My Most Recent Commission!

"Skipper" is a Terrier mixed breed dog which I was asked to do a painting of during the Bermuda Fiber Festival at Kaleidoscope Arts Foundation last December. I have just completed him and am quite pleased with the results!
He will be fitted for a frame today in preperation for hanging in my group show at Elliot Gallery at Kaleidoscope in March.
I have been enjoying the opportunities to create custom commissions of pets. I find the work challenging as well as rewarding and look forward to more work of this kind in the future!
See the side bar for other "pet paintings" that I have created.
Anyone having interest in having a portrait of their pet done in Hairlock Painting can send me an email with a photo of your pet and I will contact you with details of how to proceed.

2009 Calendar Underway!

It hasn't quite hit me that we have started the year 2009, yet, I seem to be doing a good job of filling my calendar of events and keeping myself very busy as usual!

The new year has brought me a new commission which I have begun work on; a portrait of "Skipper" a terrier mix. The drawing is near completion and once the client has approved it and decided on a size, work will begin creating the canvas and subsequent painting. Watch for images as they come available.

Soon I will be taking on some R & D with some wool jersey fabric that I received. It is fabric that was originally destined to be made into cycling jerseys, however with the synthetics on the market these days, popularity for wool in a cycling jersey has declined. I am really into the idea of making a new use for old things so I am going to play with creating paintings on a "cycling" theme and see where it leads me. It's always so much fun to try new things, but it also leaves me with a feeling of being spread a bit thin at times.

During the Bermuda Fibre Festival I happened to act as tour guide for our US teachers and visited the Crafts Center at Dockyard. While there I was inspired by some art that I saw which gave me a new idea for framing my paintings. First, for those who are not aware of it, my work was originally inspired by studying Sumi-e, Asian ink painting. Often Sumi-e is framed in the traditional scroll style so when I saw some work that was hung using bamboo rods, I was very excited about the prospect of trying this method for my work! There is a stand of bamboo near where I live so access to materials will be easy! Now I just have to squeeze the experimentation into my schedule. If this works out, it will be a wonderful solution to framing my work for showing in Bermuda. I have not been keen on framing work here not only because of the expense, but it then makes it impossible to transport work from here to the US. A fact I learned the hard way after having a bunch of work framed in the US and not able to bring it back to Bermuda for some upcoming shows!

Oh so much to report!

The success of the second Fibre Festival in Bermuda keeps me working! As I wind down the reporting and record keeping for this year's event, I have to get my sights on the 2009 planning and get that underway which brings me to the next adventure!

This week I began teaching Fibre Arts classes at Kaleidoscope Arts Foundation to 5&6 year olds and 7&8 year olds. I am so excited about this! The Fiber Festival here has inspired me to share my passion for fibre arts with the children and this is a great opportunity. This week we are creating Felt beads and making bracelets that are braided with the beads strung to them. The younger class, though needing some assistance with the braiding and stringing, did a great job and I look forward to the older group later today! I will get some photos of the finished work and post them later. This is a ten week program so look for more details on the classes and their outcome!

Ok so I have digressed a bit from my original intention with passing on my 2009 schedule. Easy for me to do! So check the side bar for my 2009 schedule so far. And in case I forgot to say it, Happy New Year to you all!

Commission Accomplished!

First I need to appologize for my lack of postings over the last weeks! I appreciate those of you who continue to visit in spote of my short commings.... I will explain, but first things first...


I have completed the "Bingo" commission and have pleased the client as well as myself with the finished painting. The photo at left was the original that I used to create my rendering of him in preperation for the work. This black & white photo is about 2" x 2" in real life but was of good clarity so that detail showed up quite nicely on it.





This next photo is the drawing I did to use as a pattern or template of Bingo which helps me to plan the placement of fiber which ultimately gives the depth, texture and dimension that I am after in the final piece.







Please accept my appology in advance for the quality of the finished Bingo photo! If you read on you will learn why this is.

Next came the actual painting! I was challenged by this piece because the final size of this canvas is only 11" x 10". To give you prespective, the hair on his chin is only 1/4" long. How was I to manage fibers so short and keep them in line so that they give the appearance of life like hairs coming away from his lower lip, combed perfectly straight? It worked in the end and I am always amazed at how I seem to find a way to move through the challenges that present themselves while doing this work.


I really love this medium.... It offers so much flexibility, so many options, so much depth and a richness that I never tire of looking at it or creating with it. I sometimes feel the need to pinch myself to prove that it is real; that I created this artform, and that it has become a part of my life!


I'm glad to be able to finally share this with you but I am not happy about the quality of the final photo of Bingo. One of the reasons for not adding a post in the last weeks is that I have been having problems with my computer. In my constant need to improve things, I decided that I would like to download the upgrade to my Olympus camera program so that I could take advantage of creating slide shows. Easy to do right? Have you ever heard the phrase "if it ain't broke?" Well let me tell you that if I could turn the clock back I would never have attempted it! Something happened in the download process that has rendered my Quick Time program unreadable to the Olympus program even when I have removed the upgrade and re-installed the original program. Not only do I not have access to the hundreds of photos on my computer with a program that I know and love, I have lost a program that gave me incredibly professional looking photos that I could use on my site. I am currently using Picasa in it's place but it is a poor replacement. I find the cropped photos are grainy and the editing software gives me no where near the qaulity that I had. I am beside myself with grief over this loss. It is only because I have finally accepted that Picasa, for now, is my only choice and that I felt I had neglected this blog for long enough that I am now posting.

