A little late as usual - it’s hard to keep a schedule when one is far from one’s home routine. However, I’ve done the three untitled collages in this post and have a painting on canvas of a whip-poor-will in progress on the easel I bought to use here. I’m back in my morning sun space by the glass doors off the back garden in the kitchen. I like it there and I’m out of Paul’s way in the studio. We’ve continued to run around Newcastle and it’s hard to remember what we did and when, but we did venture out to the IKEA in Gateshead thinking we were going to buy an ottoman but ended up with a full length mirror for my room because the ottoman we wanted was not out on display and we didn’t fancy buying something sight unseen.

Fancy - listen to me, two weeks away from the Cape and I’m losing my lingo along with my regular diet. Yesterday, I had my first piece of blood, or black, pudding at Ernest’s in Ousburn, the Newcastle neighborhood that reminds me of Manhattan’s Soho in the 80’s. I didn’t hate the pudding and would eat it again if it came on a plate of other things. I’m a fan of steak pies, and fish and chips, as well as bangers and mash since they do make delicious sausages in the UK. And, by the way, leopard print is everywhere in Newcastle including my closet, although I still tend to wear my standard black uniform and black slip-on sneakers. Mostly this trip has been about being domestic with Paul and building a home together. We both love flea markets and charity shops, and are not too proud to scavenge the back lanes for treasure like the dresser we found to store his massive DVD collection. Now, if only we could find a nice ottoman.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the art we’ve seen this week. There was a large installation by Fred Williams in the MFA post-graduate exhibition at Newcastle University which I found interesting - that’s a shot of Paul walking through it below. And Wednesday we went to a presentation of photos and a discussion afterwards with members of the SIDE gallery. You may recall how thrilled I was when they selected a photograph of mine for an online show a few months ago, and I felt so comfortable at this presentation that I plan to attend more when I’m here. But for now I’m going to bake some gingerbread for Paul and finish the whip-poor-will this weekend. Time is, as always, a’wasting - so on with the day.

I’ve been in the UK for a week now. Since I didn’t have a ride to the Boston airport shuttle this time, the trip involved three buses to Logan and way too much sitting around waiting, but the only drama was a man on the second bus cut himself and bled all over his seat causing the driver to deviate from his route to drop him at a hospital. This made some of the passengers, including myself, late for the third bus. However, the third driver knew we were coming and would be stranded otherwise so thankfully waited for us. Other than that, it was twenty hours from my door to Paul’s, and I got to watch Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride” starring Jesse Buckley and Christian Bale who were both amazing and worked really well together. So far, this visit’s been non-stop, and I’m only now catching up on my NY Times puzzles and had just enough time to create the Loon collage above, but we cut up cardboard yesterday and I have plenty of tissue paper and xeroxes of bird images to make more.

In the meantime, we saw the Trish Murtha exhibition at The Baltic. As you can see from my snapshot above, the photography was brilliant but the curation was, to my eyes, unfortunate. We also spent an afternoon pruning and weeding the jungle that is Paul’s back garden and have done a lot of shopping. Mostly groceries, but there was a bus ride out of town to a DIY store for materials Paul uses in his art practice that we couldn’t find in Newcastle. I also bought a vegan leather motorcycle jacket while looking for something more suitable for rain. The raincoat, I found yesterday. It’s transparent, plastic and leopard print but looks very “Vivienne Westwood Cool” and will definitely keep me dry. There was a dinner party at Shehla’s for Ian’s birthday on Saturday and that was good fun and relaxed. Yesterday we were meant to rest because Monday we took the Metro to South Shields and then the ferry across the Tyne to North Shields where we had lunch before walking through Tynemouth, below, and up the coastal beach to Cullercoats and were exhausted. But yesterday was spent doing admin and errands instead. So tomorrow, perhaps, as today we’re shopping for an easel and watching the solar eclipse if the weather cooperates. No rest for the weary apparently - on with the day

