People said nice things about my paintings. They said my work is getting better all the time. They said the paintings were alive and energetic and colorful. A friend of mine brought her children and forced them to take their time looking at each painting. “Why do you think the color reads so well in this one?” she asked her daughter. “Why do you think this composition is so successful?” she asked her son.

Several people told me they owned one or more of my paintings. One woman said she bought one of my small seascapes and hung it in her bedroom, so it’s always the first thing she sees when she wakes up every morning. “It makes me start the day happy,” she said. I had to blink away tears.

The first event happens tonight at the Sewell Gallery. It’s a fancy mixer, where potential patrons will mingle with the artists represented by the gallery. There’ll be food and booze and music and whatnot, and the gathering will provide the first audience for my new work. Arts Alive is tomorrow night and hundreds more people will come through the gallery. I already have butterflies.

These receptions are exhilarating and exhausting and sometimes depressing. A friend of mine – a fellow painter – had an opening a couple of months ago and someone said: “There’s only one painting in this whole show that’s worth a damn.” Someone else said: “I don’t usually care for your work, but this stuff isn’t too bad.” Of course, the compliments generally outweigh the stupid things people say, but the negative words are the ones that linger in an artist’s mind.

And there’s the concern that nothing will sell. Is anyone buying art these days? Even though I don’t paint to make money, it’s still thrilling to sell a painting. The revenue is always nice, but the real joy comes from the fact that someone appreciated my efforts enough to give one of my paintings a home.

We’ll see what happens. For now, I’ll put my worries and butterflies aside. I need to get ready for a party.

“Brick & Fire” 20″ x 20″ oil on canvas

My new show at the Sewell Gallery includes paintings of subjects that are within a mile of my house in Eureka. This one features my neighbor Curtis Otto, sitting on his front stoop reading the paper. The opening reception for the show is Saturday, November 5, from 6-9 p.m.

Here’s another new one at the Sewell Gallery. I painted it from a photo I took in La Penita, Mexico, earlier this year.

This painting features Adele’s Restaurant in Eureka, where Bill and I have breakfast most Sundays. It’s a kitschy atmosphere, with fake plants stapled to the ceiling and pink wallpaper borders, but they really know how to poach an egg.

ARTIST STATEMENT for INTERACTIONS

People fascinate me. As a painter, I’m visually drawn to subject matter that includes human beings. Cityscapes, interiors, and landscapes with figures are subjects I return to again and again. While I’ve generally been content to use anonymous figures as pictorial elements in my compositions, my newest body of work brings the figures squarely into focus.

“Interactions,” my current exhibition of oil paintings, includes multiple figures set in a variety of environments. My goal when I began this series was to focus on the relationships the figures have with each other as well as their relationship to the spaces they inhabit.

Each painting in the exhibit has a story to tell, even though I wasn’t necessarily sure what the story was when the work began. The people in the paintings took on their own expressions, postures and personalities, evolving as the canvases progressed, regardless of my preconceived notions. The more I tried to direct the narrative, the more the figures seemed to defy me. Titles popped into my head and lingered, titles that didn’t have anything to do with what I thought I was painting. “Just Married” and “Indecent Proposal,” for example, got stuck in my brain and the characters morphed to fit the words.

Painting people is a challenging endeavor, but it keeps me interested in what I’m working on. Human beings add a layer of emotional complexity and visual interest I haven’t found with any other subject matter.

THE EXHIBIT RUNS THROUGH NOVEMBER 26, 2010 at the Upstairs Art Gallery in Arcata