Roosevelt House, 20 x 45, oil on canvas

This is a painting I did in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh last summer. The woman reading shows the scale of these houses. She did not know I painted her in until later. Her husband commissioned the painting because they just love the kid-friendly street. I did it on location over a few days. And yes there were a lot of curious children.

On another note, Pittsburgh Winter, a large oil painting won the Clara A. Wittmer Award at the 100th Annual Associated Artists Exhibition held at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The AAP Annual is the longest running annual exhibition held in a major museum in the United States.
I'll be talking about the painting this Sunday from 2:30-3:30 at the museum. It was featured in the paper last week. Read about it here. in The Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Harbour Town Light House, 36 x 48, oil on canvas

Cathy and I were in Hilton Head last week so that I could do this painting for a friend. She actually took the photo that I worked from because the weather did not cooperate. I wasn't sure about doing a large painting of the light house because that's so ordinary and everyone else has already done it. Then it occurred to me that Edward Hopper did light houses and did them his way. So I tried a risky composition – centering the light house. The boats and trees were used in the foreground as an entry point and to offset the bullseye effect of the light house. These elements lead the viewer to the far left background. The hazy sunshine that saturated the scene required a lot of gray. You notice it in the water and sky. My palette knife was used to paint the entire sky. It created nice, soft edges to the cloud formations.