I belong to an organization called “Women’s Caucus for Art”, which doesn’t roll too comfortably off the tongue but which does bring me into contact with a whole new set of eclectic and individualistic artists. Annually, WCA presents an exhibition of works of art created on plaques that are 6 inches square. Each member is entitled to buy a set of four panels and decorate them for the exhibit. The panels are then exhibited together and offered for sale. The price of each panel is $66. This year’s exhibit is being hung now, at The Paper Tree in Manchester NH (865 Second Street–www.thepapertree.net), and the reception takes place on Friday, November 13, from 5 to 7.

My four plaques, pictured above, are oil paintings from photographs that I took in Rhode Island at a lotus pond in Warwick, situated right on a busy highway–all the easier for people to stop and gawk and take photos. I wasn’t the only one doing so. The size and beauty of these plants was unusual. The leaves were particularly fascinating, and dominating, which may explain why my paintings are more about the leaves than the flowers.

I am hoping my 6 x 6’s will catch the eye of another lotus-lover and all four go together to their next home. This was a fun project for me–something new for me too. I can now add flowering plants to my list of favorite inspirations, right up there with dogs and cats and trees. Next thing you know, I will be succumbing to the challenge of painting oranges. (No, no, I won’t, I’m determined I won’t!)

I thought I had corrupted my entire website without having backed it up. A disaster! –Or a fresh start?

After seeking help from Apple in an online chat, a phone chat, and finally the person-to-person chat at the Genius Bar in Salem, I had to accept the grim verdict: Restore from backup, if any, or recreate the entire website.

I turned to my Time Machine (the program that saves stuff to an external disk) thinking it had been six months since I had backed up my computer. But my Mac had automatically saved everything on September 22, just a week after my last publications to the website, so the potential disaster that has been hanging over my head for the past few weeks just went “poof” and I feel pretty silly for trying so hard to avoid the “restoration from backup” solution. There’s a moral in there somewhere, but I haven’t quite worked out what it is.

Anyway, I have been so very preoccupied with goings on at my law business and my painting activities that I let slide every nonessential in my life. It feels good to have nonessentials that one can let slide!

Since my last blog entry, I participated in 12 days of workshops and 5 days of paintouts (group plein air painting events). That’s just too much to cover in one blog entry. Here’s one of my favorite paintings from this period.

I call it Changing Seasons. The location was a swampy woods on Kimball Pond, which is in or near Goffstown. The Gallery at 100 Market Street in Portsmouth will exhibit this painting along with two others of mine, for the months of November and December and January.

Responding to a theory about why my website files got corrupted, I am deleting a lot of old stuff to give the new stuff room to breathe. And I hope to be back blogging on a regular basis.

Oh, yes. I should explain the photo at top. That was taken on August 30 at Manchester’s Art in the Park. That’s me, receiving the red ribbon from Guy Lessard, President of Manchester Artists Association. My painting, Hardscape with Reflections, won second best oil painting in the show. It too will be in Portsmouth for the next three months. Here is Hardscape:

From Friday through today, plein air artists the country over were called to get out and paint in this annual event. The NH painters chose to get out and paint in Londonderry at two locations: a bed and breakfast called Tiffany Gardens and the orchards of Mack’s apples. Following the paint-out, today, the artists exhibited their wet paintings at the White Birch Fine Art Gallery in Londonderry. Since I have been too busy to blog or update my website, and my schedule is just getting crazier in the upcoming days, the above 11 by 14 painting from today’s session at Mack’s Apple Orchard is all I can offer at this time. I titled it “Ready for Picking”.

But I have 34 works of art out in exhibits all over New Hampshire right now: 5 in Portsmouth at the Gallery at 100 Market, 9 at Manchester City Hall, 9 in the Twilight exhibit at the Manchester Artists Association Gallery, 2 at Hatfield Gallery in Manchester, 3 at the White Birch Gallery in Londonderry, 1 in the auditorium of the Derryfield School in Manchester, and 5 in the Travers Restaurant in Goffstown.

Please try to come out for Trolley Night (Open Doors) in Manchester this Thursday, September 17, from 5 to 8, when you can visit City Hall, the MAA Gallery, and Hatfield’s, sample the food and drink, and enjoy the trolley ride to get from place to place.

