Discover Jersey Arts - Featured Artist for December

I am very pleased to say that Discover Jersey Arts has selected me as their featured artist for the month of December.  You can see a virtual gallery with 8 selected paintings of mine here on JerseyArts.com.

"Grandview Sunset"
18x24" oil on canvas

Discover Jersey Arts (DJA) is a cosponsored project of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and ArtPride New Jersey Foundation working in partnership with other cultural service organizations statewide including the New Jersey Theatre Alliance, South Jersey Cultural Alliance, and New Jersey Division of Travel and Tourism. The project’s mission is to increase the awareness of and participation in the arts in New Jersey.

Kaz Country

There was a very nice article about me written by Gwen Shrift and appearing in this Sundays' Bucks County Courier Times - you can read the full text of it here.

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A big thanks to Gwen Shrift for the wonderful article, and to Bucks County Courier Times for publishing it.  Thank you!

Rich Timmons Studio & Gallery

I'm pleased to announce that I've joined the Rich Timmons Gallery in Doylestown, PA.   This will be in addition to the other venues that I regularly show at.

The Rich Timmons Studio & Gallery just opened this January -it's in a beautifully renovated 1850's Buck County fieldstone barn and currently represents over 35 nationally known artists.  I am proud to be counted among it's members.

These are the pieces I currently have in the gallery:

"Rainbow Run Winter"
Rainbow Run Farm on Rainbow Hill Rd, Clover Hill, NJ
12x24" oil on canvas

"Cornfield Trail"
at The Institute Woods, Princeton, NJ
11x14 oil on panel

"Bowman's Tower"

Washington Crossing Park, just south of New Hope, PA

8x10" oil on canvas on board  

My work on PaintMap

PaintMap is a new web site where artists can upload artwork and set the exact location of the painting on a Google Map. Way in the back of my mind, I thought it would be really nice to add something like this to my own website someday but I'm sure that would have been a lot of work, and thanks to the people at PaintMap, now I don't have to!

It's still a pretty new service but once it catches on and more artists from around the world add their artwork, it will be a really fascinating way of exploring the world through paintings. It seems perfect for landscape painters.

My paintings can be found there at joekaz.paintmap.com - I won't put all of my paintings there but I will try to add those that cover the widest geographical range (although my range is pretty small).

Garden State Magazine Winter 2007/08

Garden State Town & Country Living magazine has an article about me in their Winter 2007/08 edition, out on newsstands now through the beginning of March 2008.

Every issue features an artist in their Gallery section, and of course it was quite a thrill when they contacted me and asked if I'd be interested. Arts reporter Cathie Viksjo felt that my work has "a beautiful realism that our readers will like very much".

Since it's the winter issue of the magazine, one of my snow scenes was chosen to accompany the article - Amwell Valley Winter - a painting currently hanging in my solo show at the Triumph Brewery in New Hope, Pa., which runs until Dec 17.

I must say that I thought the article was a bit too flattering, but a friend said it describes me perfectly. One minor thing I'd like to correct though, is that when bicycling across the country, I rode pretty much straight west from Virginia to Colorado - not to Chicago as stated in the article - that would be crazy! From Colorado, we followed the Rockies north to Montana, then west again to Oregon. And it was a road bike, not a dirt bike. Other than those very minor points, I suppose the article sums me up pretty well:

You can read the rest of the article here on my website.

The Dvoor Farm Paint Out

Well, I went to the paint out at the Dvoor Farm and it was a heck of a lot of fun! I knew 6 of the 27 artists who were out painting that day. (There is safety in numbers!) There was live music and a big crowd of people wandering around the farm. The smell of buffalo burgers and freshly baked pizza was wafting through the air all day. Patricia, an artist painting with acrylics near me kept saying how she loved the smell of my oil paints and turpentine. Me, I much preferred the smell of those buffalo burgers.


Here's the scene I chose to paint - at the start, the wall was getting full sunlight:


By the time I finished, that wall was completely in shadow. That's just one of the big challenges of painting on location, especially with buildings - the light changes so quickly, that after a certain point, you're really painting from memory. I don't have a good image of my finished painting, but the Land Trust will be proving me with one:


I took these pictures at the end of the day when the crowd was already winding down, but it was a lot more lively earlier in the day:



I used to be a pretty shy person - still am, I guess - but my recent adventures in the art world have certainly helped me make progress on that front. The paint out really was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to attending the Fall Gala on Oct 20, when the paintings will be auctioned off.

The Dvoor Farm is a really incredible property, and I'm so happy to know that it's being preserved. I'm pretty sure I'll be painting back there again.

A Day on the Farm

On Sunday, Sept 23, I'll be participating in my first "paint out". What's a paint out? A paint out is an event where a number artists paint outdoors, en plein air, and the general public is invited to watch. The paintings produced are usually sold or auctioned off soon after, often to benefit a worthy cause. It's a bit of performance art I suppose.

