Plein Air Weekend: The New Extreme Sport?

 High Street Morning, oils on panel, 12" x 9." Contact artist for price.

 This past weekend I took part in Paint the Town in Chestertown. Chestertown is, to my mind, the prettiest of Maryland's historic towns on the eastern shore. Among its claims to fame are being the site of the only other Tea Party in colonial times, and as the location of Washington College, chartered in 1782 after the good General consented to have the college bear his name.

Paint the Town was the brainchild of Mary Pritchard, an accomplished pastel artist and teacher who lives there, supported by the Chestertown Arts League members. A group of artists would paint in plein air all around the town on Friday and Saturday, hold a wet painting sale on Saturday evening and on Sunday morning, a Quick Draw competition with cash prizes. They had arranged for us out of town artists to be housed by local hosts--my hostess for the event would be local artist Marj Morani, who was also taking part in the paint-out.

I got a late start on Friday due to a doctor's appointment so by the time I reached the Bay Bridge there was a twenty minute backup. I didn't arrive in Chestertown until noon, stopped by the Arts League to pick up my registration packet and decided to get a feel for the place by walking around for a few blocks. It had been many years since I'd been there and I didn't remember much. I saw Fountain Park and headed down High Street towards the river, admiring the charming colonial structures along the way.

On the first block I saw one artist finishing her painting and stopped to chat briefly. In the next block, I paused to take in an enormous tree and read a plaque next to it that stated it was a champion big tree, the largest basswood tree recorded in the state: a whopping sixteen feet plus in circumference and well over ninety feet high (it has since been topped by another tree in Charles County). As I was admiring it and the house next door, Mary Pritchard came out--this was her home. She told me that the house across the street had a gorgeous garden and the owners had opened the garden for the artists to paint there for just one day. It seemed too good an opportunity to waste, so I walked over to check it out.

 Painter in the Garden, oils on panel, 11" x 14." Contact artist for price.

The garden was lovely, and quite a few artists had nearly finished pieces. As I walked by a lady she called out, "Elena?" Marj, my hostess for the weekend introduced herself. What a stroke of luck! She was finishing up a pastel; we made plans to meet later so I could find her house.

I rushed back to grab my gear and drive to the garden, stopping along the way at the Imperial Hotel to pick up a sandwich (the chicken salad was delicious). The pleasant afternoon passed quickly while working on my painting. It was really hard to edit the painting as there were so many beautiful plantings to choose from.  I was drawn to the dogwood and the lilac, but the urn, which was the focal point of this section of the garden, was empty and needed a little embellishment, which I supplied. Unfortunately my shadows don't read well in certain places, and the greens are too monotonous--it lacks the punch I wanted. 

The artists had been invited to Mary's house for happy hour at 5:30, and we had fun meeting each other and seeing the glass-working studio her husband had set up in the basement.

The following morning we were up early. Marj had a meeting at the Arts League and I was left to enjoy my customary round of taiji in her wonderful back porch and garden before setting out to paint. I painted the view with the dappled light filtering through the trees looking down High Street towards the river from underneath the champion tree next to Mary's house. This one turned out the best of the three, but it has some defects.

 Mary's Wisteria, oils on panel, 12" x 9." Contact artist for price.

A quick lunch break at Play it Again Sam (owned by Mary's son-in-law) and I was back at Mary's house. I'd been wanting to paint a wisteria in bloom--the delicate lilac of the pendulous flowers is such an unusual color in nature--and here was a gorgeous old vine rambling over the back porch. I am surprised the painting turned out this well, considering it was getting cloudier and the shadows disappeared halfway into it. At least it didn't rain as had been predicted.

We were supposed to have our paintings framed and ready to hang at Emmanuel Episcopal Church's Parish Hall at 4:45 that afternoon for the reception and sale. Dutifully, we assembled at the tables set up for us for framing & labeling. I was still working on mounting my first piece when my framing gun jammed--I tried to loosen it but it was hopelessly stuck. The only way to unjam it would be taking it apart, and there was no time for that.

Fortunately, Mary had another framer's gun she made available to all. I barely got my three pieces hung as the reception was starting, feeling once again that this was like running a marathon. And Chestertown was nothing like as tight a schedule as the one for last year's Solomon's Island Paint the Town. Is it always like this, I wonder?

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who came to our show and bought work; the Chestertown citizens really supported the effort. After the reception, we were treated to a buffet dinner donated by the Arts League members. It was great to get to know the other artists, and I was so impressed by the enthusiasm and esprit among the Chestertown Arts League members--terrific folks!

Sunday morning dawned gray--it had been drizzling overnight, but it wasn't raining now. The Quick Draw Competition would go on rain or shine. Marj and I got ready to go to the Arts League to check in and have our panels stamped. The weather was looking very iffy, so we decided to stick close to cover. I set up on the porch of the Arts League for a view of the house next door, a decision I later regretted, as my perspective in the painting was way off.

