Roses on Royal Albert

 

Roses on Royal Albert

6 in. x 6 in., acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas

$150 unframed (no frame necessary)

This piece originated as a fun little prompt from Instagram's #foodpaintchallenge and I had never painted a fussy china cup like this one.  I really wasn't sure I was going to enjoy it, but it was tremendously fun and I loved every stage of the process, which you can see if you follow me on Insta at @shawnemorrillrandlettart where you'll see some still shots and video of me painting this one.  I looked up this china pattern, because, well, I'm a curious girl.  It's a Royal Albert pattern called American Beauty, with it's lovely large roses and leaves swirled all over it.  I hope you like it!

Photo reference courtesy Dennis Pfeil @dennispfeil.art

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Emmaus Heart

Emmaus Heart

16 in. x 20 in., acrylic on canvas

Not yet priced; unframed

You might be familiar with the oft-seen "sacred heart of Jesus" image, on fire, wounded, topped with a cross and surrounded by thorns, popularized chiefly in the painting by artist Pompeo Batoni (1708 -1787). Batoni's painting is based on a supposed apparition of Jesus to Catholic nun Margaret Mary Alacoque in France in 1673.

This is not that.  Quite the opposite.

While the flaming "sacred heart" imagery is supposed to be a depiction of the love that Jesus has for mankind, frankly, I'm a Biblicist.  And the only reference explicitly describing a burning heart in the scriptures is in Luke 24:32.  And the heart doesn't belong to Jesus.  It belongs to His disciples.  

His disciples, who have just experienced the presence of the living, resurrected Jesus, Himself.

This painting uses iconography elements and is based on a stunning incident from Luke 24:13-35. 

On Easter evening, Jesus, after his resurrection, catches up with two disciples walking the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus where they live.  They don't recognize Him, and He doesn't immediately reveal Himself. He asks what they are talking about, and they tell Him about "all the things that have happened as of late" in Jerusalem over the Passover weekend.  He plays dumb and asks, "What things?"  They are incredulous and remark that He has to be the only person who hasn't heard all the news.  They express their great grief over the murder of their Rabbi by crucifixion, their dashed hopes that He was the promised Messiah, and their perplexity that they've heard rumors of His resurrection... and they don't know what to think.  Jesus chides them that they don't know the scriptures well enough, because if they did, they'd understand that the Messiah was foretold to suffer in like manner.  For the rest of the walk to Emmaus, He explains the scriptures to them to put together the puzzle pieces they aren't seeing. Upon arriving at their house, they invite Him in, and as He breaks the bread for supper with them, suddenly, they recognize Him!  

And then He just... vanishes.

This piece is an illumination of their wild exclamation to each other, right before they put their sandals back on and ran back to Jerusalem to tell the others:

"Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked to us on the road, while He opened to us the scriptures?"

The hand in the icon is Christ's.  Is the heart yours? 

For those who may be unfamiliar with Greek icons, allow me to decode what you're looking at. The IX XC inscription is a Christogram: the iconographical shorthand for Jesus Christ.  The Greek inscription Εμμαύς Καρδιά is Emmaus Heart.  The circular nimbus around the hand holding the heart with the cruciform elements around the outside edge denotes Christ and the Greek letters contained there Ὁ Ὤ Ν means "He who is."

Protest Art

 

Protest Art

8 in. x 8 in., acrylic on cradled wood

$170 unframed (no frame necessary)

Ubiquitous in gardens across the UK and Europe, tasty gooseberries of many varieties, used in jams, pies and sauces, or eaten out of hand, are found everywhere.  Everywhere over there. 

