Recent News from Chuck Paine's Studio

Painting is my life

I am writing this at the completion of my annual show. Things went very well this year. In a mere three days I sold 6 of the 13 large canvases I had done over the past year. I am sure that there will be enough new paintings to justify another of my popular shows in mid-July of 2014. So keep the date open and save space over the mantel for your very own Paine masterpiece.

I continue to obsess over the quality of my frames and their matching the theme of my works. Many of my frames will once again be hand-carved 22 karat gold-leafed beauties that rival the beauty of the paintings themselves. A 16 x 20 frame from Motyka framers in Central Falls, RI retails for over $1000, and I have no choice but to add that to the price of my canvases, but the combination of a work of art with a frame that is also a work of art creates, you guessed it, a real work of art!

I am largely self-taught and as a consequence there have been gaps in my preparation as a painter. In an amazing stroke of good fortune I happen to be located in the part of the world where one of America’s master painters, Ronald Frontin, not only lives but has recently begun to teach. Thanks to his generosity I have endured his “boot camp” and suffered through black and white renderings of colored bricks in messy charcoal and colorless grisaille in search of a better understanding of “values”. More recently Ron has graduated me to the use of colored pigments. Ron has, as the idiom goes, forgotten more about oil painting than I will ever learn. But the more he beats up on me, the more I see small improvements in my skills. If I live long enough, maybe someday I’ll be satisfied with one of my own paintings. Fingers constantly smeared with cobalt and cadmium and phthalo-cyanide pigments, will I ever live so long?

Chuck Paine
Summer, 2013