On Sept 23, 2007, the Hunterdon Land Trust Alliance is having their annual "A Day on the Farm" - a fun filled day of activities at the Dvoor Farm on the Rt 12 circle just outside of Flemington, NJ. It's the big barn with

DAIRY COWS - HORSES

painted across the roof in big bold white letters - you can't miss it! The paint out is from 9 am to 2 pm - they'll also have live music, good food, a farmer's market, a puppet show for the kids and more - visit www.htla.org for a complete list of activities. It's free of charge and everyone is welcome to attend.

All paintings produced at this event are being donated to the Hunterdon Land Trust, to be auctioned off at their Fall Gala on October 20, 2007 at The Hunterdon Museum of Art in Clinton, NJ. Since I do so much painting in Hunterdon County, I'm happy to do my part, and I hope we raise a lot of money for the Land Trust.

Phillips Mill 2007 Poster

One of my paintings was selected for the poster for this year's Phillips Mill 78th annual juried show. This is the biggest, most prestigious show in the area and I feel very honored to be on their poster:


It's an honor, but there is an irony which every artist out there will appreciate: this painting was my entry into last year's show - it was rejected from that show, but ended up on the this year's poster!

Getting into some juried shows is tough, but not getting in doesn't mean that your painting was bad, the jurors could have rejected it for any number of reasons - sometimes something as simple as already having selected too many realist landscapes and needing more variety in the show. Or maybe there was just too much good art submitted, and it can't all be jured in. By the end of this week, I'll know how I fared in this year's show.

Here's a better image of the painting from the poster:

"Phillips Mill"
8x10 oil on panel

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On another note, the opening reception to "Finding the Extra in the Ordinary" went very well. The weather cooperated and we had a good crowd of people show up. I had my digital camera on my belt the whole evening, but somehow I forgot to take a single picture. I guess I was too busy talking with all of the guests, so that's not a bad thing.

Web Feed for my Paintings and News

I've added a web feed to my main website, joekaz.com, to list my newest paintings and occasional newsletters. It's way for you to easily know when I've added a new painting there. I post more paintings on my website gallery than I do to this blog, so there really won't be much overlap.

Rather than go into any more detail here, I'll refer you to this article on how to subscribe to my web site feed where I also try to explain what a web feed is in case you don't already know. It's a pretty cool web feature that many people don't know about, and you may find the information useful for other websites, not just mine.

Painting in Public

I got over my fear of painting in public years ago. It was a big hurdle for me, but I still prefer solitude and I usually seek out places where I won't encounter too many people. All but one of the townscapes I've done to date have been painted from photographs, and the one that I did do plein air was purposely on a quiet, off-season weekday morning. But that's about to change:

The Artists' Gallery co-op that I belong to has partnered up with the Kalmia Club this year for the 11th annual Hidden Gardens of Lambertville Tour - a self-guided walking tour of private gardens in the town of Lambertville. Several of the gallery members will be painting at these gardens as hundreds of people take the garden tour, and I agreed to take part. We'll have a fall exhibit at the gallery where we'll donate part of the sales to benefit the Kalmia Club's community efforts.

It'll be an interesting experience, and for a good cause, but I do have a few reservations:

1. Obviously the large number of people - I don't know if it will be hundreds, but it will be a lot more than I'm used to. I really don't mind an occasional break to talk to a passer-by - I usually enjoy that. But I'm worried that with too many onlookers, I won't be able to concentrate on the painting. You only have a very short time in which to capture a scene before the light changes it completely.
   
2. I'll be painting on unfamiliar ground. I'll have more than a dozen gardens to choose from but I've never been to a single one before. What if I don't find one that inspires me to paint? I'm sure the gardens will be beautiful, but I sometimes have a hard time finding a painting even in the prettiest spots. It's not unusual for me to go somewhere to paint, do some exploring, then head somewhere else because nothing was calling out to be painted.
   
3. I almost always paint wide open spaces. Here I'll be painting small gardens, and from what I hear, some of these gardens are very small.
4. The dreaded 'ugly stage' - as I've mentioned in my 2 demos here, the early stages of painting can look pretty dreadful. I know where it's going, but to everyone else, it'll just look like an ugly painting.
   

So, I may end up doing an ugly painting of something I really don't want to paint, as hundreds of people stream by politely saying "that's nice". Okay, that's the worst case scenario. Hopefully I'll have found a great spot to paint, met lots of nice people, turned out a good painting, and have gotten over my fear of painting in busy places. I'll let you know how it goes.

The garden tour is on Saturday, June 9 from 10 am to 4 pm, rain or shine. Please visit The Kalmia Club website for information on where to get tickets for this event. If you enjoy visiting gardens, and if you want to put some more pressure on me, please come out this Saturday!

Tagged!

I've been tagged Tracy Helgeson. Tagged? This is new to me but apparently it means, that I link back to Tracy (done), post 7 things that people don't know about me, list 7 blogs that I like, and let those 7 bloggers know they've been tagged.

Posting 7 things about myself, which might possibly be of interest to anyone... this will be tough, but here it goes:

1. I never knew what I wanted to do in life, so after high school I went to a community college to study architecture. I picked that because I really liked the mechanical drawing classes I had in high school. I had a lot of interests, but absolutely no direction I wanted to go in.
   
