This painting is a composite I did using Childe Hassam's Conversation on Fifth Avenue and a photo I took at the MFA Boston.  The three women in front of the painting  were at the Art in Bloom Show which comes to the museum every April.  They were actually discussing a floral arrangement that was in front of another painting. Garden clubs from the greater Boston area design floral arrangements that go with a particular painting which forms the basis for the Art in Bloom theme.  The three women in the painting who are dressed in elegant afternoon attire are a sharp contrast to the three below them who are in casual dress.  I thought it was an interesting composition.  I put it on eBay one morning last week.  However a visitor from Florida snatched it off the shelf in the studio where it was drying .  He said it was love at first sight.  He bought it and it never made the eBay auction and I removed from my site.  I am always fascinated at how a particular piece can affect someone to the point that they must possess it. 

This piece is a rendition I did of Alfred Molina portraying Mark Rothko on Broadway in the play RED.  Lenore got tickets a month before the performance in which time the play received the Tony for best drama 2010.  We took the Bolt Bus to New York City ( a new adventure for us) for a matinée performance.  It happened to be the final performance.  The play was at the Golden Theater and was sold out.  As we seated ourselves, we could discern a figure, on the dimly lit stage, seated in a chair contemplating a very large red canvas.  That was the way the play opened.  It is also the scene that I was trying to capture in the painting.   The play was a tour de force and was about Rothko's dilemma over the Seagram's painting project for which he was proffered an amount equivalent to 2.5 million dollars in todays values.  The paintings were to hang in the Four Seasons Restaurant. As he approached the end of the project, he visited the restaurant and decided that it was not the audience nor venue for his work.  He then calls and returns the check solving his dilemma

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This painting was done from a reference photo that Lenore took  and a sketch I did in Bath ME on Independence Day several weeks ago.  It was a very festive day in Bath and this young woman was sitting on a bench singing.  She was not soliciting donations, just strumming the guitar and enjoying  her own world.  I have submitted the painting to the OPA regional show and submitted an image of the work to the August Bold Brush painting contest.  If you are on Facebook you can vote online for the painting if you like it.

I painted this piece from a photo I took at Gorgia Brown's restaurant in Washington DC last Thanksgiving.  Although the interior was inviting as a venue for a painting, the chef actually posed for me and this is the result.  The painting was sold on eBay to a women in Spain.  I later submitted an image of the worrk to the Bold Brush national contest.  It was juried into the top 15% of the paintings submitted