MAG Artist’s Blog

Today I spent most of the day parked on the corner of Center Street in Old Town Manassas.  From my wonderful seat I was able to capture this 18×24 value sketch (on rough watercolor paper) and add some watercolor before the sun came up and ruined my light.  I did get about 3 hours of [...]

 Well today is the first day of my first retirement (before I go back to work next month ).  I celebrated by going to the Manassas Battlefield with Michele, Maria, Selina and Mary Ellen to gear up for the spring en plien air season.  I will let the paintings speak for themselves.  The top [...]

Tonight was the May 2008 MAG monthly membership meeting and we were treated to an exceptional demonstration by local portraiture artist, Patty McMahon Rice.  In under two hours Patty demonstrated how to do an under-painting on canvas which can serve as the tonal foundation or reference for the portrait.  Patty spent time and attention covering pitfalls, hard [...]

MAG members Rob Burkhard, Mary Ellen Semat and myself took advantage of the glorious spring weather to “paint out” at the Manassas train station. On the left, that’s Rob and Mary Ellen (I’ll let you guess which is which) hard at work, and on the right, Rob applies oil paint to his board with a palette [...]

Charlotte Pavone & I braved the chilly wet weather to spend a couple of hours painting in Old Town Manassas. I am hoping to get some art ready for the Train Festival in June, so I worked on this acrylic painting of the train station, which I had started about a year ago and never [...]

This one involved a lot of dripping!

One of my first successful acrylic paintings — of the old Manassas Courthouse. Ghostly presence……

This impressionist 15 x 22 Watercolor of San Diego’s Balboa Park was finished on Christmas Day. I spent a few days looking it over for areas to improve and am finally happy with it. One of the hardest things to do with any medium is to loosen up and paint just enough to [...]