Truths about Art

 What one truth about being an artist would you share with a younger artist?

Plan carefully; Take risks and don’t stay in your comfort zone; Don’t expect the Muse to visit all the time, but keep working on something every day.

Color Pencil Study: The woods from Porges Road

 This is an effort to make a scene I'm quite familiar with more abstract

Domestic Scenes: House portrait; pond painting

  A client asked for a house portrait. Customarily, when doing a house portrait I interview the residents of the house to determine their interests and what unique things they would like in the completed image. In this instance they told me the location from which the house was to be painted.

Yet during an interview and a site visit it was evident that a key feature of the property, a koi pond, lovingly built over time by one of the couple, would not be clearly visible from the preferred vantage point. Additionally, on the site visit I could see that much of the family's outdoor entertaining and visiting was conducted from a deck overlook above the pond.  It seemed certain that providing a portrait without the pond was as if one did a portrait of a couple with only one person in the picture.

So I elected to include, as part of the original agreed upon commission price, the pond. 

 The house was painted in acrylic 22"x28". For many reasons, this one was more of a challenge, from how to make the base of the pond look like more than a pile of rocks to angles and quirky add-ons and how to make them appear as a cohesive image. The personalization make the complete picture easier.  

The koi pond is a watercolor. 12" x 16". This was, for me, a pleasure to paint. During the sketching phase, I observed a Chinese character for "Spring" on a stone plate. In interests of completeness, the other three seasons were added based, clock-wise, with the original siting of Spring. 

Commissions are often a challenge. Sometimes the query isn't clear. But I learn from each of them.

Acrylic: Mountain Range study

Some have asked why I don't work entirely on a single project before starting something else. Simple - it may be that I'm working on color studies, or certain brush strokes, or perspective (or something else) in order to more suitably complete the other work. That said, here's a quick landscape study.

Watercolor: Leaving Belize

Plein Air from sea cruise. In Private Collection

Keeseville - Gateway to the Adirondacks

This map was created on spec for a tourism plan for the village of Keeseville, NY. It never got used by the agency that asked for it, however it provides an example of an interpretive map project, combinging illustraion and text related to the village itself. The piece was eventually purchased and is now owned by a private collector who lives in Nrthern New York.

"History Lesson"

Identifying a handful of locations where Black people were massacred in the name of white supremacy. At least three sites were thriving Black communities that were destroyed; two (Tusla OK, and Ocoee FL) were by Ku Klux Klan members - one a direct assault intended to prevent black citizens from voting in 1920. The other (Seneca Village)m was destroyed by bureacuratic intervention/

Acrylic on wood panel in shadow box. 12"x20"/30.5x50 cm (c) 2021 Will Brady

Hunting Cabin - Whigville CT

Two versions of the same site, one a watercolor on paper; the other acrylic on canvas. I tend to paint "dry"

Peering out from Shagbark Lumber Shed

First Church, East Haddam CT - looking from Venture and Meg Smith's Gravesites

Venture Smith was a prominent member of the East Haddam and Haddam communities in the early 19th Century. Venture Smith was an African-American farmer and craftsman. Yet, except for his own accounts,  there seems little to document his contributions to Haddam Neck and East Haddam. This painting of First Church, Congregational, is thus symbolic perhaps. His family burial area at the cemetery adjacent to the Church is prominent and overlooks to the sanctuary. 

In his early sixties, he was unjustly charged with the loss of a white man's property and charged for ten pounds while visiting New London. Although being absent from the scene with witnesses, he was still prosecuted. Smith then carried this matter to other courts, claiming his innocence, but the judgment was never reversed. This misleading judgment was made out of discrimination against Black people. Remembering this experience, he said: "Captain Hart was a white gentleman, and I a poor African, therefore it was all right, and good enough for the black dog.^[9] "

It would not be surprising, then, that even though he achieved financial success before he died, that - as an African man - the powers-that-be kept a certain social isolation between the white settlers and Smith.   Just like the stone wall keeps the Smith family gravesites apart from the European area settlers.

Kidnapped when he was six and a half years old in West Africa and taken to Anomabo on the Gold Coast to be sold into slavery. As an adult, he purchased his freedom and that of his family.

Smith experienced multiple personal setbacks. He bought an enslaved Black man for 400 dollars. However, he wanted to return to his old enslaver, so Smith released him. Venture Smith purchased another enslaved Black man for 25 pounds. After his daughter, Hannah was married, she came down with an illness. However, her husband did not pay adequate attention to her health. Although Smith nursed her, she died.  

In 1775, Smith bought a farm at Haddam Neck, on the Salmon River, in Connecticut. By 1778 he had expanded the initial 10 acres to form a farm of at least 130 acres. Additionally, he made a living by fishing, whaling, farming his land, and trading in the Long Island basin.

He lived the remainder of his life at Haddam Neck.^[1] 

(Birth name: Broteer Furro) (c. 1729 – 1805)

Venture Smith (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_Smith
 

Acrylic on board: The Pond"

 

In private collection

Watercolor/Gouache: Volcano Walker

Based on a 2016 documentary film Into the Inferno film directed by Werner Herzog-

 

plein air : At the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, Lavore, TN

This Historic site, The Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, in Lavore, TN, is on a river that was dammed up in the 1960s, in order for the Tennesee Valley Authority to build a nucear power plant. The construction resulted in flooding lands where members of the Cherokee Nation had been living.

Naming the site after a local Native American Indian was considered a small political token to the Cherokee in compensation for the dam-flooding and destruction of their historic sites that TVA required to control flooding on the Tennessee River.

 At the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, Lavore, TN ~ plein air watercolor (c) 2011 / Will Brady

In a sense, the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum is also a monument to the "Second Trail of Tears" for the Cherokee Nation.

Acrylic painting ~ "Fully Involved"

 "Fully Involved"

acrylic on canvas in frame.

Doing this was particularly intriguing - taking on a triple challenge of depicting water, fire and a night scene in the same piece.

(c) 2021 / Will Brady - in private collection

acrylic painting: Pheasant's Eye

 

oil painting: Rose of Cairo

This is the Nile River delta. The colors are infrared colors so the large red section in the picture are actually agricultural fields. 

oil on canvas board. 

  

 

combine: "La Guerre des Anglais et Indiennes"

 I was with friends recently who asked about if I'd completed any new combines, and I mentioned "La Guerre des Anglais et Indiennes" and they automatically reflex-stated "The French and Indian War".

So well incorporated is this war in the American psyche as the latter, the people fail to see that this is titled as the Canadians (the Quebecers, in particular) describe the war, which was about the exploitive English who made alliances with some of the Iroquois to fight the French and English colonists

watercolor: "The Basics About Painting"

 

watercolor: From a Dream

 

September Watercolors

 

Pennsylvania Farmlands

Chrysler Building NYC

Moodus Res from MSC

Shady Acre, San Diego Area