"Beckoning the Peace of Wild Things" Acquired By SMA

Beckoning the Peace of Wild Things -  by Greg Newbold
oil on canvas 30" x 18" - 2013

Permanent Collection. Those two lovely words now apply to my painting "Beckoning the Peace of Wild Things" which has been purchased through a donor for the Springville Museum of Art. The painting had previously been accepted into the 89th Annual Springville Spring Salon and was then recently selected to become part of the museum's permanent collection. The donor family felt that of all the pieces in the show, my painting best represented the values of hard work and the heritage of agriculture that the region was known for.

face detail

I am jumping the gun a bit by announcing this on my blog since the formal museum announcement has not yet been made, but I have received a check, so I figure why not toot my horn a little. At some future date there will be a press release and a photo op, but I am so excited, I wanted to share the news. This is the first museum to purchase one of my pieces for their permanent collection, but I hope it is only the first of many. More news will be forthcoming soon, but I am understandably tickled with this news. If you are in the area, the Spring Salon runs until July 7th, 2013.

PRINTS ARE AVAILABLE! Contact me through the email or phone number listed on the blog sidebar for pricing.

See previous post about this painting here

3 x 3rd Time's the Charm for Grasshopper Hunter

I was informed last week that my Boys' Life illustration "Grasshopper Hunter" received an Award of Merit from this year's 3x3 Illustration Annual. This marks the first time one of my pieces has been accepted into three of the major juried illustration annuals after it got into both The Society of Illustrators and Spectrum annuals this year. I only missed on Communication Arts or it would have been a grand slam for the annual shows I entered. Needless to say, I am pretty pleased. The annual will be published for the first time in hardback and I am looking forward to seeing it reproduced alongside the work of so many other talented artists. Congratulations to all those artists whose work was accepted, especially to several of my classmates from the University of Hartford: James O'Brien; Jim Cohen, Scott Anderson, Q. Cassetti, David Brinley and Scott Bakal as well as former student Houston Trueblood. Hope I didn't overlook anyone.

Samuel Holt Farm Signs

I had the privilege to lend three of my paintings to signs at the Samuel Holt Farm Park in South Jordan, Utah. This project is close to my heart since the park is centered around our family homestead.

This place was the hub of family parties and work projects all while I was growing up.  I spent countless hours there taking care of the animals that we kept there to maintain the agricultural zoning as well as tending the expansive vegetable garden that my dad grew.

 When my dear great Aunt Mame passed away almost a decade ago, it fell to my dad and my two uncles to figure out how to preserve the legacy of this farm for future generations. They finally came to the realization that it was impractical to keep the entire property and surrounding acreage intact

and a plan was made to preserve the home and surrounding buildings along with a key piece of the pasture land while developing the surrounding acres into a residential neighborhood.

The park land was passed to the custody of the city and the exteriors of all the buildings were stabilized and restored. The interior of the home will be restored in phase two of the project. Eventually the it will be available for recitals, weddings, family gatherings and other activities.

The paintings used on the heritage signs were all done in tribute to the place where I spent so much time as a youth and to the culture or hard work and living off the land that  I was blessed to grow up with.

Other posts about these paintings and another from this place here:

Unburdened- Process
Aunt Mame's Sheep
Evening Turn

How to Feel Miserable as an Artist

I was surfing online and found the following list which rings true to me in so many ways. It is part of an Artist's Survival Kit created by Keri Smith. If you or an artist you know is having a rough go at the moment, have a look at this and feel better. Sometimes all it takes is a little objective evaluation of the life and career you have chosen to realize that you really have it pretty good. I especially liked the exercise given in the kit about how to quit your job as an artist. The process involves getting a newspaper, looking at the classified ads, circling all the occupations in which you are a) qualified and b) would feel fulfilled by doing, then circle all of these. I suspect that there are not very many if any of those types of jobs out there for me, so I just pull up my boot straps and get back to the easel. Enjoy what you do and count every day that you get to paint/draw/design instead of figuratively flipping burgers as a blessing. Besides, most of us are unqualified to do anything else, right?

Something's Afoot

Something's Afoot - color detail 

I just finished up another really fun project for Pioneer Theatre Company's upcoming season. The play is called Something's Afoot and is a musical murder mystery farce. I know that is a mouthful, but it really is a musical comedy with tongue firmly in cheek. The premise is close to that of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians in which a group of ten strangers come together in a remote mansion. Mystery ensues as one by one they are all killed off. The movie version is played as a straight forward thriller while the stage production is played straight but for comic effect. 

My first proposal was to take each of the characters and portray them as photos on the entry wall of the ornate mansion with one of the instruments of death (the noose) dangling from above. The concept was not initially embraced mainly because the noose does not play a part in the story.  I take blame for missing that detail. I was next asked to draft an idea as suggested by the theater director in the art would show the young romantic couple with one of the dearly departed in the background. 

The resulting concept, which I actually liked, was also shot down as being too cold. I suggested changing the expressions to something more whimsical, but in a case of "what goes around, comes around" we went back to the original concept but with a chandelier playing the part of the noose and with revised facial expressions. 

In this version, many of the people react with surprise or suspicion to the other characters around them. Nobody was wild about the wallpaper pattern or color, so I found another option from a free stock site which I then modified and expanded to work in the background. All of the frame designs were based on vintage frames as was the chandelier which was originally found in a 1920's Sears type catalog. 

In the course of deciding what color palette to use, I thought it would be really cool to just go with a "Film Noir" effect and leave the the portraits as black and white. In the end, I shifted them to a slight sepia tone to prevent them from looking too "blue". The colorized detail crop at the top of the post was done to pop for web applications but most of the uses will be as they appear in this final version.