A reader asked...

No boat paintings in Hawaii? The answer is yes, I just didn't post them for a couple of reasons. Marine paintings are kind of a specialty of mine and when I'm doing a paint out or a wet paint show where I have a limited time to create something that has to be good, then I go to my safety net, boats and water. A lot depends on where I am though and I'm thinking, if I'm in Maui painting then I want to paint the things that are not found in my usual haunts like crashing surf, rocky cliffs with cloud draped islands in the distance. Boats I can paint anywhere. This quickdraw painting, a 10x12, was created because of the location, 2 hours to come up with something that was either at this marina or the nearby downtown. Boats it was. Usually the boat paintings sell, especially at a quickdraw. I picked this little scene because of a couple of paintings I saw on a fav website, www.leningradschool.com (link at right) that had a split center of interest. Here it's the boat group in the foreground and the boat group in the distance. Not sure I pulled it off though. It's painted okay, color is good, brush work is okay. Just maybe the split thing didn't work as well. I tried to soften the background down by saying nice things to it and rubbing it with my fingers but it might not have been enough. Next time I'll try getting some flowers. And then there's this 16x20 of chaos and no flow... it was a first pass and I had every intention of rectifying the myriad of errors but it got to be too much to think about plus I had other paintings I liked better to put in. One of these days I'll sit down and figure out what to do to make this better, might make for an interesting post. I have a huge box full of paintings that I will one day fix and it sits next to the dripping faucets and falling down fence and shutters in need of paint. I'll get to it some day, I swear... it's on the list.