The Arms and Farms Expedition / part 1

Artists "armed and dangerous" in front of the Higgins Armory Museum, Worcester Massachusetts (from upper left):  Sean Murray, Ken Laager, Marc Holmes, Greg Shea, Richard Scarpa, Chad Smith, Garin Baker, Jeanette Gurney, Joe Salamida, John Caggiano

Last week I joined a remarkable group of fellow artists for the Arms and Farms Expedition to Massachusetts. Activities included seeing the John Singer Sargent Watercolors show at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, sketching at the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester and Old Sturbridge Village, impromptu roundtable discussions of art and plenty of good fellowship.

 At work in the Higgins Armory Museum blocking-in my en grisaille study of a mounted crusader knight.

James Gurney produced this video of our sketching trip to the Armory Museum.

With grateful acknowledgement to the Higgins staff, I want to offer special thanks to Greg Shea, Senior Museum Preparator at Yale Center for British Art who coordinated this great event.

(Photographs courtesy of Greg Shea, Laurel Holmes and James Gurney)

Autumn

Autumn Hillside   Franklin Carmichael

No season of the year stirs my blood like autumn.  I welcome it's bracing climate, so invigorating after months of summer's indolence.

Among all our senses however, it is the eyes that are most richly rewarded by this climax of nature's cycle.  The fiery colors of hardwood foliage here in the northeast are legendary, but at "the golden hour" when the setting sunlight raking through clear dry atmosphere transfigures those trees...

Albert Camus described it best:

L'automne est un deuxième printemps où chaque feuille est une fleur.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

Here are more splendid celebrations of the fall season painted by Canada's Algonquin School impressionists -- also known as The Group of Seven

 

Guide's Home   Arthur Lismer

Serenity: Lake of the Woods   John Johnston

Falls of the Montreal River   J.E.H. MacDonald

October Gold   Franklin Carmichael

The Jack Pine   Tom Thomson