This little watercolor of the hunter ponies is going to be on display at a brand-new gallery that is opening up locally. I am really looking forward to the opening--it will be a fun mix of fine art, craft, and furniture. If you are in the Northeast Connecticut area, check out the Gallery and Shoppes at Celebrations in Pomfret, when it opens on May 5. This beautiful Victorian house, a former B & B, will make a fine showcase for art, and hopefully become a destination for travelers in our area.
I am also very excited about my Open Studio Weekend. I have hung dozens of pieces, made nice little labels for them, and have been working at getting some local advertising done before the newspaper ad deadlines.
But you know, all this, plus a hundred other things in the business of life have left no time for actually painting. And despite our earnest attempts to curtail our driving, it seems like I am always having to run somewhere in the car!
This morning, I had a respite from the merry-go-round in the form of a blacksmith appointment. Every seven weeks, I have the pleasure of hanging out in the barn for a couple of hours, shooting the breeze with my blacksmith. It's a much needed forced break from everything else. We can talk about our kids, our horses, the price of fuel, property taxes, local government, alternative energy...the topics are varied, and I always learn something. And while my boarder's horse is being done, I get a good grooming done on my mare.
On a totally unrelated topic, I just have to get off my chest---I hate lawnmowers! We have a riding mower and a push mower, and right now, the only working mowers we have on the property are four-legged ones. The push-mower is only a year old and won't start, and the riding one is about 6 years old, and has had to be serviced nearly every year, because it won't start. Starting a lawn mower should not be rocket science--it just shouldn't be that hard! So just about every year, we get to the time when the grass starts to grow out of control, and we can't mow because the mowers won't start. I know that neither my husband or I has the "tractor-gene", the innate ability to tinker with internal combustion engines.
The only way I would like to tinker with them is with a sledgehammer.
Whew, I feel much better now. And tomorrow, the horses get to graze on the lawn.

Alecia

Can't believe a month has gone by since my last post. The driving conference proved to be a pleasant show. It was an enjoyable time, talking to carriage enthusiasts all weekend. I'm signed up to do the show next year, so I'll be busy doing some more paintings with a driving theme. Now to get ready for the next item on the schedule--an open studio. This will be my first year participating in the Artist's Open Studios of NE Connecticut, and although the event runs for the first two weekends, I am opting to do just the first weekend. It's tough to give up two spring weekends in May to sit around waiting for visitors. After all, it is prime gardening and riding season. I do hope there will be plenty of turnout. I'll be spiffing up the studio, baking refreshments, and hauling all the art I have hanging in my house out to the studio to display there. It will still be a lot less work than hauling everything in my car to some other location. It's a good thing I have a month to prepare. Somehow April is so booked up with appointments, art openings, swimming lessons (for the six-year old), holidays and soccer. The month is going to fly.
The image I've attached is a mini watercolor painting. It's only about 3.5 inches across. I really enjoy doing these quick little paintings when I feel bogged down by a complicated oil.

Here is another in my bovine series of paintings, "Red Cow." This one just rolled so nicely off the brush...there was no struggling with composition or color, and I'm glad I was able to retain the looseness of brush strokes. It is a small painting, an 8 x 10 in. oil on canvas.
Well, it's the beginning of a week before a trade show, and with that comes all the stress of making sure I have enough business cards printed, wrapping prints and doing last minute framing. It doesn't help that my son starts swimming lessons, and the blacksmith is coming one of the days. And my printer decided to cease communicating with the computer, or vice-versa, and after spending a couple of hours backing everything up, and running a hardware test, (don't I sound like I know what I'm doing?) miraculously, everything started working again.
At least I have done enough of these shows to know that I will have enough done by Saturday--there will be more than enough to fill the booth, and the more work I bring, the more I have to carry.
The show in question is the Driving Forum. Although the only horse I have ever driven myself was a livery-stable rental on Mackinac Island, (the horse pretty much drove himself.) I have helped hitch and watched plenty of carriage driving events. I don't know if I will ever have my own driving horse, but a horse-drawn carriage is still one of those sights that inspires awe. Perhaps I will come away from the conference with a renewed interest in obtaining a carriage and getting my Morgan hitched. I guess I'd have to ask my mare first--she might have other ideas.

It seems as if I am always complaining that I don't have enough time to paint, however, this week, as I was updating my painting inventory list, I discovered that I had a whole bunch of new finished works to add. Some of them are little watercolors, which I am still in the process of matting and wrapping, but I have a few completed oils, as well. Keeping an inventory list, which I can sort by year, title, medium, etc... is enormously helpful in the business of creating art. You get to look back at which things have sold, and which items are lingering around the studio, and one can adjust working methods accordingly. I had so many new watercolors to add, that I had to create another page of watercolors on my web site. Also there is a new piece on the home page--one of my recent favorites. I won't repeat myself here, I've written a little about the piece below the image on my home page.
As of late, I've departed from the equines temporarily to paint bovines. One sunny warm winter day a couple of weeks ago, I took a drive around town looking for some animals to photograph with the digital, and I hit the bovine jackpot at a nearby dairy farm. Rows of dairy cows lined up to feed, right by the road. Those cows were certainly giving me the hairy eyeball as I parked and started shooting away. Some of them actually posed rather demurely. Needless to say, I now have endless fodder for a series of cow paintings. Pardon the pun.