Marj sat out by the trash bins behind the building, and managed to do the most beautiful little painting. That is the hallmark of a true artist--to create something beautiful out of something as ordinary, some would say ugly, as a trash can! Someday, I may yet learn how to do that.

The Arts League volunteers drove around town ringing a bell for the 9: 30 starting time (we were scattered all over), and again two hours later to signal that time was up. We then had to take our paintings over to Wilmer Park and set them up on our easels for the judging and perhaps more sales. The Taste of Chestertown festival was taking place at the same time, so the park was packed. I bought some tickets for the Taste of the Town so I could graze while the judging was going on. Newcastle, DE artist Dennis Young won both the First Place and People's Choice awards with a lovely pastel of Chestertown's historic ship, the Schooner Sultana. His painting was hard to resist, though a bit too sunny-looking for this day.

It started to drizzle again as I was heading out of town, back home to the western shore, totally exhausted. In all, it was an exciting weekend among genial folks. I hope this may be just the first of many annual Chestertown Paint the Town plein air festivals.

Bluebell Time Again

Bluebells on a Hill, oils on canvas panel, 11" x 14." 

  

The Potomac from Mt. Aventine, oils on panel, 12" x 9." Contact artist for prices.

That bluebell time of the year is here again and the weather was glorious. I went down to visit my friends in Accokeek for the weekend so I could paint the bluebells at Chapman's Forest.  Patrise wasn't sure there would be many blooms--the previous weekend the flowers had seemed skimpy, so on Saturday afternoon I set out to explore.

Thanks to the recent rain, the bluebells were lush, but with so many deadfalls, some of them huge old trees, the trail was hard to follow. On the way back I somehow lost the trail, but managed to find my way to the main road. By then there was no time to go back with my painting gear. It would be dark before I was finished and I didn't relish the thought of being lost in the forest at night. Instead, I walked up to Mt. Aventine, a colonial-era mansion on the property, to paint the view from the back or the house.

When I got there, a couple was enjoying a picnic on a table by the house. I greeted them, saying I hoped I wouldn't disturb them and started to set up on the back porch of the house. I found that the bottom screw-plate of my Guerilla Paint Box had come off somewhere and I couldn't secure it to the tripod. Not dissuaded, I sat on the back steps and set the box on the floor to paint.

I've painted this spectacular view a few times before, and it's difficult to compose because the wide panorama is so symmetrical. To take the curse off, I decided to try a vertical format and focus on just one small part of the view. The colors were very hard to render: all that lovely variety of greens of the new foliage, particularly the yellow-green of the ancient oaks, against the silvery hues of the Potomac just defeat me. I know I didn't get them all here, but I think the composition works.

Back at my car I was relieved to find the screw plate to my paint box in the trunk. How could it have become loosened from just the vibrations of driving? And yet it did.

Sunday morning Linda, Patrise and their dogs joined me. The ladies suggested we cut directly through the woods to save ourselves the distance down the driveway to the trailhead. I was loaded down with painting gear, so the suggestion was welcome and we struck our way across the forest. Once at the site I set up my easel on the hill, trying to avoid stepping on the bluebells. Patrise & Linda were sitting on a log sketching a short way from me when the dogs caught some scent and went wild. I was so focused on my painting I didn't notice what they were after until Patrise asked if I'd seen the fox--I hadn't.

After about an hour my friends left with the dogs and I stayed to struggle with my painting. I was enjoying the songs of birds in the stillness when I heard something stir over by a huge fallen log (on the left). I looked up and there was a small red fox--perhaps a yearling--cautiously poking from under the trunk just a few feet away. I think he was more surprised than I--he turned around and took off the moment he saw me. I wondered if this was the poor creature the dogs had chased after... Later as I was getting ready to pack up, a herd of about 10 panicked deer came crashing through the forest at a gallop and disappeared down the gully. More dogs, presumably--deer have little fear of humans around here.

My painting of the bluebells turned out underwhelming--it doesn't quite have the right colors to give the impression of this spot on such a lovely spring day. I'll have to try it again next year. Sometimes it seems the more beautiful a place, the harder it is to paint.

Cherry Blossom Perfection

Painting the Cherry Blossoms at the Arboretum

Cherry Blossom Perfection, oils on canvas board, 11" x 14." Contact artist for price.

Yesterday I met up with Lee Boynton and three other students for a one-day workshop at the National Arboretum. We couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day: sunny and warm, with the cherry blossoms at their peak of perfection, as were the magnolias and a myriad other flowers.

