Moved to West Hartford

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In late June, my wife and I left Durham, NH, and moved to West Hartford, CT. The move was precipitated mostly by the fact that the University of New Hampshire, where my wife was a professor of Arabic for 11 years, effectively terminated her by not renewing her contract for Fall 2018 (she was not on a tenure track). The reason seems to be that with her seniority, she had begun to cost the University too much. She was replaced by a younger, cheaper professor with a freshly minted PhD. This despite her superb record as a highly effective teacher who was beloved by her students.

Anyway, we sold our house and moved to West Hartford to be near my son, Remz, and his wife Norah and our two grandchildren. We’re settling in and are enjoying the area very much.

Once nice thing about our new house is I have a much larger area in the basement where I can spread out and really splash paint around.

It would be hard to call it a studio, since the natural light comes in only from two deep window wells, and I have to use some bright LED daylight bulbs to illuminate the place. But, as I said, there is much more room to spread out and get creative.

So one of my first creations here is this painting, which I called Beach Fires, Night. I wanted to do something to enter into a landscape painting show at the West Hartford Art League, which had the theme “Land, Sea and Sky.” Normally, I don’t paint anything approximating realistic scenes, but I thought I might give an abstract approach to it — and this is what I came up with. Kind of a twist on the traditionally bucolic beach scene.

The juror, a long standing and well known landscape painter, let it into the show for the month of September, where it was hung with a lot of nice scenes of beaches and seascapes and boats and such.