Drawing with Dorian

I’m currently in Montclair, New Jersey, visiting my good friends Dorian, Liana and Dimitri Vallejo. Yesterday I joined Dorian and Liana’s wonderful weekly drawing/painting session. Emily was our model and we went from 10 to 4 in a succession of poses from 2 minutes to 1 hour. The internet went down and Liana asked me if I’d play some music from my iTunes, so I played some of the staples of the playlists from my Three Martini Studios life drawing group. It seemed just like old times with Dorian and me side by side drawing again.

       

 

Weston Tower, Manchester, NH

I am always excited when I can check off another state where I have painted. This past weekend I had the good fortune to paint in Manchester, New Hampshire. I started the painting Saturday morning, but was forced to abandon my post due to rain. Luckily, New Hampshire has a fantastic museum – the Currier. The Currier is a top notch art museum. One that is worthy of a city much larger than Manchester. In addition to other types of artwork, the Currier houses many really great landscape paintings including works by Gifford, Monet, Haseltine, Kennset and Cole. Quite a few of these pieces were painted in New England and the visit was very inspiring.

It was so inspiring I couldn’t wait to get out of bed the next morning and get back to painting. Even though I had only been at it about 30 minutes the day before, I had to make substantial changes to the tone because Saturday was cloudy and gloomy and Sunday was bright and sunny. The subject was Weston Tower, which sits on a hill top and has a great view of Manchester and the Monadnock mountain. 

I haven’t done many architectural subjects and now I don’t know why. I thoroughly enjoyed painting the tower and the play of colors between the man made objects and the natural surroundings. I have to make some adjustments, primarily a few drawing corrections and increasing the value on the light side of the tower. I realize the photo below is fuzzy and I plan to update it at a later time.