In the morning we painted this fabulous old cherry tree near the visitor center. As the hours wore on, more and more visitors came until there was quite a crowd under the enormous tree. A photographer with very professional-looking gear stopped and wanted to take my picture; I consented and asked him to take another with my own camera that you see here.

For our afternoon painting, we drove over to the Asian Garden. This part of the Arboretum sits on a steep hill overlooking the Anacostia River. We ate our lunch sitting on the grass near a tree-sized Camellia covered with white flowers. After lunch we set up in what is called the Central Valley to paint. I was tempted to wander about to examine the exotic plants, among them a beautiful variety of Siberian skunk-cabbage with white flower spikes new to me, instead of painting, but being conscientious, I buckled down to dash off another painting before the end of the day.

Valley at the Asian Garden, oils on canvas, 12" x 9." Contact artist for price.

I lingered a bit later than the rest of the students to finish this and paid the price, getting caught in the worst rush hour driving I've seen in a while. It had taken me just a half and hour to drive there in the morning; at 4:00 PM it took a full hour to crawl on 295 from the New York Avenue exit up to the I-95 exit off the Beltway, and another forty minutes slogging on I-95 to get home. I frequently wish all the other cars would magically vanish so I could have the road all to myself...

Another Anniversary

Tomorrow will be exactly 49 years since my arrival from Cuba. Today being Palm Sunday made me nostalgic for our beautiful Royal Palms, so distinctive a part of the Cuban landscape. My mother wrote sonnets about them, as have many other Cuban poets over the centuries. Their straight tall trunks seem made for symbolism, and the mere sight of one, even in Hialeah, evokes our beloved island to us.

I found this photo of a hotel in Cabanas that my father, Aquiles Maza, designed and built for a transplanted Canadian in the late 1950's and selected it for today's posting because it nestles in a grove of royal palms. At the time, its architecture was considered quite innovative: the curved concrete shell roof with glass all along the perimeter, its suites of rooms arranged in small cabanas scattered along the hillside. It was part of that vibrant period of Modernist style that was the hallmark of the 1950's in Cuba, when our island was a prosperous first-world republic, an island of song.

Cabanas is the middle one of three large bays on the north coast of the western province of Pinar del Rio; the port of Mariel, famous for the massive exodus of 1980, lies to its east closest to Havana, and Bahia Honda to the west. The land drops off steeply toward the sea from a plateau and the palms grow almost right up to the water.

The bay of Cabanas has a narrow mouth but is large enough to have small cays scattered within. This was the site of what was to be our last family vacation in Cuba, and I vividly remember how exciting it was for us girls to tour the bay on a motorboat one afternoon. There were a few people living in the small cays and we were amused to see they had pigs and goats--they must have brought the animals on boats, but we wondered how on earth do you get a pig or a goat to board a boat?

My folks didn't want us to swim in the bay or water-ski, as sharks were reputed to be abundant, so we swam in the hotel's pool, sited on a wide terrace below the dining room with the big glass windows. We children spent most of our day in and around the pool, taking cover to read or sketch on the balconies during the sun-burning hours. I was already a committed artist, and remember making a number of drawings of the bay in my favorite Prismacolor pencils, one of which I'm sure my aunt Nina preserved (she sent me this postcard of the hotel on my birthday to cheer me up during my first months alone in Albuquerque in 1961). Time passed as slowly as it does on childhood vacations that end too soon...

After the hotel was "intervened" (confiscated) by the Castro government, the owners returned to Canada. I wonder what happened to it, whether it still stands and forms part of some government tourist facility or if it is now in ruins? Sometimes it's better not to know, to hold it perfectly preserved in the mind's eye.

Flowers for the Ladies in White

This week as we celebrate the return of spring in the northern hemisphere marks the seventh anniversary of Cuba's Black Spring. On March 18, 19 and 20 of 2003, seventy-five (75) Cuban dissidents, many of them journalists and human rights activists, were arrested and condemned in summary trials to serve a collective total of over 1,400 years of jail time.

Shortly after, a group of wives and female relatives of the condemned prisoners began to meet and regularly attend Sunday mass at the church of St. Rita of Cassia in Miramar (I know it well, this was our parish church when we lived there). St. Rita, like St. Jude, is known as the patron saint of impossible causes. The women dressed all in white and after mass they would walk along Quinta Avenida (5th Avenue) for some blocks carrying a flower in their hands, in silent protest for the unjust incarceration of their loved ones and a prayer for their liberation.

They have since become famous around the world as "The Ladies in White" and you couldn't find a more courageous group of women anywhere on earth. Their valiant stance earned them the European Parliament's Sakharov Human Rights Prize in 2005. For those who don't know about the panoply of methods of repression and psychological torture employed by the Castro government, these women have stood firm in the face of incredible pressure and threats, as well as actual violence perpetrated on them from time to time.