It’s been a busy week and there is lots I could report, but what I most want to discuss is the collage workshop I ran on Thursday. As I mentioned last week, I wasn’t sure if it was going to take place until two sets of brothers signed up together making it a Go. As it happened, those same four boys didn’t show and I was left with another teenage boy and a nine year old girl, both of whom blew my mind. Since I had set up supplies for six, the gallery owner and I made collages too. Along with the colored tissue paper, glue sticks and crayons I’d provided, I also had a stack of old New Yorker and Vanity Fair magazines as well as a folder of xeroxes of bird photos. After I showed the kids the samples I had prepared as examples and explained my process, they both launched into their projects. I watched the boy obliterate the xeroxes he’d selected by covering them with slices of magazine and wadded up tissue that extended off the cardboard he adhered his work to. He went through a few glue sticks and wound up with something both feral and very sophisticated.The nine year old girl got the brief right away and impressed me with her calm focus as she cut up birds to create a fantastic, fantasy creature - I could not believe it was her first collage. Then, in a moment of genius, she folded and unfolded several sheets of tissue to give her bird an enormous crest that also extended off the cardboard by at least a foot. The work was inspired and inspiring, so much so I did the untitled pelican at the top of this post during the workshop, and then did the vulture below at home two days later.

Before I properly start this post, I realized that last week I posted the first paragraph twice without the second one, but that has now been fixed. My apologies. Anyway, another early morning sitting by the open window in my comfy chair. Back when it occurred to me to move the bed out of this room and turn it into a studio, I never thought about sitting by the window in this very chair to write in my journal and drink my first cup of coffee in the morning. I slept in here and changed my clothes but that was it because it never felt right as a bedroom. I only hung out in here after the room switch, although sometimes it was too messy to do it. That changed with the series of professional studio visits I had earlier this year. The room got progressively tidier, more organized, and once the antique dresser finally made its way out and into the other room by the bed, it became more spacious and actually inviting to sit in. It still gets messy but everything has a place to go once I’m done with it. At the moment, there’s framing going on but nothing else to distract me.

In the meantime, I have news. Peaches, the orange bird with the fuchsia background from last week’s post, has sold. And this project I keep referring to but am still unable to discuss yet, and which by the way has a great deal to do with the tidying up of the studio, took another step forward towards fruition. It’s big, and I promise it will be worth the wait once it happens but the spooky old woo-woo Irish in me doesn’t want to jinx it. And as you can see, there are two new paintings, Cadet at top and Patience above, both on canvas and smaller than other recent pieces that will be at the Ali Gray Gallery for the Birds of a Feather show which opens this Friday. I’m not sure if the collage workshop will take placeyet, but I have a long to-do list for the show and of course, the big UK trip next week. Next week! Yikes! Best get cracking, Maureen - on with the day.

Greetings from my tidy and reorganized studio, where I now spend my cool mornings sitting in a shabby, uber-comfy, overstuffed vintage swivel chair by an open window, unless of course it’s closed because of the smoke from the Canadian wildfires that have been plaguing us lately. I had already put up sheer linen curtains during the first heatwave this summer to keep the afternoon sun from making the studio unbearable. Curtains also made the room, along with plants and an old Turkish rug protecting the landlord’s carpet, quite homey. Then my printer died a couple weeks ago leaving space on the desk for collages instead of doing them on my tilted drafting tabletop. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m preparing to run a workshop at the gallery and part of that has involved my creating collages to use as examples. The workshop may not happen now, but I’m okay with that because it has motivated me to do the two beauties above and below. I’m especially happy with the hawk, which was meant to be simple enough for kids to follow but took on a complexity that, dare I say it, is quite sophisticated.

