the beginning of my process. The request was for a 20″ x 20″ or 24″-square version of that 48″ -square painting. This is the one the customer selected….from the five I had done.

I’ve got two of them here.

The others I put back on the easel for tweaking and/or massive changes. They could have gone like they were if he wanted them, but left with me, they came back under my ruthless eye.

I always work on more than one thing at a time. For commissions that means I have more options and so does the customer. It’s not all hanging on one piece.

This means I have some room for explorations.

This commission is for a painting of koi and water lillies. This request, too, came from another painting of mine the customer had seen at a friend’s house.

I CAN’T match what I did back then–that is the lesson from these experiences (over and over, I keep learning this)–but I can start from that seed and see where these particular paintings go/grow. This version of the idea is not quite done but much further along than I realized a month ago when I put it away for a break.

This is the painting that she likes. We are refining it together, tweak here and there, color warming where needed. It’s not always possible to tweak and fix a painting for someone. Sometimes I’m spent and can’t do a thing more. But if my eyes and energy are still fresh, and my interest, I can look again with the customer and see what’s changeable.

I want the buyer to be pleased and happy to live with their painting for a long, long time.

 I had no idea pitcher plants had elaborate flower forms in such beautiful burgundies and lime greens. These water studies have me thinking about layering all these elements in a larger painting–water, duckweed, tadpoles, pitchers and flowers. Hmmmm….

And then we found a poppy….stopped in our tracks to draw it.

Which made me notice the next stand of poppies I found later in the weekend. These are at Fearrington Village. The gardens are lovingly tended there, too, and there are many, many beauties to see.