LINDA H. POST FINE ART

My latest exhibit, "The Willing Suspension of Disbelief", opened on April 25 in the big, sunlit upstairs gallery space at R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, MA. This was my 9th solo show at the gallery. Over the course of the next two weeks, as more space opened up in the gallery, my show expanded. By May 10, the opening reception, it was complete. The exhibition was extended twice, finally coming down on May 26. Four of my paintings were displayed in the center of the st

When I get to this point in a painting, it's time for me to decide where the boundaries of the finished painting will be. Since the canvas is pinned to the wall, and the size of the canvas is larger than the painting, I often paint outside the edges that were the original borders. It takes about a month for the stretcher to be handmade to my specs and shipped from California. So I have to make my best guess in advance as to the finished size and go ahead and order the stretch

This painting has been fleshing itself out (seriously, I've been working on some of the flesh) and I now have a working title. It's "A Willing Suspension of Disbelief", a phrase written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge about what constitutes poetic faith. In this case, it's about how one creates a perception of reality wholly based in the imagination. This is a pretty complex project. Not just the painting itself, which has a lot of moving parts and hard-to-paint details, but makin

The sky is still red. In order to create the sky-blue-pink I see in my head, it's important to work on everything that juxtaposes it. That way, I can work back and forth between figures, ground and sky. There are always adjustments. Do the heads emerge strongly enough from the background color? Does the sky give a feeling of infinite distance? How do I make the tents almost ethereal, blending with the sky, but still real? Lots of questions. The bonfire on the beach is coming

I often come back to the same models when I think about a new painting. (Not the birds. I always choose new birds.) After quite some time spent manipulating images of people and places, putting them together, pulling them apart, the composition settled down. Allison and Hannah (who have never been in my paintings together before now) became my muses. This one began with a snapshot of party tents my sister took on the beach in Provincetown, MA. I loved the light, which is alw

I started thinking about this painting - actually, dreaming it - last winter, in January. I didn't draw it onto canvas until almost May. Now it's July, and it's done! Since my last post, I had to make a decision about Adriana's dress. I wanted a bit of yellow, to bounce off the teal blue background. The deep shadows called for a pool of plummy purple. I also created some patterning in the cloth. The volume and expression of her hands and arms were integral to this painting. T

It's time for a breather. I've been working on big projects for the past few years, paintings that can take a year to complete. The most recent was "Sirens", a six by seven foot giant. I found an empty stretched canvas, put it on my easel (I haven't used the easel for a while, everything was way too big) and began a 30" x 40" painting - small by my recent standards! The model is Adriana, the same young woman I used in the foreground of "Sirens". The inspiration came from a ph

Nothing ever goes exactly the way you plan it. It is SUCH a large painting, difficult to measure accurately, and eventually we had to take t

The light is mysterious in this painting. Perhaps that's because I originally planned a brilliant blue sky. The deep red has a presence