My sweetie gave me orange-yellow roses (my favorite!) for Valentine’s Day, and they are keeping our house bright and cheery during the gajillionth winter storm. The sun came out, so I could take artsy photos of the roses in the front window, with the snow swirling around in the wind in the background.
On Sunday morning, we stepped outside to get a closer look at what Winter Storm Neptune brought us overnight. Another several inches of fresh white fluffy snow had coated the existing enormous snowbanks, and huge wind gusts were blowing the snow every which way. The snow banks are as tall as Brian now!
We had planned to stay in for V-Day, and since it was blizzarding out, we decided to stick to the plan. Brian made an incredible dinner, starting with an appetizer of seared scallops, and then an incredible duck risotto, with plenty of seasoned onions, shallots and garlic.
Major winter storm #3, day 2, 5th snow day of the semester … Mother Nature reminds us that there are colors other than white and gray …
After a delicious lunch, Brian, Stanley, Rachel and Olivia hung out while Mo and I worked together on a web project. A perfect mid-winter Saturday in between storms!
Started a lovely Saturday by attending a lecture at the Gardner Museum about an ancient epic tale, then snapping this lovely shot of the Gardner’s much-need mid-winter oasis of greenery, because I can! I do love me some ancient epic tales …
Another foot+ of snow on top of the two feet that fell last week …
The little ladies turned four on Super Bowl Sunday! We had to miss their birthday party, but we got watch the Super Bowl with the birthday girls. They borrowed my camera to capture a few portraits (and a lot of blurry randomness), and Laura took a precious photo of Uncle Brian reading bedtime stories. Go Pats!!
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum recently changed its photography policy to allow visitors to take photos of the courtyard (photography is still prohibited in the rest of the museum). This means that after ten years of volunteering and ten years of enjoying this incredibly unique and magnificent space, I can finally take pictures of it!
We have been out to Worcester several times in the last year or so, and yet we haven’t been to the Worcester Art Museum in a long time (since we first got together). What else is there to do but go to a museum on a rainy three-day weekend when football isn’t on til later in the afternoon?
A glimpse of lovely purple flowers at the Gardner Museum’s greenhouse before heading out in to the cold after a fun evening of volunteering!
Anyone who has been to my house in the last few years has perhaps noticed one of my paintings, which was hanging in our living room as if it was a finished painting (I don’t have enough storage space for my paintings, so works in progress are often ‘stored’ on our walls). That painting wasn’t actually finished until today.
Bates Hall at the Boston Public Library – by Becky DiMattia
oil on 12×20″ canvas
2014
Bates Hall is the majestic main study room in the Boston Public Library in Copley Square (click here for the BPL’s page about this room). On one of our many field trips around Boston, I took Brian to the Boston Public Library when I realized that he had never explored the library’s many art and architectural treasures. (photoblog post from that day in ’08 when we had only been together about 4 months).
It was an eye-opening experience for Brian because it was his first real glimpse of his father as a teenager, starting his lifetime career in the library industry with his first job shelving books in the spectacular halls of learning at the Boston Public Library. This past summer, Brian recalled that first visit to Bates Hall in his father’s eulogy.
I started this painting in Summer 2012, after getting a good photo of Bates Hall during my wanderings on a gorgeous day off (photoblog post from that day). Yes, it somehow took me two and a half years to complete this rather small painting. I guess I got distracted.
Also, this was probably one of the most challenging paintings I’ve ever done … partly because of the tricky perspective, partly because of so many little details, partly because it had become so important to us, but mostly because I tried two very stupid experiments with this painting. I thought it might be ‘fun’ to challenge two basic steps in starting a painting, and I now know better.
First, I didn’t sand the canvas. I usually use a very fine sandpaper to sand the gesso primer, and that gives you a nice smooth surface to paint on. I thought it might be interesting to paint on a rough texture, but it just made it hard for the paint to cover the surface. Basically, it felt like my paintbrushes weren’t working right the whole time.
