Landscape of Virginia

Just north of Lovingston is this gas station where I sometimes visit with a friend for a Latino style breakfast. It is a unique spot, a one of a kind in my experience of gas stations. It is the typical country gas station with the exception that it has a Latino styled restaurant in the back and from the outside look of it nothing else looks quite like it due to its paint job. I really love how it captured my complete attention from the road when I first noticed it driving by on my way to Lovingston. Its bright as all in the sunshine on any typical clear day. When I first saw it I said to myself "I've just got ta paint this place, just for its paint job if nothing else." As so I did. Its raw wood flooring and hand built counters are filled with goods and there is always a friendly smile on the cash registrar attendant's face when you go to checkout. The restaurant in the back is raw too with its indoor picnic tables with plastic place-mats from which to ea...

The Ben Franklin was the very best way to spend idle time back in the day. This painting is a tribute to em. One could always find those things that one didn't really need yet had to have none the less. Whenever spotting on I would always ask my Mom to go in and have a look around and lovingly Mom usually did if we had the time. They were great stores for stuff like superballs or balsa wood airplanes that one could snap together in a minute and have fun with for the rest of the day. It could all be had with little cost to one pocket. They were a great idea and there were others like Woolworths and People's Drugs, but this one (Ben Franklins) were my favorite. They are all part of the past now, all have gone under at one time or another. Yes I am waxing the metal of the past some here but if you ever had been in one you too would get a little nostalgic here too. They are something one doesn't get on the internet. One doesn't go skimming across the web look...

The idea of doing the same object over and over again was something that our art profs had us do during our first years as art students. As you can tell (if you've been following this blog of mine) this is a redone imagery of a street scene in Charlottesville's dinning scene, the Blue Moon Cafe has appeared on my canvases before. The restaurant is one small spot that holds a very dear place in our community of cityfolk. Its gone through its changes, and now they are talking about putting a ten store building crowded around it. What next, put it under glass(?) and sell tickets to the oddity of quaint old haunts of the hippie era(?)a...well this is my painting of the new style of the Blue Moon. It had had a wooden slate roof but all that has changed. I just paint it as I see it. Its a larger painting than my first work similar to this one. This one is about four inches higher and maybe a few inches wider, which gave me more room to move and expand on what I could inc...

A friend whom I don't frequent much time with anymore, not because I don't want to we just don't cross paths like we use to living in the same neighborhood and all....well anyway on with the story with this painting; He saw this scene way up in Maine (God only knows what he was living up their for, a girl I suppose..well) and he took out his camera and photographed it thinking that it reminded him of "JT's People" as they have often been called by people who knew how I use to paint these kind of overweight folks almost all the time. Well enough for the run-on sentences, I just had to get it out...this painting was the result of that photograph coming into my hands. I let it sit for over two years thinking I didn't really want to paint it. It didn't catch my interest until this guy sent word back to me that he'd like me to at least try and draw it, these were my people afterall. So I did. Then I found a way for him to get a look at it and I h...

I am slowly building up a collection of important structures in Charlottesville, afterall I lived in that city for 34 yrs without leaving it very often so I think it fits to remember it in oils. This painting is a little local market on a very busy wide avenue near but not on a downtown street. The fella in the window is a character who is their whenever the door is open and he is the owner, proprietor of the Market. Its nothing fancy mind you however he does have the essentials on hand. He runs a clean Market, not corncob pipes for sale either over or under the counter. Its been handy for me to run in with our students on a hot day and have a soda or waterbottle cold and frosty. The actual image of him in the window doesn't do him justice due to the fact that I painted him to be such a small figure, he doesn't really stand quite like that, but he does stand in the window on many a day and simply peer out watching whatever happens to be passing by. Lots of people and ...

I'm currently working on an oil but I had time to review older pen and inks last night here. My interest was piqued by one of an "Wooden Ship" that I began work on over a year ago. I wanted to add some interesting details in order to bring it to life it didn't seem done, there was something that said "yet undone" Some drawings lye about for a good amount of time and they simply down draw much interest in oneself to look at them. The reason can sometimes be that they aren't finished yet and they ought to be put back on the drawing board. I did that with this one of a 'Wooden Ship' and certainly what I did afterwards was worth it in my humble opinion. What you see is the final work, before this endpoint it lacked something one just can't put into words, but it was something important..not everything is describable in words, sometimes we just know. Hope you like it.

The iconic dinner on West Main in Charlottesville has got to be "Mel's Cafe". Its been their since the 1970's or perhaps it predates that time I haven't checked but it is an excellent 'pit stop' on a walk from the University to downtown. I needed to include the place in my collection of 'known spots' true to Charlottesville's historical significant buildings. The building has that retro nineteen-seventies look to it with the wide expanse of glass and the winged roof atypical of that era. I enjoyed painting it although the darkness created by his smoked glass on most of the windows is something I neglected to include in my rendition of 'Mel's'. I felt that the attention to the images he includes on his walls such as framed photos and other framed items too small to make out their origins or type were objects of interest for me as I rendered this painting in oils. Its truly a unique place, and the only one of its kind in thi...