The Veg Van is almost ready

What you see above is the "before decoration" view of the truck, and the next 2 images are of course the designs as they will be applied to the truck. Recognize those paintings?





What do you think, are these eye-catching enough?

If you want to look at the paintings before they became part of the design, look at my posts on 4/5, 4/19, 5/4, and 5/25 of this year.

Fran Durner, gardening writer for ADN, has just posted on her blog Talk Dirt to Me about the upcoming veg van makeover. Please click on the link and read her excellent article!

Many thanks to Alison Arians of Glacier Valley Farms CSA, and all the folks at Graphicworks and Norstar Color for their work on the scans. And a big thank-you to Fran Durner, who has been following our progress for months.

Keep an eye out for that Veg Van and please email me at info@carollambertarts.com and tell me what you think!

And while I have your attention, please come see me this weekend if you are anywhere near Fireweed Gallery in Homer. I will be doing a painting demo all day Saturday, July 18!

Fireweed sketch

Access to my friends' cabin is by 4-wheeler only, and I get to ride on the back, hold on tight, and enjoy the scenery. Riding along next to the railroad tracks, we passed lots of a favorite Alaskan wildflower, Fireweed. It grows tall, and kind of looks like a lot of people wearing pointy pink hats! The blooms start in mid summer, and when they get to the top, we know cold weather is only weeks away.

I couldn't stop and paint these on the ride, so this sketch is based a combination of memory and drawings.

8" x 10" oil on linen panel

To purchase, contact me at info@carollambertarts.com
$150 plus shipping, unframed

And for those of you who, like myself, looked at that last post and thought, "Wow, something funny about that perspective!" here is what I got when I tried to make corrections. Did I get it right this time? Maybe not, but this is a bit better. It often happens that I only see the glaring error after I look at the photograph, even though I've stared at the thing for hours!

Raising the Beam

Here is your typical Alaskan painter, mosquito netting rakishly folded away from the face, standing by the outhouse to complete a masterpiece. The sign on the outhouse says "Hippies use back door No Exceptions!" (outhouse humor.)


And here are her friends, doing their best to raise the beam of the new addition on the remote cabin.

And here is the mamma bear with one of her two cubs, visiting the area the next morning, just minutes after abovementioned artist returned from abovementioned outhouse!



Slightly out of focus because the photographer got a little excited. Also, bears move a lot. That's the cub nuzzling mom.

And here is the painting.

Oil on linen panel, 8" x 10"
SOLD

McKinley From The Ridge

I painted this one on July 3 from a location about 50 miles as the crow flies from the big mountain. We were visiting friends who have a great cabin outside of Talkeetna. When the mountain is "out" (that is, not creating it's own little cloudy weather system) this is their view! It's a challenge to paint the mountain from this location because there are few reference points by which to indicate its impressive size. It towers over the landscape. You see it here with a foreground of about a million trees.

The artist most associated with Mt McKinley is Sidney Laurence, who was actively painting the Alaska landscape in the first decades of the 20th century. His views of McKinley solve in various ways the problem of how to suggest its monumental scale. He is known to have worked near the Tokositna River, about due south of the mountain, and not too far from my location for this painting (I am to the Southeast). Here is a link to one of his paintings of the mountain with the Tokositna River in the foreground. More details on his life and images of his paintings can be found here.

This painting is SOLD.

6 AM Return

Here is the final painting from the Homer trip. Looking over these last 4 paintings, you can see that the landscape involved a fair amount of wet ground. I really loved those patterns in the mud flats! When the fishing boat came by, heading back to harbor in the early morning light, it inspired one short and one long stroke of the brush, and the painting was done. That was a fun moment!

10" x 8" oil on linen panel

SOLD

Homer Wetlands

The is the 3rd Homer landscape from my trip there in June.

Since the last time I posted I have been up to the Arctic Ocean and into the backwoods of Talkeetna. More paintings from those places to be posted later!

This view looks out at Kachemak Bay from the Alaska Islands and Oceans Visitor Center in Homer. There are paths through the trees that go down into the lowland area. It is all part of a larger wildlife refuge, where one finds lots of birds, plants, and ecosystems to explore. I was there in the very early morning, enjoying the peaceful and soft light on the marsh.

9" x 12" oil on linen panel

To purchase, contact me at info@carollambertarts.com
$325 plus shipping, unframed