Color Inspiration—Swiss chard

Swiss Chard is easy to grow and great in the garden for eating of course, but it also looks impressive en mass as a bold and colorful garden design element. Try planting some in your flower bed. Here they look nice and springy!

To see more colors, click on the red "color inspiration" label below.

Speckled lilliputian wonders

Behold these speckled lilliputian wonders! Aren't these little quail eggs perfectly darling? A local market carries them regularly, and not just at Easter when all manner of eggs—plastic and organic—are ubiquitous. I love the varying dotted egg exterior, and how the inside of the shell is lined every so faintly with the robin's eggs blue color. For those who are curious, their taste is very similar to a chicken egg. Though these quail eggs are certainly not plovers' eggs, they always remind me of that great passage in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited when, at his room in Oxford, Sebastian Flyte treated Charles Ryder and other schoolmates to a feast that included champagne and plovers' eggs—an opulent and rare delicacy. 

"The first this year," they said. 

"Where do you get them?"

"Mummy sends them from Brideshead. 

They always lay early for her." 

When the eggs were done and we 

were eating lobster Newburg, 

the last guest arrived.

+ + +

"I’ve just counted them,” he said. 

“There were five each and two over,

 so I’m having the two. I’m 

unaccountably hungry to-day."

Oh right—mummy sends them. 

Darn good maple syrup

Thank you Kim Bartlett, for your delicious maple syrup! We anointed our buttery orange French toast with your humble tree sap, which you have alchemistically boiled down to a sweet and luscious golden syrup. It really is darn good!

Big, fluffy clouds

Fluffy clouds over Fox Creek,  18 x 18 

I am delighted to have sold this painting this week to a wonderful couple from Wayland, MA. I was joking with the buyer—a very talented abstract artist—that perhaps she should paint the wall it will hang on a turquoise color to bring out the bits of turquoise in the painting. This piece is also filled with bronzes and dusty French blues, and has thick impasto texture. I hope the new owners never tire of gazing at those big, fluffy clouds.

•

SOLD!

Private collection, Wayland, MA

Detail

First day of spring!

Woot Woot…  Happy spring!

Officially, the Vernal Equinox
happens at 6:45 PM today.

We made it through one hell-of-a
record breaking snowy winter, so I hope
 you have a bottle of prosecco chilling!
Be there. Aloha!

Please visit her Mousehouses blog 
to see more of Maggie Rudy's fine work.

Farewell fiery path painting

Fiery Path, Halibut Point, 30 x 30 

I said goodbye to this piece today, which I painted of Halibut Point State Park in nearby Rockport, MA. The big draw there is always the massive old granite quarries and the rocky shoreline, but some of the pathways—like this one—are also quite beguiling and mysterious. This painting is now in the hip urban home of a Swedish fiber artist in Arlington, MA. I loved meeting the new owner, and I hope this painting gives her and her family years of pleasure.

•

SOLD!

Private collection, Arlington, MA

Hummingbirds + Flowers

Passion flowers and Hummingbirds  

These botanical paintings of hummingbirds and orchid and passion flowers illustrated by Martin Johnson Heade have me swooning on this cold winter day. What lovely and inspiration! Click here to see his complete works.

Orchids & Hummingbirds in a Brazilian Jungle

Red Passion Flowers and & Hummingbirds 1 & 2

Orchids And Hummingbird

White Brazilian Orchid

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Enchanting hummingbirds

A color plate illustration from 

Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Nature

(1899), showing a variety of hummingbirds.  

Color inspiration—Caravaggio's lips

Carravaggio used these lovely 

blush pink and peachy colors so well.

Looks like a Revlon lipstick ad, but really, I'm

just dreaming of those first blooms of spring.

To see more colors, click on the red "color inspiration" label below.

Renaissance Gold

Renaissance Gold  16 x 16

Here is another painting in my salt marsh series. I made a smaller color study of this scene back in June at Fox Creek in Ipswich, when the world was bursting with sunshine warm breezes—a far cry from the wintry white landscape I see out my window today. I have made this larger version changing the colors slightly with warmer peach and pink colors.

Renaissance Gold  4 x 4

This little gem radiates with the warmth of a 

summer morning on the Ipswich, Ma. marshes.

The Gloaming

The Gloaming  20 x 16 

Last June I made a small little color study (see below) of this lovely scene at Fox Creek in Ipswich, and I finally got around to making a larger painting of it.  I am inexplicably drawn to these salt marshes, and keep going back to paint them. They woo me. So I have been working on a series of works exploring the moods and colors of the Marsh. This painting is called the gloaming—those magical twilight and dusk hours.

The Gloaming  4 x 6 

Spring flowers for you

I'm just a little bit in love with Lulie Wallace's colorful, bounty of floral yumminess. She makes these simple floral vases burst with color, energy and happiness. At this point—at the tail end of a wicked New England winter—we're all craving color, or at least something growing and green. It's coming soon! Today is the first day of meteorological spring, so keep the faith people… spring is right around the corner, and with it will come real flowers.