What a week it has been!
My days start early as I head out from Queens towards Manhattan on the Subway.
West from Queens, early morning.
I exit the underground to be greeted by the beautiful red bricked Carnegie Hall. I then take a left northwest towards central park, the Arts League of New York is located just there off 7th Avenue.
Carnagie Hall.
Training and meeting with a master painter at the Art League has been a great experience and I look forward to many more creative days spent there. The studios are primed and brimming with history and energy. You can smell the oil paint and turps the minute you enter the vast building.
Paint covered Tables, Chairs and Easels make me feel right at home.
I am working with a group of painters under the tutelage of Gregg Kreutz - a very famous American teacher and a painter I greatly admire.
Gregg visits us twice weekly and makes his way around the group to each individual to discuss ideas around our painting. I find him so informed, quick and a real gentleman.
Photo of Gregg Kreutz painting plein air in New York City.
For me, as I listen to what Gregg might have to say regarding my work I feel it is as much about what he doesn't say - whats written between the lines - a deeper message. He might talk to you of how you notice 'silence' one morning when everything is quite and when that silence is disrupted by something small it may very well be the only thing you can hear is that noise. He talks of phenomena like this and how that sort of worldly phenomena can relate so really and readily to painting. Being in a place like this which so many passionate artists consolidates and reaffirms in me the notion that painting 'Is Life' itself.
It is that engagement, that total commitment that I am after to fulfill each day.
Since taking up my palette on Monday I have two near finished still life paintings. The first being a very traditional old masters style composition and the second more bold.
This mornings session was really interesting as we worked in the near total darkness of an early winter morning. The studio is lite by a natural soft light which makes its way through cloudy fogged out windows.
- Richard
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