We Came. We Saw. We Ate Ice Cream.

Another Saratoga visit is history! For the first time I can remember since my initial trip to the 'Spa' in 2003, we had perfect weather. For me, rain and humidity in Saratoga is just a given, but this time around, after being overcast and muggy on Wednesday afternoon when I arrived (complete with a few token drops of rain, just to say it did) the weather was unbelievably beautiful.


One of the highlights of this trip was being joined by fellow equine artist and racing fan Sharon Passmore. Sharon and I were both Equine Art Guild members, and often correspond back and forth about racing, comparing our experiences and stories of the business. She was able to share connections that got us signed into the backstretch in the morning for amazing photo ops, as well as box seats for the races on Thursday afternoon. Add to that our paddock passes courtesy of the Beresford Gallery, which represents my work at their gallery across from the racetrack, and we were set! Juliet Harrison joined us Thursday, and after sending Sharon on her way home to Tennessee early Friday, Juliet and I took advantage of that backstretch contact for more photos. We also visited the yearling sales barns, and saw the recently renovated pavilion.


The joy of being able to rent a house for our short stay inevitably means ice cream. I can't help but take advantage of the US's greater selection of flavours (not to mention better prices!) of my favourites, Haagen Dazs and Ben & Jerry's, and fortunately my friends indulged with me! It is, however, tradition for Juliet and me to buy an overpriced serving at the racetrack at least once, which we did on our way out Friday afternoon. And of course no trip to Saratoga is complete without at least one stop at Mrs. London's for amazing pastries. We did a lot of walking, but I'm not sure it was enough to balance out the intake of calories!


I'm home again, and did make it back to the easel today. Each year I order some art supplies and have them sent to Juliet so that I can save some of the shipping costs. I'm anxious to try out some of the paints I ordered - decided to try some Vasari oils and see how they compare to my faithful Old Hollands. So far I've only tried one tube - the colour is brilliant, but they're a lot oilier than the rich OHs. We'll see how it goes.

One more thing that made the transition back to reality a bit easier - Ben & Jerry's on sale at Fortinos! Now if we could just get some of those flavours....

Falling Into Place

The local Friday paper always has all the flyers in it - sad, perhaps, that I look forward to leafing through them on a Friday night or Saturday afternoon. My motivation is pretty simple most of the time. I'm looking for things like ice cream and chocolate to be on sale...and usually spend the rest of the weekend talking myself out of stocking up. I've already got a trip to Shoppers' Drug Mart planned for this weekend, because they've always got a good selection of chocolate and as the day after Halloween, there's sure to be some good deals. Much to my excitement, I see that Ben & Jerry's is also on sale! That will fit in perfectly with my insane month! Do you remember cramming for exams? That would never be complete (or, perhaps, even possible) without ice cream and chocolate! It's kind of like that.

So, on to day one of my horse-a-day painting! I'm starting with horses on the farm. Today I painted Twine, a 9 year old Thoroughbred broodmare. This is 8 x 10 oil on panel, and I've used a very limited palette of burnt umber, ultramarine blue, cadmium red medium, yellow ochre, titanium white and a touch of cadmium yellow light. While she won nearly $160,000 on the track, Twine's claim to fame – around here – anyway, is that she's little Gracie's mom! She's in foal again, due in mid-February.

I'm really happy with today's painting, though it wasn't the way I anticipated working. My battery backup died last week, so outlets are at a premium until I replace it, which means not everything can be plugged in at once - power supply for the laptop, monitor, laser printer, giclée printer, external drive, scanner, USB hub...where did all this stuff come from? Anyway, my reason for bringing this up is, rather than print out the photo to work from, I decided to just put it up on the monitor and work from there. This is a little awkward, but I went with it. To simplify things, however, I decided to do the drawing in pencil so that I could face the monitor directly as I drew, rather than be looking over my shoulder sitting at the easel with a brush. I do intend to do most of these starting right with brush to surface.

I stayed up till midnight last night to start my writing project, and logged 1500 words or so before calling it quits. That means I still need to write a bit more today. Ideally, I'd like to write more than the 1667 I need to complete one-thirtieth of the total! I know there will be days when I don't have as much time as I'd like, and with NaNoWriMo it's not required that one writes every day (unlike this blogging and painting adventure!). It's only 6:10pm, so I have the whole evening ahead of me to get down some more!

See you tomorrow!