First of all, my apologies for the poor image quality. This was taken with my phone camera. But I wanted to go ahead and post this image. For one thing I needed to shake things up a bit around here before completing these abstracts. But I also have a project in the works for an upcoming show at Three Hounds Gallery in Wilmington, and I have been intending on posting progress reports anyway.

I’ve gotten a lot of requests for works similar to my Kansas series I did a few years back. So far that has been my most successful set of works in terms of popularity. But I have been resistant to doing more from that set. I wanted to keep trying new things and move forward with thoughts on the image making process. But that series has continued to follow me around in requests and interest for more. I’ve said no a couple of times and forwarded examples of my current work, only to never hear from them again. Or I would say “let me see what I can do maybe” and then I never follow back up. But then Kate at Three Hounds Gallery in Wilmington contacted me over a year ago, and although I was initially resistant, I did cave in some time later. For one thing, having emailed and spoken on the phone with Kate, I liked her, which is important. Plus, the gallery is in a great location in a beautiful town, the show will be in October at the beach. It all seemed appealing.

Even more important, though, is that I thought of a new twist on the theme, a way to move it forward. The previous series was on the “experience” of Kansas, and I couldn’t make a long-term commitment just painting Kansas all the time. But I think the appeal to the series more about the composition. So the problem I needed to resolve was how to appropriately reuse the big sky composition while perhaps improving it’s use in a new theme. This is what I came up with. I will write about the various ways this theme came together as I post progress on the work.

This image is a preliminary for the series done in charcoal on a big sheet of drawing paper, 44″ tall I think, not sure about the width. The plan is to do the entire series in watercolor, but I can work quickly in charcoal, and I wanted to flesh something out to gauge it’s potential. It’s a shame I promised watercolors, because charcoal really seemed like the appropriate medium to use, as if the image was created from the soot of the environment it depicts.

Tonight is Open House at McColl Center for Visual Arts, so I have a big evening ahead of me. I will post some of the work I am showing for the first time next week. Until then…