Portraits are hard to do!

I was approached about a portrait commission during a recent show. I hesitated because I don't really "do" portraits. I had painted a genre-type painting that included a figure, which a lot of people seemed to like, but I wasn't very confident about capturing a likeness where it mattered. I reviewed a lot of snapshots and spent some time with a charismatic young girl whose ideal pet is an African hissing cockroach. Eventually we settled on a photo of the girl feeding Birdeelee, a rescue who had become imprinted and would hang out on the patio waiting to be fed.

I struggled with just about everything. Getting the head to be that of a young child. Dealing with the background, which needed to have some reality but also needed to "step back" to give focus to the figure. The light in the photo was indirect, so I didn't have any obvious drama. As a result, I looked at a lot of impressionist portraits along with John Singer Sergeant -- a did the best I could. Now on to landscapes!

Field Notes

I live in a picture-postcard village, surrounded by a patchwork of agricultural landscape bordered to the west by fossil-laden, steep cliffs of Devonian limestone. The softly rolling land below the cliffs was once the edge of glacial lake, whose ground is a slurry of smooth round rocks encrusted in hard clay. Nevertheless, the region was settled by German tenant farmers in the 1700s and the fabric of history is still preserved in Dutch barns, small farms, and family names. Though the area seems to be turning inexorably into real estate, it is still possible to ride and walk through open countryside, much as people did in the nineteenth century. 

This painting is of chicory encroaching on the fields of a sheep farm on Meadowdale Road in Guilderland, New York. I love the color of chicory, its stiff, yet random growth pattern, and the fact that the flowers bloom early today and then fade, before reblooming tomorrow.

For some time I've been wanting to start painting landscapes. Having my small food paintings off site for a couple of months has given me the clean slate I needed in the studio to start working in a new direction. The painting will be shown at the Albany Center Gallery members' show from January 6 to February 17, 2017. The opening reception will be January 6 from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. 

Superabundance

These days it seems we have a superabundance of everything. Too much cold in winter. Spring days that are too beautiful, because too dry. And now too much rain. In the rolling glacial plain where I live, the old farm families are leaving their land. Too many rocks. Too much work and too many worries. Fields where cattle and sheep used to graze are now covered with too many small trees and weedy shrubs in dense thickets. 

Yellow willows. ©Laura Shore 2015

This painting is from a photograph I took in New Salem in January 2011. My mother always looked to the bright yellow willows and red saplings as a sign that winter would turn to spring. I made this painting this winter in her memory.