Here are some of my students on location at Hyannis Harbor yesterday. We concentrated on working small, fast, color studies.  Our ferry boat subjects moved in and out of the harbor to Nantucket. Everyone did a great job in the heat.

I have a new 6 week class beginning at the Cape Cod Art Association on Monday June 25, 2010.

Check out some class videos on Youtube.

Email any questions.

There are so many great places to paint on site in Boston, especially on a rainy Saturday. With the warmer weather,  I have put the studio work aside and am traveling around and painting on location.

This work is refreshing and a needed balance to the larger, winter, studio paintings I have been finishing recently.  I am trying to balance the existing work with these new pieces, balance the inside paintings with working outside now.

This is a photo of a roughed-in start. The third painting of a new Boston Waterfront Series  I’ve begun for my late summer show “The Bean and the Cod ” in Orleans at the Elizabeth Rowley Gallery.

Oyster River runs through Chatham Massachusetts. As a child my father and I weaved down it through the idle boats out to fish in the dark mornings. That’s what I remember most.

And for the time being I am still close enough to come down and paint along it’s banks whenever I choose. There are a lot of paintings here. The last couple weeks I have come back here to see Mrs. S. We can talk about people my parents were friends with forty years ago.  She has a garden built over her old chicken coup and the soil is like gold to this gardener. I have come by twice this June and her roses are still not open, so I painted looking back toward Oyster Pond and the town center.

I had noticed this view last week and have been painting it in my mind. She made us coffee as the fog rolled in.

There are probably a lot of artists out there that hide their art too.  There is something very refreshing about putting new work away, out of site, out of reach, out of mind, whether you are really conscious of it or not.  Before you know it you are busy on something else, then something else, and then one random morning you are holding  a new  French study that hasn’t been seen in four years. That’s what happened to me recently.

I was busy doing something in the studio and I came across this small study, and immediately I knew it was  from Sarlat in the Dordogne  region.  It’s funny how you can lose a whole painting for four years but remember precisely how you painted it that morning. It was misty and damp. I headed right out to paint first thing, finding a view,  working just off of one of the main roads leading into this Medieval town.  It was beautiful out, distant smoke and  rolling small farms.

But my study did not go so well. When your work doesn’t go well it usually means you don’t know what you are doing or you just can’t fix it  then. Sometimes it can be hard to paint on location when the view in front of you, everywhere around you looks so foreign and rich. When I came back to Massachusetts from France I put it away out of view.

So it was very cool to find this hidden study left in its state of discontent.

This was painted in France on a historic morning in my life. This day I realized granola tastes just fine without the milk. You can eat it right out of the box driving down the road looking for a strong place to work. When I found this small oil waiting patiently,  I immediately wanted to paint back into it.  It came together quickly.  It’s probably been percolating in the back of my mind over many  breakfasts.

Feeney,  “Salat France”  9×12 Started on location.

Available at the Rowley Gallery.

Recently in my studio I had a very knowledgeable man looking at my work. He walked around and asked me “what kind of painting is this?”

“I am an impressionist painter.”

“What is that? What does that mean?”

“You know how some people create paintings so realistic  you can’t believe they are not photographs?” I asked him.

“Yes I have seen those. That is cool.”

“Well I am not that kind of painter. I paint an impression of a scene, or a  place.  Like a small view or glimpse of life as I see it… to paint a small impression of our time,  like a memory.”

“Oooh.”

This is the invitation to an upcoming show for the advanced painting students of my recent  Cape Cod Art Association classes. This  school of fish painting is by Yarmouth artist Willie Hayduck.

This is a Cape Cod  themed exhibition with subjects ranging from Martha’s Vineyard to Provincetown Massachusetts.

The show is going up later this week and you can check out this strong art work and get more information at

Woodruffs Art Center in Mashpee.

See you there.

Today I am posting an overcast harbor scene of  Wellfleet Massachusetts, 16×20.”

I told a dealer about this piece a few months ago and was told there was no interest in anything that might reek of  inclement weather. Then I had another dealer see it and rave about how well it comes across. This made me reflect on the art market and how things have been like this since  the beginning of time. As soon as someone begins to create, there will be  someone there suggesting what you really should  be creating.

Don’t listen to them.

You’ll be at your strongest creatively,  if you paint exactly what YOU want. Your colors, your subjects,  with no regard to the market…or what might sell. This  is the only way to go.

Painting what you are excited about will get you up early and keep you up late at night in your studio.  As artists this is the ideal scenario, heading to the studio before you do anything else.

I like capturing  the rain. I like the fog and painting snow scenes too. I remember being in Times Square in the early 1980′s photographing one cold winter morning with a close family member asking  “why are you photographing this area?”  Times Square back then was a  seedy set  of peep shows, hawk shops and XXX Dancing signs everywhere. I am so glad I kept taking those shots and did not listen to anyone’s objections. Times Square does not look like that anymore and it never will again.  With my old Fuji I caught the New York of that day, a shady neighborhood on its way out and  from those photos, I painted a killer city series of  a Times Square that is long gone, and so are all those paintings.  As the fog lifts this morning I head into the studio to paint  more unpopular subjects. Can’t wait.

A  highlight-dot of color, is how I began to insert  figures into my landscapes as a focal point.  They were so vague and uncommitted, people  would ask, “is that light spot  a figure back there?”

Over the years as my oils changed to become more comfortable depicting people, the single figure is now often a part of the crowd. This has opened up interesting  subjects for me, to the point where I am a dedicated urban painter.

I like standing in the middle of a busy street taking my shots. I do. The funny thing is though, these anonymous faces are starting to feel familiar  now.I know them. When I paint my people I think about whether that  business man’s brief-case is heavy as he is  hurries to get home, trying to make that train.  I consider the window shopper and what day of the week it might be that  I am trying to capture with each piece. Your peeps will have a different vibe when you take your reference pictures on a Saturday rather than a Monday morning commute. These are all elements that are fun to consider as you work in the studio where the imagination runs away with you.

The business man that was catching the train in Paris twenty paintings ago is now following behind a woman in red, looking in vain for that particular shop on Fifth Avenue.

Paris Figures After the Rain

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Fifth Avenue Shoppers,  New York  (partial closeup)

This week opens a big show curated by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod.

It’s billed as “A Major Exhibition of Over Fifty-Five Cape Cod Artists” shown at the Cotuit Center of the Arts. The exhibition is called First Things First.

I was free to choose any painting,  and I quickly chose a new 18×24″ canvas of  Harvard Square in Cambridge  Massachusetts.  This piece has a bit of  Out of Town News on the left side,  looking down Massachusetts  Avenue.  Actually this is one of those paintings that I thought was complete,  but chose to live with it.  After a while I knew it was not quite finished but  not sure what it needed.   I put it away out of site… for TWO YEARS!  and  forgot about it.

When I found it again recently, I knew instantly what it needed to  finish up strong.  I moved a few things around and took a bus out of the painting, and it opened up the middle to recede wonderfully.  Funny how the creative mind works.

This piece is available at the www.elizabethrowleygallery.com

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This is a oil painting of skaters on the Frog Pond near Beacon Hill. I am posting it to begin getting this site  in the Christmas season with a link to the gallery where it is available.

The Elizabeth Rowley Gallery has an opening today from 4-6pm to showcase new paintings for Christmas time.

I will be there to discuss the recent work, and the public is welcome.