Fall Member Show

Hurray! Fall has started and we have gotten our Member Show hung at the Jewish Community Alliance this morning. As usual. I'm so impressed at the quality and variety of the work our members have provided us to share with the public.

The JCA is a great venue as it gets a lot of foot traffic, so is a great place to display our work and educate people about the medium we all love. Even as we were just taking the paintings in and then getting them arranged and hung we had people constantly passing by and stopping to ask us about the work, the medium, and to tell us how much they loved the paintings.

The gallery space is a long hallway connecting sections of the center, and this is the finished product, with all our paintings up on the wall. How wonderful that we had enough artwork to fill the gallery space!

Don't forget that next Sunday, September 13, is our opening reception, 1-3 PM. Because of the kosher dietary restrictions the Hospitality Committee will handle refreshments, so no need to bring anything.  Just tell all your friends. The show will be up for the rest of the month if folks can't come on Sunday but would like to see the show. Here below are all the paintings in the show, but as I've said many times, it's very hard to photograph pastels when they are under glass. So these paintings will show some glare, they are not professional photos. And I have not identified the titles and the artists!

If you want to know for sure, and see them in their best light, you will have to come next Sunday. I hope to see many folks there. But in the meantime, of course, I hope to see many of you at our meeting tomorrow morning.

An exciting week coming up

After our summer hiatus we now have a busy week coming up, so much going on that I'm combining three blog posts into one in order to make sure everyone sees the information:

1) Receiving for our fall Member Show
Date:  Friday, September 4th
Where: Jewish Community Alliance, 8505 San Jose Blvd, Jacksonville
When: 9:30-10:00 AM

2) Fall kick-off FCPS meeting
Date: Saturday, September 5th
Where: Cultural Center at Ponte Vedra Beach
When: 10:00 to 12:00 noon

3) Reception for our fall Member Show
Date: Sunday, Sept. 13th
Where: Jewish Community Alliance, 8505 San Jose Blvd., Jacksonville
When: 1:00-3:00 PM

So there you have it. Remember to bring your artwork to the JCA this Friday morning. We only have a short window for the take-in, just 9:30 to 10:00 AM, so please try to be prompt. If you have a problem with getting your artwork there at that time please let us know, but we look forward to seeing you there.

If we don't see you there we hope that we will see you the next day at any rate, as we will be kicking off the new season with our first meeting at the Ponte Vedra Cultural Center. Our own co-President, Rick  Petersen, will be doing a demo for us. Please join us at 10 AM for refreshments, seeing old friends, and a great start to the new season. We may even get to hear about some of the events at IAPS that so many of our members attended.

The following Sunday is the reception for our fall Member Show. We hope everyone will come out to support our members even if you could not participate in the show. It's a nice venue and gets a lot of foot traffic, so your art work will be seen!

Just a reminder if any of you will be bringing food for the reception. The JCA only allows kosher food on the premises, so all our food must be dairy kosher (no meat). Fruits and veggies should be okay. Disposable plates and utensils should be used to avoid cross contamination. I was told that food will be inspected before coming into the building, so if you are bringing in any packaged foods please don't remove them from the package until after you have arrived.

We have a lot of events coming up for the coming year and I hope you are all as excited about them as I am. See you soon.

Castaway paint-out

It was a sultry day on Saturday when we met for our last get-together before the fall,with temperatures hitting 90 by the time we broke after our picnic lunch. Many of our members were also out in New Mexico also, but we still had seven stalwarts who showed up to paint and share a meal.

Because of the heat and humidity most folks steered clear of the lovely salt marshes, but looked for shaded areas to paint under the canopy of trees. The picnic areas lent themselves to this as the tables were all set in shaded areas.

It made a nice gathering place also when it was time to put the pastels down and have lunch.

As usual we had a great time sharing a meal with one another, and lots of water as well for some of us! It was the sort of day where you really needed to stay hydrated.

Interestingly most of us worked rather small.  Smaller pieces seem to be a good format for plein air, and many of us have gotten smaller and smaller at out plein air outings. Below are most of the works from the morning, in various stages of completion of course.

Just before lunch a few members rebelled against the idea of painting one more tree, so for about 20 minutes we had an impromptu portrait session. :-)

And that's it folks for the summer. Don't forget we kick off the fall with a Member Show. More details will follow towards the end of the summer.

Castaway

What: End of the season plein air paint-out and picnic
When: Saturday, June 6, 9 AM to 1 PM
Where: Castaway Island Preserve, Jacksonville, FL

This week is IAPS week, and lots of our FCPS members are out in New Mexico this week. We hope they are having lots of fun, and we hope to hear all about it later, but we can have lots of fun here too.

This year we are having our end of season paint-out and picnic in a northern section of our membership range, at Castaway Island Preserve in Jacksonville.

Castaway is a lovely little gem on the Intracoastal Waterway. It's a long slender park with walking trails that parallel the road into the park that are shaded, give wonderful views of the salt marshes, and also harbor small gardens along the pathways.

You can also go out on the boardwalk trails to get even more and different views of the salt marshes.

The boardwalk at the far end of the park leads out to a great view overlooking the waters of the Intracoastal Waterway.

There are also several picnic areas where we can meet at mid-day for lunch and, if we choose, a show and tell of the art work from the morning.

This is our last formal get-together before we come back in the fall. Don't forget that we will kick off the fall with our show at the JCA. Paintings for that show will be received on Friday, September 4th, which is even before our first fall meeting (which will be the following day, September 5th) so make sure you paint during the summer! We have wall space to fill up in September.

I look forward to seeing you this Saturday before our summer break. I hope the weather will hold and we can have a great day of painting and picnicing at Castaway.

Portraiture

Last weekend the FCPS was privileged to host a workshop with noted portrait artist Ann Manry Kenyon. We had a good group of eager participants at the workshop.

Students worked from a live model, and Ann was generous in spending time with students to give them instructions and critiques.

This was a big change for many of our artists, who often choose landscapes as their subjects, so it was a great opportunity for personal growth and stretching the limits.

How great it is to belong to a wonderful organization like the FCPS which gives us opportunities to do something like this. Many thanks to Ann for being the juror and judge for our Spring juried show, and for offering this workshop with her.

It's almost time for our summer break, so stay tuned for details about our last outing for the season in June, where we will head north this year to Castaway Island Preserve.

Complementary colors

Our May meeting turned out to be just as much fun as it sounded like it would be, with Lyn Asselta offering us all a mini-workshop in using complementary colors.

We had 25 attendees at our meeting, which may well be a record, that's almost half our membership, which is a great percentage indeed. We all had our supplies for the mini-workshop.

We all listened attentively to Lyn as she lectured us, and showed us examples of artworks using limited palettes and complementary colors'

Lyn chose the yellow and purple families for her complementary colors, where she had asked us to use only two complementary colors with three different values in each color, but you were also free to use red/green or blue/orange, and between the 25 of us we used all the different combinations.

After Lyn presented we all out to work on our own examples since we only had about 40 minutes to try to put her suggestions into action

Meanwhile Lyn continued to work on her own painting, and showed us how much could be done so quickly with such a limited palette.

We needed to be out of our meeting room by noon, so after 40 minutes we stopped to tape our own works up on the wall.

Even with such a short amount of time it was fun to see what everyone did using only two different colors, three values of each. Everyone did a great job! It's always fun to see the variety produced by our members.

It was also great to see what a wonderful article we had in the Jacksonville Times-Union "Beaches" section about the opening of our juried show the previous weekend. The show is up through the end of this month. Go see it!