Fall Semester-Week 14-Thanksgiving Break

As the paint is drying on this painting as it hangs on my studio wall from my life painting class with Peter Van Dyck the oven in my kitchen is warming up for annual cooking event known as Thanksgiving. Today as I finished this painting up you could hear, see and literally feel people rushing about and getting out of town for the holiday break. I know I am looking forward to at least one or two days of just eating and sleeping like a big bear! The painting above grew out of my quandary and boredom of painting the typical classroom painting where the model is sitting on a box or chair and you nibble away at the painting as best you can with the amount of time you get per session or pose. For me the academic paintings or drawings can be beautiful, but too often I felt I didn't like the pose or lighting or both and didn't have enough time to get the painting to the point I wanted. Being in my 4th year and having produced these types of paintings from my first year I just found them boring to to and mostly unsatisfactory and frustrating in completion. Having been so excited about doing my commuter and landscape paintings I wanted to find a way to feel the same way about these classroom works. So what I did was wait until everybody set up and then looked around until I found a bigger image that captured my interest the same way I do a landscape and went for that. We now have just two more weeks till the semester is done and the winter break starts--I don't look forward to shoveling snow, but I will look forward to some more pure painting time and some downtime at home and the studio. Well it's time to get Tom Turkey ready for the oven--happy Thanks Giving!