Tuesday 207: Maine On Spring Break

Maine On Spring Break / 4" x 4" / 2015
Sale Price:$207.00 Original Price:$300.00
Add To Cart

It's only the last week of February but already I'm leaning forward, anticipating Daylight Savings Time, longer work days in a studio full of natural light, and increasing birdsong out the window. More wind chill advisories and snow may come, and I may not be traveling anywhere tropical in the month of March, but you can be sure I'm already swimming, snorkeling, and surfing in the studio. Studies say taking a vacation might not make you happier, but anticipating it will. Painting is, for me, an act of remembering because I work from past adventures and experiences; but it is also an act of anticipation. Oh to be that free, that immersed, that awestruck, that breathless, that filled with wonder soon -- soon when the painting is complete, soon when the seasons change, soon when I am in the water again. My imagination travels and so do I. So can you.

+++

Every Tuesday morning The Maine and jessicaleeives.com will post a new 207 Painting for sale. For a limited time these small works, each 4 x 4 inches on cradled birchwood panel, will be available for the special price of $207! Click on the image above to access the painting’s sale. New 207 Paintings will post each Tuesday around 5:30am EST and will be available on a first-come-first-serve basis directly through the artist’s website (no longer through a third-party auction platform — yeah for developments in soloprenuerism!). Should a painting not sell by midnight on the Saturday following its original posting, its price will increase to the standard $300 and be available through the store at jessicaleeives.com.

Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.

Water Warmer Than The Air -- a small painting sale exclusive to the blog!

I want to start the year off with a double dose of goodness so I'm offering a second small painting for sale this week. This painting isn't of Maine (did the bikini give it away?) but will still be available for the special price of $207 through Saturday at midnight. 

Last month I had the opportunity to return to Costa Rica for work. A friend and I created a portfolio of images and a video for my uncle's vacation rental listing. I'll share more information about the rental in a future post when I have more beach and surf paintings to show because, yes, alongside the hired camera work I took plenty of photos for painting in the studio back home. Making swimmer and surfer paintings has become one of my winter survival tools. The imagination is strong medicine. Second-hand Vitamin D is almost real. 

On the night before our flight back to Maine we spent every second of sunset playing in the surf at Playa Negra. It was Christmas Eve, and it was the most unusual experience of Christmas I've ever had. I think I understood the incarnation for the first time. I played and splashed and floated, surrounded by infinite bodies of air and water that were so...continuous, so infinite, and so close to my own temperature that I had moments of forgetting myself. And so it was, that in my moments of remembering, I was all the more aware of being miraculously, powerfully, and gracefully within my finite body.