And second, I didn’t start with a ground color. I usually start every painting by covering the entire surface in a basic color like yellow ochre (mixed with white) or cerulean blue (mixed with white). I thought it might be interesting to start with white, and then just simply not paint the windows. This did actually work well for the windows, but it made the rest of the painting really hard to paint. This, combined with not sanding the canvas, meant that it was just plain hard to paint in all of the details, and cover over every trace of the white canvas surface. For the longest time, I felt like I was getting nowhere with this.
But then I look back at the photos I took along the way, and I remember that this one really did come a long way! Brian worked hard on this too, providing incredibly valuable observations, suggestions, and coffee. It’s quite amazing how many of my paintings are starting to feel like our paintings.
A delicious meal at a cozy restaurant after an afternoon at a beautiful museum … pretty damn good. I’ve been to Grafton Street a few times, each with time with several years in between, so it was great to be back.
In mid-November, the Harvard Art Museums reopened after several years of renovations. Harvard has spectacular collections and a gorgeous museum, so I’ve been looking forward to this reopening for many years. I’ve been a little distracted since mid-November, but we finally got over there this afternoon and it was fanastic!
It’s winter break and I’ve been painting up a storm … stayed tuned!
I’ve eaten about a million tuna melts, but never a crab melt … until a few days ago. Turns out, it’s delicious. Three days in Maine, three crab melts. This one was the best: crab meat slaw, melted havarti and avocado at Robert’s Maine Grill right by the Kittery Outlets.
I had set my alarm so that I could get up nice and early to see the sunrise again — this time even earlier so I could walk to a spot along the Marginal Way that I had picked out the day before for optimal sunrise viewing — but my alarm didn’t go off! Instead Brian somehow woke me up just in time, and after bundling up (it was 20 degrees), I headed up to my spot … completely worth it. Absolutely, incredibly, fabulously gorgeous sunrise.
I woke up early to see the sunrise, and I was rewarded with some absolutely gorgeous colors. After breakfast, we took a nice long walk to on end of the Marginal Way, right near where we stayed in 2007. It was a clear day, and the ocean was a gorgeous shade of blue, so we took a lot of pictures of waves and rocks.
We absolutely loved our stay at the Beachmere Inn in Ogunquit, Maine. It’s a handful of buildings right along the coast with lots of porches and balconies for looking out at the ocean, a cozy little room for breakfast, a patio with a fire pit, and a kick-ass Christmas tree made out of lobster traps.
Since we had such an incredible view of the ocean, I wanted to see the sunrise. I set my alarm, woke up, saw that the sky and the ocean were the exact same shade of completely gray, and went back to bed. We headed down to Kittery, Maine for the outlet stores (seriously killer post-Christmas deals), had a late lunch, then headed back to the Beachmere Inn for an afternoon walk along the Marginal Way. We saw pretty much the same thing we saw yesterday … waves crashing on rocks … but since the light was a bit different, and it was still spectacularly beautiful, we took a bunch of pictures.
I needed to spend a few days curled up with a book somewhere extremely beautiful, so we booked three nights at the Beachmere Inn. The Beachmere is one of the few places in Ogunquit, Maine that is actually open in December. Oqunquit is a tourist town, filled with shops, galleries, restaurants, a gazillion inns, and an extraordinarily beautiful stretch of coastline.
In October 2007, right around the time I started dating this handsome fella who is now my husband, I spent a weekend in Ogunquit with my family. My first ever photoblog post was from that weekend. I have been wanting to show Brian this beautiful place, so even though December is not the most ideal time to go to Maine, we spent three days taking pictures of waves crashing on rocks, and it was perfect.
We arrived around 3pm, dumped our bags and headed straight to the Marginal Way, the walk-way along the coast, just a few steps from our room. It was supposed to be overcast the next few days, and I was hoping for a colorful sunset. Here are our photos from that evening.
We stopped for a delicious lunch in Portsmouth, NH on our way up to Maine.