Let me explain.  When I was a little girl, I started life picking these wonderful sweet-tart, vaguely grape-like berries every summer from the sprawling, thickety, green bushes, careful not to catch my fat little fingers on the thorns.  My parents had them on their property when they bought their house in the 1950s.  I was born in 1969 and relished the cool pop of gooseberries on my tongue every July.  I remember my dad, an avid gardener, wanting to add to the ones we had, and browsing the Miller Seed Catalog from Canandaigua, NY, discovering other varieties, purply-red ones, golden ones, and other kinds of green ones like these.  He mailed in his order and that was that.  A week later, he received a call from the nursery at Miller's.  "I'm sorry, Mr. Morrill.  I'm afraid we can't ship you the gooseberry bushes you ordered."  The nurseryman explained that in the early 1900s, a federal ban was issued on all Ribes family fruiting shrubs, because they could carry a blister that harmed white pines.  Mainly aimed at black and red currant varieties, the family also included, unfortunately, gooseberries. They pulled them up wherever they could find them, and burned them, nearly eradicating them.  That's why most Americans now have never heard of them.  And until the day of the phone call from Miller's, dad had never heard of the ban.  Apparently, the bushes we owned had been missed during the gooseberry and currant holocaust, and dad had no idea.  The plethora of big white pines crowding the driveway by the woods never seemed to care about our little bushes way over on the other side.

He dug them up and took them when we moved to a different house in second grade.  The bushes were looking pretty ragged, weathered and old by the time I left home and got married, probably getting punky with old age.  The pines there never once even had the sniffles.

The rest of the story goes like this:  In 1966, about 55 years after decimating Ribes in this country, the US lifted the federal ban and now you can grow them in the US.  Yay!  However, a handful of states still have them on the banned list or tightly regulated.  My state is one of them.  

I'm mad about it, and this is my protest art.  I can walk down the street and catch the whiff of a skunky cloud of smoldering marijuana that muddles the brain and stunts the spirit and no one does a thing about it. But I never smell gooseberries on anyone's breath.  If I did, I'd have to call the Agricultural Schutzstaffel with the shovels and blowtorches. 

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Winter at Portland Head Light

Winter at Portland Head Light

12 in. x 24 in., acrylic on canvas

$300 unframed

I love the coast in winter, at least to paint from.  The mood, landscape and colors are often more interesting than summertime, which can often appear bleached and muted by the full summer sun.  We were on our little annual winter trip to Portland this year and it had been a while since we pulled in to Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth.  This lighthouse is one of the most photographed places in America.  Even Edward Hopper gave it his treatment.  It's hard to get a unique view of this lovely place, but the view from the cliff walk, with the ragged, rocky cliff wall, the dead grasses, and the fickle winter sky was enough for me.  I hope you like it.

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The Work of Your Fingers

Psalm 8

O LORD, our Lord, 

how majestic is Your name in all the earth!  

You have set Your glory above the heavens.   

Out of the mouth of babies and infants, 

You have established Your strength because of Your foes, 

to still the enemy and the avenger.  

When I look at Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, 

the moon and the stars, which You have set in place, 

what is man that You are mindful of him, 

and the son of man that You care for him?  

Yet You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.  

You have given him dominion over the 

works of Your hands; 

You have put all things under his feet, 

all sheep and oxen, 

and also the beasts of the field, 

the birds of the heavens, 

and the fish of the sea, 

whatever passes along the paths of the seas.  

O LORD, our Lord, 

how majestic is Your name in all the earth!

The Work of Your Fingers 

(An Illumination of Psalm 8)

7 in. x 15 in., acrylic and gold metallic on canvas

$250 unframed (no frame necessary)

While reading in the Psalms, the imagery of the eighth psalm filled my mind with idea of the fingerprint of God.  I thought of the whorled pattern of galaxies and neurons, of suns and moons tracing their predictable paths, of planetary movement, our own system a labyrinth of ellipses.  The whirlpool of air currents and waters, the striated rows of both waves and plant cells and the helix of plant growth and DNA. All of these bear the characteristics of the divine fingerprint; the poetry rebounds from metaphor and surprises us with the nearly-literal.  This offends our sensibilities.  There's a certain amount of safety in keeping God cloaked in symbolism and simile.  We can play about with metaphysical wordplay, impress each other with our profound-sounding platitudes.  And while it is true that God is mysterious and beyond our ability to fathom, He also puts Himself right. in. your. face.  He writes His name with a child's fat-fisted scrawl; He pushes His signatory crayon hard into the pulp of His creation, watching you to see if you will be willing to notice the deep trenches of his patterned marks, or else turning aside to be preoccupied with the randomness of the errant wax flakes.  In all these things, everything lives and moves and has its being, from divine creatures and stars and angels to people and animals and plants and microbes and cells and elements.  And in the center, a single red blood cell, signifying the One who took on flesh and poured Himself out for humanity and creation.

