Dirt By Amy Stewart

My Silly Hen

Usually our chickens go through a very discreet winter moult, losing one little patch of feathers at a time, so you hardly notice it's happening. But not Eleanor.  Poor girl--she seems to have dropped half her feathers at once.  She looks like half a chicken. Fortunately chickens don't spend much time looking in the mirror, so she has no idea how silly she looks.  Also--luckily for her--it has not been terribly cold yet.  I hate the idea of her dropping all her feathers just when she needs them to keep her warm at night.

Eggplant Pair

I tried out a new surface this weekend--a 1/2 inch thick masonite board with grooves in the back so that you can hang it right on a nail with no extra hardware.  It's a nice surface and it's fun to do a square painting again.  I've been attached to these 8 x 10 boards for a while now--but you can do some interesting things in a square. 

More coming soon.  Oh, and this is--6 x 6 inch oil on board.  Click here to bid. Go here to see more eBay paintings, and go here to see more paintings on Etsy.

on eBay--'Fifth Avenue Reflection'--SOLD

6 x 8 oil on linen panel.  Click here to bid.  Go here to see my other eBay auctions, and there are also some paintings for sale on Etsy.

Once again--a painting I'm so pleased with that I took it off the easel and photographed it before it even had a chance to dry.  I remember this moment in Manhattan--I came around the corner and here was this guy leaning against this shiny building, and I thought he was doing the kind of thing I would do in Manhattan, which is to lean against some iconic structure and possibly even kiss it, just because I love New York so much and am always under such a spell when I'm there.

But he was not kissing the building, nor was he gazing at his reflection in the twinkly Manhattan night sky.  He was talking on his cell phone.

Oh well.  Anyway, I've been looking at this photograph for like a year and thinking that it would be much too complicated to paint.  But here's the funny thing:  I spent as much time on this as I spent over the weekend on a simple little painting of some cherries.  The cherries drove me CRAZY, and this one just worked exactly the way I wanted it to, given, of course, my limited skills and abilities.

So.  Here it is, part of an ongoing effort to raise funds for an actual painting trip to Manhattan next summer.

The Obama Garden

I wrote this on the morning after the election, as I was trying to tame my hangover in time for more champagne at another victory party that night.

During his acceptance speech last night, President-Elect Obama laid out many challenges that Americans face, but he overlooked our most pressing problem: what to do with all those hours that we have been devoting to obsessively checking the polls and monitoring YouTube for Sarah Palin snafus that we can forward to our friends.

I'm glad that I did my part – who knows what might have happened if I hadn't forwarded all those videos and generally kept a close eye on this campaign for the last twenty-one months—but to have the Internet-campaign-insanity feeding tube unplugged all at once is a little distressing. I seem to be connected to half of Humboldt County via Facebook now, and I can tell from your Facebook profiles that many of you are feeling the same way. What are we supposed to do now?

I wish Obama would keep up his daily e-mails to his considerable base of supporters and give us all new instructions on how to fill our time. “The first thing I’d like you to do is drop and give me ten push-ups,” he might say. “If we’re going to change the world, we’re all going to need some upper body strength. Then—go outside and pick up some trash. We’re going to have clean streets in this administration, and I’m putting you in charge of that. There’s more coming, but now I have to go pick a Secretary of State. I’ll get back to you this afternoon.”

Lacking any instructions from the President-Elect on how to fill my day, I'm heading outside to do a little pre-winter cleanup in the garden. It gets me wondering: what would an Obama victory garden look like? What can I do in my own backyard to support this administration?

 

'Apple Harvest'--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on board.  Click here to bid.  Go here to see all eBay auctions, and see more paintings on Etsy.

I hung out in a friend's apple orchard the other day.  The apple season around here starts as early as July and can last into January.  As he said, "I was harvesting apples before I was harvesting tomatoes!"  That's what you get in our cool climate.  Anyway, the apples were gorgeous.  More to come.

on eBay--'Gaslights'--SOLD

8 x 10 oil on board.  Click here to bid.  Go here to see all eBay auctions, and there are more paintings for sale in my Etsy shop.

It's funny how some paintings look better when they're photographed, and some look worse.  I have very often photographed a painting to put on this blog, looked at the photograph, and said, "How did I miss that?"  I'll see poor color choices, missing shadows, uneven lines, even fingerprints on a painting that I completely missed when I was looking at the original.

But in other cases--and this is one of them--I'll take a painting I'm not real sure about, photograph it, look at it on my computer, and go, "hey, that's kind of cool."

This is an actual old-fashioned gas light outside of City Hall in Manhattan.  I took the picture at dusk, at that wonderful blue hour when a city like New York really sparkles. The angle of the photograph was kind of uneven and strange, so I just left it that way for the painting.

Anyway.  It's an odd little painting, but it appeals to me.

BATS!

It was just another typical evening in the Stewart-Brown household.

ME: Honey, would you like to hear some fun facts about bats?

SCOTT: Actually, I was just wondering if there were any fun facts about bats I hadn’t heard already, so your timing is perfect.

ME: Did you know that there’s a guy at HSU who has developed software to record the sounds that bats make and then analyze the data to identify which species are out there? He got a grant from a program at the Pentagon to go all over the country and set up these bat monitoring systems.

SCOTT: The Pentagon is monitoring bats?

ME: Bats hate our freedom.

SCOTT: Well, we always knew that. What else have you got?

on eBay--'Algonquin Hotel'--SOLD

6 x 8 inch oil on gessoed art board. Click here to bid.  Go here to see more paintings on eBay or on Etsy.

And now for something completely different.  I've always taken pictures of bars and hotel lobbies--I just love all those warm, glowy lights.  I finally decided to give one a try.  This is the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, one of my favorite places to visit in New York.  Dorothy Parker lived there, E.B. White often stayed there, and of course the writers of the Algonquin Roundtable hung out there.  I never go to New York without stopping in for a glass of Champagne. 

I'm saving up to actually take a painting trip to New York--a complicated endeavor because it means being there long enough to paint and let the paintings dry, having some outdoors space like a terrace where paintings can air out, and, of course, lugging supplies around.  Not sure if I'll be able to pull it off, but I'm trying for next July.  So--you know--buy a painting, help send a painter to Manhattan.  That's the deal.

"Peppers 2"--on eBay

5 x 7 inch oil on board.  Click here to bid. Go here to see more eBay auctions, and even more paintings on Etsy.

Another little one.  I don't know which I like more, the peppers or the blue carton. They're both fun to paint.

'Peppers'

8 x 10 inch oil on board.  Click here to bid.  Go here to see other eBay auctions, or check out even more paintings on Etsy.

I am very happy with this painting.  A happy painting on a happy day.

I think I'll go paint another.