Oh, buoy!

Day #2. Will finish today. I love this fundraiser for Penobscot Bay Resource Center almost more than anything else I do!

If I were gonna make a habit of painting on buoys, I’d find some way to hold them steady. I painted on this one for five and a half hours yesterday, and it wasn’t my painting hand that was tired, it was the hand clutching the buoy.

I haven’t got a table per se in my studio, so I sat in the dinette in my kitchen to work on this. That had the advantage of being more comfortable, but it had the disadvantage of exposing me to my peanut gallery.

How can you tell the lobster is attacking New York? Because that's the Brooklyn Bridge!

“Do you really think a lobster could stand on his tail like that to attack the city of New York?” asked my son.

“A lobster could theoretically grow that big,” noted my daughter, who is a biomedical engineering major and presumably au courant on matters of biology. “Unlike humans, who have a finite number of cell replications, they can keep growing forever.”

Even my engineer husband and daughters haven't found a way to make working on this buoy comfortable. Any suggestions?

“However,” she added, “I think the lobster should be lighted from the bottom. He is, after all, in the City.”

I hate when my kids are right. But I also plan to finish this painting today, so they can have it in Stonington, ME, by May 15.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. My Belfast, ME, workshop is almost sold out. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

Help! I need ideas.

The buoy itself, awaiting ideas. Any suggestions, friends?

Last year, when I got a buoy in the mail, one of my kids asked, “Who sent us an oversized dreidel?” This year, we’ve moved on, so the question is, “What should Mom paint on that oversized dreidel?”

Once again, I’ll be participating in Penobscot East Resource Center’s  Annual Lobster Buoy and Reverse Auction. There are a lot of very witty buoys submitted, some of which you can see here.

Last year's buoy.

Penobscot East Resource Center works to rebuild a small-scale diversified fishery where fishermen and their communities are a part of the governance of fishing. They serve 50 communities from Penobscot Bay to the Canadian border. This is the most fishery-dependent stretch of the East Coast.

If you’ve followed the news, you know that lobster wholesale prices have been in freefall—they’re somewhere near a twenty-year low. This is devastating for lobstering communities. (The New Yorker did an interesting piece on why that hasn’t translated into lower restaurant prices, which you can read here.)

So they’re a good organization, and I want to support them by painting a good buoy, one that will make patrons smile and pull out their wallets.

Gnomes are known to indulge themselves at times. I'm leaning toward painting them, but am open to suggestions.

Last year I painted a mermaid on a rock. I discovered in the process that the tapered shape of a buoy makes a wraparound painting devilishly difficult. Still, I want to paint something realistic again this year (ahem). I’ve bounced around from gnomes to fairies to gluttonous gnomes feasting on lobsters while being serenaded by fairies.

Any suggestions, friends?

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!