June and July I neglected my web pages in favor of creating new paintings. To make up for that neglect, I posted five categories of 14 new works, all but one painted au plein air:

(1) Wet and Wild Water Workshop with Peter Granucci–three successive Saturdays painting au plein air at a water location. We started on the first Saturday at Kimball Pond, in Dunbarton I believe. Then we discovered Griffin Mill park in Auburn, which gave us a variety of structures along with the water, so we spent two Saturday mornings there, and I stayed on in the afternoon to create two more paintings. Total water paintings: 5

(2) Arnold Arboretum in Boston Massachusetts–prompted by a call for art inspired by the Arboretum, a group of us from NH Plein Air made a day of it at the Arboretum, hoping for inclusion of our works in the upcoming exhibit. My choice was a small footbridge not too far from the road but tucked away behind the shrubs. In my studio, I also painted from a photograph by Stan Kelley, with his permission, a portrait of a Chinese Stewartia, a tree known for the painterly way it sheds its multi-colored bark.

(1) Canterbury Shaker Village–A perennial favorite of NH Plein Air artists. We will gather there en masse for Founders’ Day on August 2, painting and selling our wet paintings at the end of the day. CSV gets a percentage of all sales proceeds. Also on exhibit and for sale will be works painted au plein air, completed and framed, of CSV scenes. So I, and many of my colleagues, are working to complete some paintings that can be sold by August 2 dry and framed. (CSV will keep the wet and dry paintings for about a week after August 2 to accommodate potential buyers trying to make up their minds.)

(1) Moore State Park in Paxton, Massachusetts–A return trip to this enchanting place was definitely called for, but we didn’t get there in time for the big rhododendron bloom. That didn’t matter because there is so much there that inspires. I choose a prime lookout spot in order to paint the sawmill, and later tossed off a quick sketch of one of many rhododendron paths, adding the blooms we had missed.

(5) Tannenruh in Holderness, NH–A celebration of the fifth year of existence of the NH Plein Air painters brought nine of us to this private estate, once the site of artist Helen Nicolay’s studio. I spent most of my time depicting a corner of the house, combining porch, umbrellas, and birch trees. Late in the afternoon, I succumbed to the charm of the view of Squam Lake and painted the one I call “Helen’s Bench”.

I have been so busy doing artful things this month that I hardly had time to get work done for my law clients. You are going to hear about only those artful things that relate to actual paintings. After the Canterbury Shaker Village paintout, there was a Goffstown “Uncommon Art on the Common” paintout, then a Portsmouth paintout followed by a wet painting exhibit at the Coolidge Art Center, managed by the McGowan Gallery of Concord. Then I took off for a week in Rhode Island to get my fill of surf and rocks, plus some other goodies. All these new paintings (the ten after Canterbury) will be posted on the Newest Additions page, as well as distributed to their permanent pages.

My Day 1 RI painting is posted above, and it may be my favorite of the seascapes. I went at it determined to be loose and not fret about the shapes of the individual rocks. You may notice, when you visit the grouping that includes all of my recent RI paintings, that as the week progressed, some of that determination slipped away. But be sure to check out my boats, which I did the last day. I think there will be a lot more boats in my future!

Adding to my busyness right now is the preparing for two, no, three new exhibits and for Manchester’s “Art in the Park” coming up this weekend. Saturday and Sunday you will find me in Veterans’ Park from opening time to five o’clock. Then at the Manchester Artists Association Gallery at 1528 Elm Street, the “Twilight” exhibit opens on Wednesday, September 2. Reception night coincides with Trolley Night, September 17 (Thursday) from 5 to 8.

That night (Sept. 17) I will be splitting my time between the MAA exhibit and two others–Manchester City Hall and the Hatfield Gallery, both also stops on Trolley Night tours. At the Hatfield Gallery, I will be showing two drawings from the Saturday Life Group. At City Hall I will show mostly local landscapes, including the popular Nutfield Lane cityscape. Both the City Hall and MAA exhibits run for the months of September and October.

Getting everything selected and fit to exhibit (framed and wired) is not a simple matter. I also have to prepare for Art in the Park, which will include a display of my pet portraits with probably a few of the canine models hanging about to demonstrate how admirably I captured their likenesses in oil. The cats have declined to participate. I would love to see you there!