It's been a productive day in the studio. A new painting was started and is well on it's way, and several works in progress have, well, made progress. The finishing touches went on a couple of things. One painting I thought was finished, and it already had a coat of matte varnish, and was ready to scan. Sometimes it isn't until it's up on my computer screen at 300 dpi, that I realize that something just isn't right. So it was back to the easel with that one, just for a minor touchup, and now it will have to dry and be varnished all over again. The work isn't really over when the painting is finished. There is the drying time, during which it can look patchy and ugly until the final varnish is applied. Then after the varnish is dry, the painting must be documented, which used to mean waiting until several works were finished, then loading a slide film into the camera and setting up the tripod and the lights, and doing a full photo shoot. Nowadays, everything just gets scanned, at full resolution, then a duplicate is saved at a lower resolution for the website. The next step is framing, if the piece requires it, or sending the work off to have professional prints made. It can be months after the painting is finished that it can actually hang on the wall of a gallery.
Speaking of finishing things, I'll post the finished version of the Coach and Four watercolor. I kept this one light and loose.

The driveway is icy, the paddock is filled with snow on top of mud. Yet, I like this time in January, when there aren't a whole lot of things going on. I can finally settle down and focus on some work. Painting is progressing much more slowly this winter than usual. I think my new camera is stealing a lot of my time. I take a few pictures, I download them, I fiddle with them. All this time could be spent at the easel...but there will be time for that too.
I have a show to get ready for in March. Still far enough away to feel that I could perhaps have a new painting or two to exhibit. Yet I don't want to leave too much for the last minute. I'm trying to think about driving, carriage driving in particular. The show in question is the Driving Forum, a conference for carriage driving enthusiasts. I haven't been to a driving event in quite a while, so I'm going back through old packets of photos taken at the World Pair Driving Championships, Coaching Weekends in Newport, or other carriage shows. I've found a few promising reference shots, but it's hard to get excited when they aren't fresh and new. The challenge lies in going through the photos with new eyes, looking for something I didn't see in them before. The four-in-hand coaches in Newport provide plenty of painting fodder, Now to just sit down and draw all that harness and carriage paraphernalia. It's not just four horses--it's sixteen legs, four wheels, traces, buckles, collars, reins, and seven or eight people with top hats and lap robes! The image attached is of a work in progress, no background yet--it's a small watercolor, about 8 inches long. This size really helps cut down on the amount of detail I need to portray. The horses need to be darkened up a bit, still, and the background is just going to be a suggestion of the grand old trees on the Newport estate.

In my house, we know Christmas is over when there is some new project in the works. My husband seems to get a break from his freelance work right after Christmas, and there is usually some home-improvement project to do. His task this week is building some painting storage for me. There can never be enough space to store artwork, frames, matboard, and other big flat stuff, so he is constructing some vertical flat files under the stairs. I am spending some time in the studio too, but so far it's been on things like matting new prints, and tweaking things on my web site. My new Christmas toy is a digital SLR camera. I've been playing with it just around the house and barn, so far, but I can't wait to take it to a horse event! It is really going to come in handy when photographing horses for commissions, which leads to my topic of the day.

On my web site, I have posted new detailed information on portrait commissions, and how to think about photographing your horse. This is something that most horse owners don't think about, it seems. Folks say, oh, I've always wanted to have a portrait painted of "King". But now King is getting old and graying around the muzzle, and they don't have a single decent picture of him from his younger days. I hope the information I've provided will help, because let's face it, artists can't always work miracles. We don't know the horse personally, and don't know that he changes color with the seasons. I can usually move parts around a bit, like moving a leg back or forward, or putting the ears up. I like to photograph horses for commissions myself--I can remember things about the horse that might not come through in the photographs. Sometimes seeing how he moves helps me know more about how he's built. However, the advantage to taking lots of your own photographs of your horse is that you can photograph him at different times of day, in different lighting conditions, even in different seasons. I'm pretty much limited to the hour of time I can schedule a visit to the farm.

For more information on this, visit the part of my web site devoted to portraits: http://www.aleciaunderhill.com/portraits.htm

So here's a New Year's Resolution for all horse owners: I will take lots of pictures of my horse this year!
Even if you're not ready to have his portrait painted, you'll have a nice photo record of him for your albums.
Happy New Year!