This weekend marks the beginning of the six-week art show of my oils and watercolors atThe Winery at Marjim Manor in Appleton, New York. The Niagara Wine Trail Wineries are hosting Art Weekend, August 18th and 19th and I am the featured artist at Marjim Manor.
My husband and I traveled a portion of the Niagara Wine Trail on our anniversary, visiting a total of six wineries that day. Of the six we visited, Marjim Manor was by far the most beautiful in my opinion. It is situated near Lake Ontario in a beautiful fruit farming community. Owned by Margo Sue Bittner and her husband Jim, the Winery is operated by Margo. Jim Bittner is a partner in nearby Singer Farms; the wines made at the Winery at Marjim Manor are made primarily of fruits from Singer Farms.
The Manor is gorgeous and has quite a history that goes with it, including a few ghosts that seem to haunt the place. There is a beautiful wrap around porch where most of my oils will be hanging, while my watercolors will be hanging in the interior foyer. Follow the link in today's blog to the Marjim Manor website for more information and stories about the Winery and the people behind it.
If you would like to attend the show, I suggest you visit this weekend if possible because some number of the paintings will be gone by the end of the weekend. I will continue painting during the six weeks of the show and hanging new paintings as they are available, but I have no idea what the overall display will be like at the conclusion of Art Weekend.
Today I present to you three pieces from the show, and over the three weeks or so I will reveal one painting daily on my One Painting a Day blog, so that even if you are too far away to attend the show, you will get a chance to see all of the paintings. After Art Weekend, once I know which paintings are still available, I will begin offering some of the remaining paintings for sale via eBay auctions or directly on my I Live on a Farm website.
As for the sneak preview paintings featured on today's blog, I offer some background on each.
The first piece is a painting of an apricot that looks quite a lot like a peach. It is positioned in front of a pretty little blue butter crock I use for storing vintage buttons. This one is oil on pure eucalyptus hardboard; the size is ten inches by ten inches.
The second is a painting I created of two cherries my husband and I picked at the u-pick cherry orchard out at Singer Farms. We picked a few pounds of several varieties of their cherries one beautiful afternoon in July, and I photographed samples of each variety on my pretty north-facing stone window sill before we ate them all. For the art show, I created half a dozen cherry paintings. This is an oil on pure eucalyptus hardboard; the size is six inches by eight inches.
Finally, "Three Pears Laying Down". This is an oil painting on antique barn wood from our barn. Our barn is about 200 years old, and the cedar siding on it is about 100 years old to the best of our knowledge. During colder months and harsher weather, pieces of the siding break off and fall to the ground especially on the west side of the barn. I started collecting pieces of it last winter thinking I ought to come up with something artistic to do with the scraps of wood. One idea I have is to create oil painting on them. This is the first I have done, and I am pleased with the texture and the way the oil paint looks on the antique barn wood. The texture of the wood is quite rough, so I prepped it with three coats of acrylic gesso before creating the painting. The size is approximately three inches by ten inches.
In total, the art show will begin with twenty-one oil paintings and seven watercolors. Over the next few weeks I will reveal each of the paintings on my One Painting a Day blog, as mentioned above. I will be at the Winery at Marjim Manor Saturday the 18th from one to five, and Sunday from one to four ... so if you can come by and would like to say hello, please do. To those who have been sending their well wishes for the art show, thank you so very much. I will keep you posted as it progresses. Very best wishes, ~firefly