I have been soooo bad! For almost a whole month, I have made no entries in my blog. For 14 out of the past 19 days, at least, I have a good excuse for not blogging: I was on a painting vacation in Florida (Marco Island). This trip will be the subject of a couple of upcoming blog entries–but not this one. I am still finishing up and photographing the paintings, and have not even downloaded all of the 600 + photos I took while there. When I have finished all that prep work, I will have a lot of new material for the blog, including the best wildlife closeups I have ever photographed.

Just before leaving for Florida, I had to spend a lot of time in the office, making sure that I left everything shipshape there. That’s my excuse for the other 11 days of blog-neglect. But I completed some painterly tasks as well. I finished the Snow Camp painting that had been giving me fits, by modifying the snow wall and adding the foot tracks in the snow. The final result is shown above. Tentative title is “Looking South at Franconia Notch.” To see the penultimate version, link here to that blog entry. The original version was this:

The other two snow camp paintings are hanging in the Manchester Artists Association Gallery for its latest exhibit on the theme “Bright Ideas”: “Hammock in Winter” and “Plein Air Painters in Winter”. Perhaps a hammock and plein air painters in winter landscapes exemplify bright ideas only if you appreciate irony.

Because of complications from the power outage that NH suffered while I was in Florida, my granddaughter failed to deliver the two paintings to the Gallery on Sunday, when they were juried, but the director saved the space for me and hung them on the first day of the exhibit, which was last Wednesday. If you get there, look for them on the right as you enter the Gallery.

Earlier in February, the aforementioned trusty granddaughter had delivered three paintings to the Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth. The current exhibit there is a showcase for two very interesting abstract artists, so my three are helping to fill the walls on the third floor. Two are from the White Mountains/Bartlett weekend (link to that blog here)–Mt. Washington from Route 302 and the Humphreys Ledge view. The third painting in this exhibit is the large gallery-wrap one of the Arboretum pond, painted from photograph (blog link here).

Meanwhile, my gallery in Londonderry (White Birch) is exhibiting two large paintings of mine from past years. One I call “Sailor’s Delight” because it depicts a super-red sunset. See on this web page. The other is called “Cat Contemplating Winter”, a 12 by 36 painting almost monochromatically black (actually not black except for the cat) and white, depicting a close up of a freshly plowed street with a tuxedo cat in red collar looking it over. I don’t know why I chose to paint that picture, but I like it so much that for years I have refused to put it up for sale. You can find it on my website here.