I promise to write more frequently now as long as you promise to not judge my photos too harshly until I can find resolution for this photo problem :-)

Until then......

The month of August took me to New England earlier than planned to celebrate a death in the family. Since I was due to travel a week later, it made no sense to return to Bermuda, only to find myself back on a plane in a weeks time.

I used the extra time wisely spending some quality time with the new babies in my family and had a blast! I got peed on, puked on, and even pooped on, and loved every minute of these precious moments with the boys; Henry, Jackson and Owen. I will return to Maine in a week for the big event of my year, Fryeburg Fair, and once it has passed will have a few days to reaquaint myself with them again. I will have to soak up as much of them as I can this trip since my travles will not take me near them again til I'm not sure when next year! They will have grown so much by then!

New Commission....

AND BINGO WAS HIS NAAAMOoooooo.......

Summer is keeping my mind busy with the upcomming show at Audubon, Fryeburg Fair Fiber Center planning, and planning the Bermuda Fiber Festival! BUT, I have been commissioned to do a piece which will be given as a surprise birthday gift. The images I'm sharing with you are the original photo that I used and the
drawing that I did which will serve as my pattern or template for creating the actual Hairlock Painting.

The finished piece will be small for a commission at approximately 8 x 10" so will provide some challenges in manageing the details with very small sections of hair. Keeping them in check, seperate and not moving until they are adhered to the canvas will take time and patience.

Working on a commission is very different than creating an imagined image even if that imagined image has been drawn in advance since it makes no real difference in the end, if the final piece is different from the imagined one. There is no one to please but myself. When rendering a likeness of a pet, or of an approved drawing for a client, being on target with the drawing is important. It's what the client expects and what they are paying for. As a result, I do my best to re-create the drawing. I am considering this small piece an experiment which may determine if I choose to do something this small again on commission.

The delivery date for the piece is not until the end of October which gives me lots of breathing space so that I can choose to work on the piece when I am in the right frame of mind. This will offer the best possible environment to successfully complete the piece. I don't expect to take that long so keep an eye out. I will publish it when it is complete!

Don't forget to come and find me at the Audubon Show on August 16th & 17th in Falmouth, Maine! Until next time....

From Drawing to Painting

Well here it is folks! You may have seen the drawing at left from an earlier post that I did for a commissioned piece. I'm very happy with the final result! The completed piece measures 27" x 39". It only looks smaller in the photo because the drawing was only done on an 11"x13" sketch pad. In order to create a painting with the same proportions, a few hours of math becomes involved in the process. YES Math! When I want to duplicate a painting from a drawing it's important that I get the proportions right and very difficult to do with the naked eye. For many of us, the brain is unable to process the spacing and dimension of one line or object to another without adding it's two cents. Because of this, we create what we think we see instead of what is. No doubt there are artists who never do a single math equation to determine how long the boot foot should be compared to the length of the overall boot and do a fine job of creating appropriate proportions; perhaps they have an inate instinct to be able to do this accurately. But know that, any basic drawing class will teach you how to use a grid to establish proportion and we all know a grid is just another way of determining fractions or math! It is easier to accomplish the "no math" method when free painting which I do regularly. However in the case of replicating from a drawing where you want the finished piece to be as close to the original drawing as possible, you do the math.... It goes something like this: In the drawing, the space from the top of the boot to the edge of the page is 2.75" or 25% of the 11" height of the paper. My paintable canvas is 22" high so 25% of that is 5.5". This tells me that the boot has to sit that far from the top of the paintable canvas to look like the drawing. Etc... To prepare for the actual painting, I spent several hours figuring the equations that I would need to tell me the lengths of spaces and lines on the drawing so that I could as accurately as possible re-create the drawing on canvas. The unfortunate part of this process is that without a copy machine, the drawing that might have been framed as a pencil drawing now looks like a math problem or blue print for building something! I would take a photo and show it to you but my light pencil marks wouldn't reproduce well.

If someone had told me little more than a year ago that I would be doing this work and accomplishing these results, I would have definitely told them they were crazy! But it has become a passion for me to create these "hairlock paintings" and now that this piece is complete I will begin the body of work to get ready for the Audubon Art & Fine Craft Show in August in Maine.

The above piece will live in a house by a lake in North Carolina that sports a western theme and I hope it's owners will enjoy it for many years to come! I have yet to name this piece which I would like to do and include in the signature. Anyone have any suggestions?

Current Commission

Today I wanted to share with you the beginnings of my current commission. This will be a Hairlock Painting approximately 28"x32" (unframed) which I am creating for some folks in Atlanta. It will hang in their lakehouse which has a western theme. They asked me to create an image for them to include cowboy boots and the drawing at left is what they have decided to go with. The hat was inspired by Clint Eastwood in one of his Classic cowboy movies "The Good, Bad and the Ugly". We are currently discussing the canvas that it will go on and though there are a few options, I am partial to and recommending that they use a canvas that I created and haven't used yet! Its reddish brown tone and off white paper reminds me of a cow hide. My more spiritual side tells me that this canvas has been waiting for this project to live on it! This particular canvas is more unusual than my others in that the felt backing I made from hand made felt so is a bit more rustic looking. Since the initial layout of fiber must be about 30% larger than the finished size, it began it's life with three layers of sheeps wool about 3' x 4'. That's a lot of sheeps wool and very time consuming since I have a fine hand in my method of laying out the fibers. As soon as I hear back from them, this will be the next "painting" project on my studio table. Watch for postings of the finished painting!