Standing in the rain.

Burrrr!!! It's winter. I was out in the forest painting yesterday. It was a little overcast but nothing serious. About an hour into painting it started to drizzle. Nothing very heavy. I ran to the house and grabed an umbrella & large sheet of plastic. The plastic was for the easel and the painting. The umbrella kept me dry while I sheltered behind a tree. An hour later, I concluded, it was time to give up pack everything away and get back to the house till it stopped.

However, the time spent waiting for the rain to stop, standing under the tree with an umbrella in the rain, was marvelous. I had a chance to just experience nature. No mobile phone, no people passing, no cars. Just the drizzle, the trees and me. I almost never stop to just experience things. There is so much to do. Even when I'm painting I've often got that little voice in my head judging the work and trying to understand what it is I'm doing so that I can build upon the experience. This was nothing like that. Just calm. Very quiet and respectful. Nothing boring about it. I really enjoyed, just looking at nature, wet and all as it was.

Downpour

Oh la! It's really raining. The light just vanished and the clouds unleashed a massive downpour. So I'll not be painting any more this evening. Might get some drawings in. The painting is only a third of the way through. You can see a bit of each layer. The charcoal drawing, the greyscale underpainting, and the colour in oils.

Here are a few pics. This is nothing on what I can see out the window right now. It's as dark as dusk. The lights are flickering here so I think the electricity might go off soon. Big storm rolling in.

It really is like Ireland now :)

Exhibition update-Greenlane Gallery

There are four paintings which are on show in the Greenlane Gallery in Dingle, Co. Kerry this month.

They are:

Garcon
Shopping
Negotiations
The Lovers Whisper

I'm very pleased about this because Dingle is one of those special places in the world. It was a pivotal place of change for me several years ago, before I decided to move to France. I was on an artists retreat with some American artists who came over from New Haven. I thought that there would be more Irish artists too but in fact I was the only one.

It rained and rained for two weeks without ceasing. Despite this we walked and explored every day and wrote,talked, painted and went out over the sea to the Blasket Islands. It was boot camp for creatives and I loved it. Thanks to Caoimhghin O'Fraithile, our indestructible & madcap artist guide, we visited many amazing, artistic and historical locations in Dingle and the ring of Kerry. It was formative. The Greenlane gallery, which was in a different building then also opened my eyes to the freshness and purity of the kind of art that a location like Dingle can produce. So it's great to have my work on show there and it's a great gallery.