Don’t forget to check out my paintings at the Gallery at 100 Market Street if you find yourself in Portsmouth. That exhibit runs through October 24th. At White Birch Gallery in Londonderry, I am exhibiting three paintings. And in Derryfield School’s auditorium, one of my paintings is part of the “Small Gems” exhibit of the Women’s Caucus for Art. Contact me if you need more information about any of those venues.

Artists who keep up with their blogs must not have a day job. The only reason I have time to make this entry right now is that I am on hold waiting to talk to the IRS about a client’s problem. I even have a special “practitioner’s hotline” number to use, but it has been 20 minutes to reach the first voice, who apologized and forwarded me to a different department for another estimated wait of of 30 minutes.

All I really want to think about is my planned trip to Narragansett, Rhode Island, for a vacation of painting with high school friend Mary. I’m hoping the company and the surroundings will be as inspirational this year as they proved to be last year.

Meanwhile, my busyness overall has included a certain amount of painting. Unfortunately, the 3 products of last weekend’s paintings have not been photographed and are still in the hands of McGowan Fine Art at their summer satellite studio in Portsmouth (Wentworth Coolidge House). Sunday will be the last day of that exhibit.

The painting at the top of this entry is from August 2 at the Canterbury Shaker Village. The NH Plein Air artists converged on the site for its Founders’ Day and put our wet paintings up for sale at the end of the day. Here is my photo of the scene I decided to paint. .

Probably not. But I managed to find an interesting (to me) photograph of that sawmill, taken earlier in the Spring. I struggled so much with getting the perspective correct as I painted the darn thing. Now I sit and stare at my painting, wondering “Where did I go wrong?” Then I found this photograph in which the sawmill seems to tilt slightly. Or is that the perspective? I think it could be tilting because only the one side has the solid foundation of stone. This is definitely a good reason to go back there and get to the bottom of it, no pun intended.

Not that I have time to kill, but it would be nice to archive all those newsy bits that I have entered on my Newest Additions page. A blog enables that. Another nice aspect will be the ability to include photos of artists at work or scenes slated for artistic renderings–the kind of thing that I haven’t wanted to spend time on because it seems so ephemeral.

So henceforth, this blog becomes a combination of Newest Additions and Current Activities. I dropped the Exhibit Calendar page along ago because of the difficulty of keeping up with the changes. Now I can just enter the news in my blog and not worry about deleting old and outdated information. At least, I hope that’s how this is going to work!

Now, drum roll, for the first time in — months, anyway– here is where you can find actual paintings of mine on exhibit for public examination.

White Birch Gallery, 8 Mohawk Drive in Londonderry, NH: I have an ongoing presence at this gallery, with about three paintings at a time, changing out every two months or so. The next opening reception is scheduled for Friday August 7, from 4 to 7 p.m. I expect to be there for an hour beginning at 5 p.m.

Gallery at 100 Market Street, Portsmouth, NH: Paintings exhibited at this location could be on any one of four different floors of the building. I had 9 paintings on the first floor (very desirable location) in an exhibit that just ended, but will have 5 different paintings in the next exhibit that opens on July 31–the reception will be from 5 to 7 that Friday evening. I expect to be there for the reception.

MAA Gallery, 1528 Elm Street, Manchester, NH. The current exhibit is all photography, but I do have some prints in the print bin. (MAA = Manchester Artists Association)

Bartlett Inn, Route 302, Bartlett, NH. I have three paintings on display in the main building or in one of the guest bedrooms. This place is full of paintings by the many artists who have stayed there for the semi-annual artists’ weekends.

Travers The Village Eatery, 13 Main Street, Goffstown, NH. My series of four paintings of Route 302 in Crawford Notch are on the wall here, along with a painting of the woodland garden called “Evergreen” on Summer Street in Goffstown. The owner of Evergreen, Robert Gillmore, opens up his garden for a free public tour every now and then. I painted from a photograph that I took on my visit.

My law firm–Lotter & Associates, P.C., at 41 Brook Street, Manchester NH–exhibits paintings by me as well as some impressive works by other artists, including James Aponovich, Roger Graham, and Vincent Van Gogh. (Is this what artists mean when they brag that their paintings are in corporate collections?)

NH Institute of Art is currently exhibiting the works of their continuing ed students. Since I took a course last year from Adeline Goldminc-Tronzo, I was entitled to show one of my paintings done in that class. I chose my self-portrait because Adeline said it was her favorite. This exhibit will run until August 15. I missed the reception, which was on July 18 because I was painting in Holderness at the time.