Painting, Hiking, and Eating Peaches: An Artist's Year in Review

Another year has positively flown by. It was extremely busy with a lot of ups and downs. I moved up to working four days per week in my Archivist job, tons of events popped up to fill the days, there was hiking to be done, a garden to grow, and paintings to be painted. Here's a short roundup of the year in sections.

Painting

The theme of the year seemed to be quality over quantity because, although I am pretty sure I did not finish as many paintings as last year, those that I did make were very thoughtfully painted. I felt pulled into the subtle details of texture, light and line within each one, without the pressure to rush through anything. 

One extremely productive exception to this trend was the Artist Residency I had at the Shoals Marine Lab on Appledore Island, Maine during August. For two solid weeks I painted, sketched and drew every single day; often for the entire day. The time crunch was on to observe and paint everything I could. There was never any shortage of inspiration with the rocks, the ocean and the meandering trails all over this tiny island.

Alongside my own work, I had two large commissions this year. One was a beautiful New Hampshire Lakes Region scene for a home down there, and the other a favorite mountain view from the western part of the state. Commission work is always such an interesting dance. I want to paint scenes that really grab my interest while still creating a painting that shows off what the patron loves about the scene in the best possible way. No matter how many commissioned paintings I do, I will never not get that tiny voice in the back of my mind wondering, "but what if they don't like it!?" 

Hiking

I managed to get in a number of tremendous hikes this year. Things kicked off in February with a grand day snowshoeing to Mt. Isolation, which I had done only once before in summer. Next was a slog up Mt. Cabot in more challenging conditions in March. In early May there was a long, fun day going up over most of the Northern Presidentials on a lot of already melting snow and bare rock. All three of these first hikes of the year were done with my good friend Liz, who is always up for something adventurous.

Leading into summer, I went on an overnight backpack with a high school friend and her teenage son. We stayed at Jim Liberty Shelter on Mt. Chocorua and hiked out to the Kancamagus Highway the following day. Just a couple days later found me hiking to Lonesome Lake with a group to examine the history of AMC's Lonesome Lake Hut and view the hut's former site on the opposite side of the lake from where it is now.

In August I hiked into King Ravine and finally went up the Chemin des Dames, a trail I'd had my eye on for years. It was super tough and steep - certainly no easy ladies ride through the countryside! Later in the month I took an interesting jaunt up toward the Baldfaces with my other regular hiking buddy, Xar, to see the magical mosses, lichens and low shrubs carpeting the upper slopes. One combination hike and painting session was a trip to the ridge below Mount Jefferson in early October to paint the autumn view above treeline. This was a great day and I will certainly repeat it next year. Lastly, there was a magical day revisiting Zealand Falls Hut and Zeacliff with my old woodsman, Stu, in November for the anniversary of when we first started dating ohhhhhh so long ago!

I'm hoping there are still a few more hikes to be had before the end of the year. As usual, I don't think I got out nearly as much as I wanted to.

Teaching & Speaking

I did a lot more teaching than I've done in the past this year. First up was a class for young students in drawing what you see, as part of February vacation week set of workshops through WREN. I really wanted to teach some fundamental drawing techniques and came up with the idea of running an observational drawing workshop using repetition and line work to build a drawing 'scaffolding' first. Rather than diving right into drawing the 'thing' in front of them, I asked students to try to think of the object (in this case, a pair of wooden chickens) as shapes. Guiding them to see proportions and boundaries, we practiced "not drawing a chicken" over and over. The idea was to help trick our brains out of drawing what we think we know about what a chicken looks like and draw an accurate representation of the object in front of us instead. It was pretty fun, and it turned out to be the start of honing that lesson into a workshop I would teach five more times this year!

I ended up teaching the class again with a group of adults for the WREN Drawing Festival, three times during my Artist Residency with teens and adults (using a taxidermized seagul out on the island, appropriately), and again with a group of college students in the fall.

One other teaching-adjacent project was helping a group of students from the White Mountain School organize and hang a show of their work at WREN at the end of April. It gave them an insider view of the gallery experience and what it's like to be artists putting together a show.

On top of classes and workshops, I was invited by one of my local arts organizations to speak at their annual meeting on marketing fine art in the middle of nowhere - a topic I hold dear and work on for myself every day! 

Shows and Festivals

The year included two 'pop-up' style events at the Omni Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods. The first was in January when Jackson Art Studio & Gallery held a large, weekend show in one of the ballrooms. I sold three of my most recent paintings to one couple. The other event at the Omni was a Wine Festival, to which a group of artists from WREN was invited. A few of us set up displays and easels in the hotel's grand ballroom and talked with folks as they sampled dozens of wines. The painting I was working on during the event sold immediately, and I now realize I should have had a dozen similar pieces (scenes of the hotel) for everyone who inquired about the painting after it had been spoken for!

I was part of just a few group shows in The Gallery at WREN here in Bethlehem. The first was an eclipse-themed show (obviously we had to name it "Total Eclipse of the Art") for the big total solar eclipse on April 8th. Being on the Gallery Committee of WREN, I was very determined that there should be one accent wall in the gallery covered with stars, and I endeavored to find just the right wall covering to make it happen. I was very proud of the result. The show was brilliant, too, with all kinds of work by local artists riffing on the idea of eclipses and other major astronomical events. 

The other fun show at WREN in which I took part was a drawing show titled "Drawing Outside the Lines," to which I contributed three ink and watercolor drawings of local mountain and trail scenes. I conjunction with this, I taught a class of drawing what you see, again using my pair of wooden chickens as models.

Art in the Park has become a regular annual event, and this year was no different. I made the pilgrimage down to the Mount Washington Valley for this nice two-day show, met lots of wonderful people, and sold a few paintings. The market felt a little slower than the previous couple of years, but it is still a good way to get my name and work out into the region.

Additionally, I had my work hanging at the Pope Memorial Library in North Conway for a couple of months, and for November and December I have work hanging at the Littleton Co-op, just a few miles from home.

At Home (Gardening Edition)

The year on our tiny plot of land moved through its usual routines. In March and April my husband Stu and I tapped our maple trees, fired up the evaporator and made a few gallons of maple syrup. When the snow melted, we planted our vegetable garden of raised beds, and put in a bunch more fruit trees, shrubs, and flowers. Firewood was delivered in spring and stacked in the woodshed to be burned the winter after this one. Flowers bloomed, more rhododendron bushes were planted, and the lawn even got mowed from time to time.

One unanticipated garden feat was our peach trees, which ended up setting so much fruit that the branches on one of them sagged toward the ground. We had to thin down the number of green fruits on it just to keep limbs from snapping off. Even after that we picked more than 200 peaches off the biggest tree, and over a 100 off the smaller one. We spent the rest of the summer picking peaches, eating peaches, blanching, peeling and freezing peaches. We'll be pulling bags of frozen peaches from the freezer for the better part of the winter. It was astounding.

The rest of the garden was great as well. Our strawberry patch produced gallons and gallons of berries throughout the season, tons of tomatoes eventually came along, we rarely had to buy produce at the height of the growing season, and we harvested hundred of heads of garlic in early fall.

Growing food, creating paintings from nothing - it was a creative year on many levels, and regardless of all the tumult and chaos of the world, it was a pretty good one for me. Realizing that the years seem to be going faster and faster, my hope for the coming year is to slow down, knock out all the things that don't matter, and really focus on what brings me joy and satisfaction. Here's to a good year ahead and to the decent one just passing by.