2. With a 2 year architecture degree, I still didn't know what I wanted to do. So instead of continuing that line of education, I bicycled across the USA: 3 months and 4500 miles of cycling coast to coast from Virginia to Oregon with 8 other people. (I flew back home.) We carried everything we needed with us: tents, sleeping bags, cooking gear, everything. It was the best experience of my life!
3. I've always had some artistic hobby: painting, ceramics, woodworking, bonsai, wine making, music - I play guitar, and compose music on the computer.
4. I am a social recluse - not a good trait for an artist trying to make a name for himself.
   
5. I make wine, but never from grapes. I figure there are thousands of wineries out there making wine from grapes, I have no interest in doing the same. But, I've been curious about dandelion wine ever since I read Ray Bradbury's book "Dandelion Wine", so eventually I learned to make my own. I've made wine from dandelions, apples, honey (mead), wild raspberries that grow in my back yard, tea (you can make wine from almost anything!), mint (okay, that one is a little weird but it's nice in the summer), and I may try making an oregano wine this year - that will be for cooking with, not drinking.
   
6. In 2nd grade I played Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol. I had one line: "God bless us all" which I delivered while standing on one leg.
7. I still don't know what I want to do with my life, but now I'm pretty sure it has something to with painting.

Seven blogs that I like:

1. The Artists Gallery Blog - I hope this isn't too self-indulgent - I do all the posting to this blog, but it's full of news from our art gallery and it's 18 members. We're an artists' cooperative, and it's a great bunch of people, so it's a pleasure for me to be running this blog and posting news about the successes of my fellow gallery members.
2. Deb Trotter - Cowboy's Sweetheart - I met Deb in one of Alyson B. Stanfeld's e-classes. I love Deb's Western Art with a sense of humor.
3. William Wray - this guy's plein-air work is pretty amazing. His gritty scenes of urban decay are very far removed from my tranquil landscapes, but he's got a way with the brush and I love how he finds beauty in such very ordinary scenes. A quote from his own website sums it up: "if Thomas Kincaid is the painter of light, I'm the painter of blight".
4. Peinando letras (Combining Letters) - This might be weird because this blog is in Spanish and I can't read Spanish, but I love looking at this blog. The imagery is really great.
   
5. Jan Blencowe - Art & Life - Jan is a plein air painter who's work I really like.
6. Danny Griego - Artist - Dan is another painter of urban California scenes, like William Wray, but stylistically pretty different. Maybe I need to move to California since I like this type of artwork so much.
   
7. Scott Adams - The Dilbert Blog - Okay, it's not an a visual arts blog, but it one of my favorites. Scott Adams has such a unique way of looking at the world. If you look beyond the humor, you sometimes find some seriously good ideas there. And sometimes it's just plain funny.

Now I'll go let these bloggers know they've been tagged.

The Road Less Painted

I was fortunate to get some good press for my solo show at the Hopewell Frame Shop. This appeared in the "Good Times" entertainment section of the Trenton Times newspaper today, April 6, 2007. Thank you, Janet Purcell, for coming to see the show and for writing this wonderful review!

(Click for a larger image)

Here's a better view of the image pictured in the article - a farm on the road that runs between Rosemont and Sergeantsville, NJ, one of the most scenic spots around:

"Along Rosemont Road"
11x14 oil on canvas on board

Subscribe to this Blog or Newsletter

I've added an email sign-up box to the sidebar of this blog. If you sign up, you'll receive an email whenever I post something new, so you can easily keep up on my latest news.

You may have noticed that I also have a newsletter that you can sign up for. So what's with all of the sign up options? Newsletter... blog... My newsletter is for the big news, like show openings, or a consolidated list of smaller news - on the average, I send these out less than monthly. My blog will also have the big news, but a lot of smaller things too, and I post here more often - maybe weekly. Some of the blog entries eventually get rolled into a newsletter. Well, now that I've cleared that up... Subscribe to my newsletter if you only want the big news. Subscribe to my blog if you don't want to miss out on anything. (Or subscribe to both.)

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Artsbridge Board of Trustees

I've been invited to join the Board of Trustees at Artsbridge, the premier arts organization in the Lambertville / New Hope area. I was honored when the president, Ty Hodanish, asked me to join, but I have to admit that I also had some reservations. Being on the board of a non-profit organization basically means that you're volunteering your time to help run the thing. My main concern was how much time it would involve. Being a member of 2 co-op art galleries already takes up a fair amount of my time but there's a lot of good that I get back from being in those co-ops. So what would the return be for being on the Board? I'm sure it will be interesting to see how an organization like this works. They put on 1 big juried show every year plus some smaller shows. Some of the other board members are artists who I really admire, and maybe working with them will be as rewarding as I've found the co-ops to be. So I've joined the Board and I'm sure it'll be an interesting experience.

New York Times

Last night was opening reception for the annual holiday show at the Artists' Gallery: Small Works / Stocking Stuffers. The show features smaller works from all of the gallery members. Much to my surprise, the New York Times printed an image of one of my paintings in their gallery listings:And here's a better image of that painting - it's a scene on the road that I live on:

"Longhill, Looking North"
8x10 oil on board

The holiday show runs through January 7 - I hope you can stop by.