Also, I dig groovy fonts.

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Tuckerman Ravine Trail

Tuckerman Ravine Trail

6 in. x 6 in., acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas

$100 unframed (no frame necessary)

A four-plus mile trail to the Mount Washington summit, the Tuckerman Ravine Trail isn't quite as steep as one might think, thanks to several switchbacks on the way up.  Some trail reviews, however, say things like, "wandering off the trail could have devastating results."  So, while there's definitely a way up the bowl-like ravine carved into the side of the Mount Washington rock pile, there's one SAFE way up.  In this painting, the clouds at the top aren't sky clouds.  It's mist surrounding the area above the tree line.  Welcome to New Hampshire.

Photo reference courtesy Mick Haupt @mickhaupt102085

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Acadia

 

Acadia

 20 in. x 20 in., acrylic on canvas

$600 unframed

This is a fairly large piece.  It needed to be.

Unless I'm in the White Mountains, Maine always feels so much more wild than New Hampshire.  Yet, because I've spent so much time there, it's so much like home.  In fact, geologically, it's much closer to New Hampshire than Vermont, which is made of very different stuff.  That's obvious just by crossing to the Shire-esque west bank of the Connecticut River.  No, Maine is largely made of great slabs and piles of igneous granite just like New Hampshire, along with pine needles and sand banks and brushy barrens and swamp maples and oak groves and clover-covered fields.  But the interaction of granite cliffs and salt water is what makes Maine so different from New Hampshire.  We've ruined our meager 18 miles of coastline with ugly traffic tangles, shops and arcades and sidewalks with parking meters that would steal one of your kidneys for payment if they could (I won't apologize for excoriating whatever leaders of state and coastal towns for overdeveloping it into abject ugliness... fight me, shameful scoundrels).  But Maine has managed to keep bit and bridle firmly attached to the would-be ravishers of much of its coastal natural spaces, and for that I'm thankful. 

I hope you like this piece of coastal Maine, with its tenacious, weathered conifer trees, its wildly changing skies and unrelenting tides.  A dear friend camped near here with her family and graciously allowed me to paint from what she captured while she was in Acadia National Park.  

Photo reference courtesy Kate Goodin

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Sunny Side Up

Sunny Side Up

8 in. x 8 in., acrylic on cradled panel 

$150 unframed 

Last year I painted bacon.  At the time, it didn't occur to me to move on to the obvious eggy follow-up.  When I paint, one thing does not automatically lead to another.  But of course, now I'm thinking about toast... anyway.  This wonderful fried egg was a fun and interesting challenge to paint, from the crispy golden edges to the scattered salt and pepper.  There's not actually a lot of pure, straight-from-the-tube white in this piece; the subtle pale colors swirling in the cooked egg white are surprisingly convincing and I was able to reserve the white for the few highlights. 

 

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Moonrise

Moonrise

8 in. x 10 in., acrylic on canvas 

$160 unframed

The moon rising in the inky darkness over water. As it peeks over the horizon, it casts a complementary glow up into the cloud cover and across the surface of the lake.  It faintly illuminates the grasses and earth on the near embankment between the trees. There's something cozy in a nocturnal landscape, and I aimed for looser, expressionistic brushwork here in an effort to capture the fleeting moments of cresting moon and the rapidly changing turbulence of the clouds.  Photo reference Jill Hatfield.

 

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