Back to the regular paint-out schedule. This week we drove down to the Potomac and painted along the canal, at Riley’s Lock. It’s a long drive from Ellicott City, but I’d been wanting to paint there since I discovered it by accident last year. Barbara and I were the only ones who made the trip, and I have to say that, after anticipating it for so long, I really and truly screwed the pooch. It was just a bad painting day: no focus, poor composition, muddy color. I made a number of other bad decisions, too, such as setting up so that I was looking into the bright light coming off the water, which made me squint all morning and gave me a doozey of a headache later on. Maybe I painted so much the week before I broke something…like my art brain. No idea, but it was a disappointment, I can tell you, and the result went straight into my Portfolio of Shame. But there’s always next week!

I was lucky enough to be one of thirty artists selected to participate in the second annual Mountain Maryland Plein Air event in Cumberland, under the auspices of the Allegany Arts Council. It was a wonderful week: gorgeous scenery, friendly and hospitable people, excellent event organization, (mostly) great weather, and the opportunity to meet and paint with some truly remarkable artists. I completed 4 paintings the first day (what was I thinking?) and then was so pooped I was able to do only one the next day. I did make a stab at a second, in the afternoon, but got caught in a rainstorm, and by the time it cleared up, I realized I was just too &%$# tired. This was my first plein air event, and I realized that 1) painting outdoors once a week in a leisurely, all-the-time-in-the-world sort of way does NOT prepare you for the gotta-have-two-paintings-that-don’t-suck-by-Friday frenzy of a timed event; and 2) I’m not in my 20s (or 30s or 40s) anymore. But it was really a lot of fun, and I may even consider entering more of these events, once my feet stop aching. My sincerest thanks go out to Kelly Moran and Andy Vick and all the wonderful staff of the Allegany Arts Council and the Saville Gallery, who worked so hard to pull this off; to juror Lee Boynton for selecting a nicely eclectic group of artists to participate; and to the welcoming people of Allegany County who made the event memorable for me, including Henry Maier and his wife Nancy, who invited us up to paint from his property (I wish I’d had more time!!); the other folks who stopped to chat the first morning on Murley Branch Road and to suggest other great views to paint; the wonderful folks at the Stone Age Café in Flintstone, who also pointed me to some great scenery; and Ron in the red pick-up, who invited me to Forsythia Lane to paint from his hillside and gave me some great photographs of local scenes several decades ago.