falling leaves 9-23-2013Falling leaves – watercolor on 9″x12″ 140# Arches coldpress

My brother who does not read my blog emailed me the story below.   He spends HOURS in his car commuting to and from his job each day and has seen many bizarre things while driving (sitting) in traffic on the LIE, the Cross Bronx Parking lot Expressway, the George Washington Bridge and many of the other terrible NYC roads.  My brother is one of the funniest people I know and is extremely talented and creative.  He really should be writing books or screenplays or TV shows.   Hey, anyone out there need a writer for a movie?   I got a guy for you.

So I’m sitting in traffic on the Harlem river drive rolling up towards the George Washington bridge.  I look over and the guy next to me is playing a trumpet in his car.

A trumpet?   That’s ODD I think.   Coincidentally I had my slide trombone with me so we engaged in an impromptu jam session.  Until traffic starting moving again, naturally.

The above painting was a fun experiment using leaves my friend Patricia collected in Connecticut and negative painting.   We painted with Joan Iaconnetti who I’ve mentioned before who is a wonderful teacher and painter of an underground/subway series which I love.  http://www.joaniaconetti.blogspot.com/  We chatted, laughed, ate organic apples from the farmers market, followed by yummy chocolate chip cookies.   We laid the leaves out in a pleasing design to get an idea as to how we wanted the image to look.   We then removed all the leaves but the first one and painted around the edges of the leaf.  We continued to do this with leaf after leaf.  We also made sure to go back and soften any hard edges we didn’t want.   Finally we went back while a leaf section was still wet to drop in some additional color around the edges of the leaves.   I had so much fun with this I will do a second one using an autumn color scheme.  Stay tuned.