Also in the works this week was Peaches, below, an 18x18” continuation of the Fauvist theme I wrote about last week. Fuchsia and orange, seriously? It works for me, and women in particular really like her, although I’m not sure about the men. All I know is I’m excited about exploring this sort of palette again since the early birds in the series had some very odd color combinations and I’m not attempting to imitate nature. I was getting rigid with that until working in black and white with the Charcoal series freed up my approach - as did the switch to canvas which lends itself to a softer texture that comes across cleaner, and, here’s that word again, sophisticated. Some use the term Post-Modern about my new pieces but I don’t think of my work that way. I’m more of an intuitive, instinctive painter. So bring on the fuchsia/orange and maybe chartreuse palette - on with the day.

Late again, I’m busy preparing for my UK trip, which is just three weeks away. Paul suggested we do a quick visit to Liverpool while I’m there, and since I’m the one with the Expedia hotel discount credits, I got to decide where we’ll stay. I honed in on the waterfront close to the Tate and found one in the Beatles’ old stomping grounds. Paul is in charge of the train tickets and keeping me entertained. No small task, and it’s a good thing two more bird paintings have sold this week at the Ali Gray Gallery so I’ll have a bit of mad money to spend while I’m away. Speaking of art sales, I’m happy to report that of the twelve paintings I had in last summer’s show where only my giclees sold, I have just one piece left. That odd delay also happened with my first show at The Commons, I only have one of those sixteen birds left now too. Lesson learned, it’s about the time and place, not the work, so there’s hope for the charcoals yet.

Another lesson learned is no work is safe from being repainted until it leaves the studio. Case in point, Peony, who I declared finished last week without feeling the love, then I redid the beak in a pale grey and VOILA, she was done and back in the gallery. I also revised the Crow, below, and retitled it Corvette. It’s now a companion to Savannah, at the top of this post - that’s its midway progression above as it slid into Fauvism, an art movement, which included Matisse, that got its name in 1905 because of the artists’ use of shocking colors. According to Google “Fauvist painters radically detached color from its descriptive function in nature. For example, instead of painting shadows with black or dark brown, a Fauvist might use vibrant purples or deep oranges to create a sense of emotion, rhythm, and visual harmony. Their work prioritized subjective, emotional expression over objective reality.” I totally relate. I’m ready to go all Wild Beast on a new canvas but first I need to do another collage for the workshop I’m running at the gallery before I leave for Newcastle. Only three more weeks to go, Maureen - best get on with the day.

I’ve finally finished, I hope, reworking Peony, the pink cockatoo at the bottom of this post, and have started a 12x12” canvas of a vulture. Peony drove me crazy as I realized, once again, how done I am with wood panels for the time being. Or perhaps, it was the process of reworking a piece altogether. There have been some that were quite successful but in general, a rework takes longer than starting something new, and whatever bothered me in the original version still bothers me in spite of any major changes I make in color or composition. Anyway, I think the cockatoo is done and I can get on with the new vulture.

I love the challenge of a vulture. Getting beyond what they represent and how they look to make them beautiful intrigues me. Some of my strongest pieces have been vultures, even if they don’t necessarily end up looking very vulture-like. Anatomical accuracy is not the point, I’m going for a bird’s integrity and godliness. Which Harlow, the horned owl at the top of this post, has in spades. People love owls and they are fun to paint. I have done a couple dozen of them so far and will continue to create them. One reason is that they look good at every stage. Above is Harlow’s first stage, and below he is halfway through. I could have stopped at either point and it would have worked, but for me, they were both still works in progress while I waited for the owl to come alive.

Enough about that - I have news. I bought tickets for a trip to see Paul in the UK the other day. I’ll be there for the month of August, which for those who live in Provincetown year round, is the best time to get out of here. July sort of sucks too, but by August the locals are moments away from slapping or screaming at any random half naked, oiled up tipsy creature who is expecting, demanding, to be entertained or indulged because, as they will loudly declare, they are on vacation. But somehow August suddenly opened up on my calendar and I get to miss it this year. Yay! In the meantime I have paintings to do for the upcoming show and a workshop to prepare for before I go, so on with the day.