Road to New Bern, revisited - by North Carolina Painter, Sue Scoggins

There's another show coming up.  This will be the third this year.  I feel like a machine. In order not to get burned out, it takes new venues, new subjects, and new techniques to get me all lit up again.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is find new subjects or a new story to paint.  It seems I've been painting wildflowers since the day I was born.  There will be plenty of them at the October show at the Little Art Gallery in Raleigh, October 10th.  It is so much fun, slinging the paint on in the beginning, Jackson Pollock style, then carving out those little peeps of blooms that are hiding in the middle of all the chaos.   But it's time for something new lest those wildflowers start to wilt.

Today, I decided I would paint over an old painting. The intention was to have another "subject" at the show. So often those beginnings turn out to be the best paintings!  While  perusing through some old images, I remembered the painting "Road to New Bern".  Every time I would go to see my husband, who was ill at the time, in New Bern, I would pass this old barn.  I had the barn on my mind. With all the colors of the painting still in tact, I decided to put paint on very thick with a pallet knife but let the random colors of the old painting show through in little peeps.  I began with large swipes of white paint for the roof of the barn.

Basically, the rest of the painting was surrounding the white barn with color.  

Lots of crazy combinations of thalo blue, pthalo green, and indian yellow.  Juicy color.  Pretty fun.

RECAP and ONWARD - Back from Shangri-La

Shangri-La was a place is the fictional novel, Lost Horizon, written in 1933 by British author James Hilton.  It was a perfect place.  A dream.

sitting on a table in a vintage shop

Spending the summer in Italy was truly that.  A pipe dream that, never in my wildest dreams, would I have thought would occur.  The people I met and the art that I saw was almost more than I could take in.  I saw art everywhere.  In the architecture, in museums, in cafes, at street markets, sculptures on playgrounds, symphonies at sunrise. And it was old art...an authentic representation of life.....a wedding, the universal love between mother and child (I could write forever about that), history over the centuries.  Where would we be without art!  Even the shoemaker! It became ingrained in me.  To think that 10 years ago, I didn't know a thing about art.  I had only been to Europe on a few business trips but never to "live" and experience it. The art that I saw was more than I could have ever seen in any art history class.  To think, people live and breath it over there.  What a privilege.  Arranged by a friend, I was even able to see the Queen's art collection in Buckingham Palace before I came back home. I am humbled to have been able to go.  I mean, who gets to do these things?

on an
Arezzo street

a wedding documented on canvas in Anacapri

bye little Rose

It's September 1.
Time to get back to work. I said goodbye to my little Rosie, picked up Peacock Georgio's feather, gathered fourteen paintings, carefully rolled them up, and carried them under my arm across the Atlantic.  Neither heat, nor rails, nor airports could keep these paintings from coming to Raleigh. These 13 acres of Italian Borgo San Pietro gardens, captured on canvas, have travelled on trains to Naples, ferries to Capri, planes to London, the Gatwick Express, and finally on American Airlines back across the pond to Raleigh.

trains

ferries

See you soon, October 10, Little Art Gallery, Cameron Village, Raleigh, North Carolina.