Seven years later fifty-three prisoners remain in jail in sub-human conditions; eleven have been released for health reasons on "extra-penal license" (meaning they can be returned to jail anytime the government wishes), one completed his sentence and another died shortly after his release.

This week, to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Cuban Black Spring, the Ladies in White have been marching in the streets of central Havana after attending masses at a number of churches. Government-hired mobs of 300 to 400 persons have followed and surrounded them, heckling and shouting insults at them in an attempt to intimidate these peaceful women from carrying out their purpose.

On Wednesday their march was interrupted by the mob of government mercenaries and State Security thugs in plain clothes who forcibly dragged and boarded them into two buses the government had waiting nearby. Photographs and videos of the incident have circulated widely, and the evidence showed the Cuban government's claim that no force was employed is entirely false. The woman in the photo below applying a stranglehold on a lady in white was identified as a trained State Security agent who travels at the government's bidding.

Photos by Reuters from an article in Spain's newspaper El Pais.

Despite the fact that several of the ladies were injured in the melee (Laura Pollan, their leader, suffered a broken finger), the Ladies in White continued their planned activities on Thursday and Friday. The resulting publicity and the international community's outrage at the violence against these innocent women tempered the government's reaction in subsequent marches and these have taken place with just the usual heckling and verbal harassment. I hope eventually they will obtain the release of their loved ones.

For their courage and unwavering faith I offer The Ladies in White my admiration and solidarity, symbolized by these spring flowers--may they and the Cuban people triumph in the pursuit of Liberty.

A Host of Golden Daffodils

A Host of Golden Daffodils, oils on canvas panel, 12" x 9." Contact artist for price.

Last week for the first time it was light enough on the way home to see that the steep banks bordering lower Rock Creek Parkway were full of yellow daffodils in bloom. It brought to mind that poem by Wordsworth all of my generation read in high school, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,"

(first stanza):

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.


--William Wordsworth, 1804

(I feel sorry for subsequent generations of students who missed learning the wonderful literary works of the English Romantic poets... so-called "Modern Education" has thus impoverished their lives.)

Today was our finest spring day to date. I remembered there is a small hillside at Brookside Gardens that has daffodils planted among birches and thought it would be delightful to paint there.

The gardens were full of young mothers with their offspring, retirees and neighbors out to enjoy the lovely afternoon. I walked around and took some photos before setting up to paint, in case there was something more appealing, but my first instinct was right, this was the prettiest sight to paint.

The scent of daffodils and the witch-hazels perfumed the warm air as I worked. It felt so good to be outside it was hard to concentrate on the basics of painting. I almost lapsed into common beginner mistakes such as starting to focus on individual flowers too early rather than laying down masses of color first. I managed to pull out of it and balance the colors before getting into the details for a nice finish just as the sun was going down behind the hill.

Primroses for Spring

Red Primrose, oils on canvas panel, 11" x 14."

It was raining this morning as I drove off to class, one of those light drizzles that heralds spring, so long awaited after such a harsh, snowy winter. This was our last class of the winter session; in fact it was a make-up for the class we missed due to the snow. What a pleasant surprise to find flowers in our still-life set-ups along with the usual props!

It was also Lee's daughter Margie's birthday, and her mother had given her a beautiful vase full of yellow daffodils as a present. The bouquet was one of our set-ups and Margie had joined our class so she could paint it. By the time I arrived, all the easels around the daffodils were taken up, so I worked with the other arrangement along with Lee and one other student.

The colors seemed impossible to harmonize--how does one deal with such shocking color juxtapositions or shades of green so close in value? It was a real challenge, and I don't feel I rose to it very successfully. I like the zing of the purple background against the red flowers, but the primrose leaves appear too artificial in color--they're almost the same shade as the ceramic bowl when they should have been closer to the color of the plastic pot. Still, I hope the painting captures a bit of the spirit of spring now happily approaching.

The Blue Bowl

The Blue Bowl, oils on canvas panel, 11" x 14."

I finally had a chance to paint "the blue bowl" as everyone in class refers to this bowl. It has a particularly challenging blue ceramic glaze with patches where the terracotta underneath shows through. Today it was complicated by a towel with pink stripes draped around the bowl in addition to the bottle. Using oranges rather than apples was a master stroke; it sets up some wonderful color harmonies with the towel and backdrop.

I benefitted by having watched Lee and other students paint this bowl in other sessions; I was able to be freer with my color, bolder. The drapery of the towel upped the challenge one more notch. I don't feel my towel was entirely successful--the folds don't read in certain places, but perhaps that is not so important. Overall, the impression of light and the color seems right.

Artists of the past who painted drapery so beautifully, such as Zurbaran, have risen even more in my estimation after this experience with painting folds in cloth.