My very kind brother Alpha helped me deliver my show to Dixon this morning. It was exciting to see all the pieces all dressed up and ready to go out on the town. It was even more exciting to pull up behind a huge Rodin statue to unload my work. I continue to be thrilled at this opportunity to have an exhibition in a museum, the kind of museum that has huge traveling shows by Rodin come through.

I got a sneak peek at part of the Southern Impressionism show in the main gallery, and I can't wait to see the whole thing. The museum reopens Sunday, November 1, after its summer of renovation, and my exhibition will be a part of that.

The official reception for my show will be Thursday, November 19 from 6-8, with my old friends the Tom Lonardo Trio playing jazz. I can't wait. I'll also do a gallery talk on Wednesday, November 11 at lunch time, talking about my art hero John Constable, how he shaped my art and subject matter and work habits. I'll also talk about the process of making multi-color prints with multiple blocks. It's a slightly arcane process for most of us, but great fun.

My week has mostly been prep for my Dixon exhibition. Work is due a week from tomorrow, so I've been working on getting final prints and framing. But I took a break to join the Memphis Urban Sketchers at the historic Elmwood Cemetery, one of my favorite places to go sketch. Because we were outside, Mr. Darcy could join me, which is always a treat, and it was fun to catch up with my friends after my recent travels.

After sketching a remnant of us went to lunch. The group kindly agreed to eat outside on the patio so Mr. Darcy and I could join them. We ate at Tart, and they immediately brought out a bowl of water for Mr. D, which won me over. And the beet/goat cheese salad was lovely.

So this happened today. I went to Dixon to have a final meeting before my exhibition, and Laura Gray told me there was a banner of one of my prints out on the corner of Park and Southern. The plants have eaten my name a bit, but it is a total thrill to see my work blown up and out on a museum banner. A career moment for me.

It's funny, because this morning on my walk I noticed a spotlight of a sunbeam picking out one tiny sapling in the Old Forest. I took a photo and posted it on fb. It felt like such an encouraging image that we all get a spotlight at some point in our life. This afternoon when I saw the banner, I flashed back to that spotlight, feeling like it had been an omen. I just read The Alchemist last week, and it talks about being open to and aware of the omens in your life. It feels superstitious to me to wait around on them for decision making, but a wise man of my acquaintance today said, when I told him of my feeling about an omen, "A lovely thought. It's good to cultivate a sense of wonder wherever you go." I love that idea of being open to wonder around me. And, as E.M. Forster said, "Only connect."

A lovely day.

I've been focusing and printmaking and sketching the last few years, but Dixon wanted some oils as well for my fall exhibition with them. It took me a while to get my head back in this space, but I've been flipping through some sketchbooks and found several images I'd enjoy painting, and I really have been having a ball. There's something very immediate and responsive about oils. They're lush.

I'm also enjoying revisiting a special place. This painting and the moonrise one (last blog entry) are both from watercolors I did at the woodworking school Country Workshops. My friends Drew and Louise Langsner live there and run the school, and their farm is one of the loveliest places I know. They periodically invite me to visit them and paint for a bit, and I always look forward to my time there. It's a fruitful place for my art.

I've got a new painting underway for my fall exhibition at Dixon Gallery and Gardens. This is an evening sky I painted in watercolor when I was in North Carolina last fall. I've already done a print from that sketch, but the image continues to call my name. My favorite thing to paint in oils is big, lush skies. That medium does skies better than anything else I work in. I've enjoyed getting back into oils for this exhibition.

Dixon asked me to come up with some thoughts about my upcoming exhibition that they can use for the newsletter. Here is what I came up with. (Above are color proofs of the print I created for the exhibition poster. That was way fun to do.)

"My work and work habits both are highly influenced by John Constable, my favorite artist. I took the title of my show, "My Own Places," from his letter to a friend in which he writes, "I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate 'my careless boyhood' with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful." Constable did not follow his generation on the grand tour to paint Italy. He painted the river he grew up next to, his village church, his home, his best friend's home at Salisbury, and later Hampstead Heath just outside his door.

Similarly I spent the first dozen years of my career painting the landscape in and around Memphis. I could easily say that my family's farm and Overton Park made me a painter. Constable was also one of the first painters to do finished paintings on site instead of just studies, and his practices influenced the Impressionists. He also did hundreds of small studies of clouds and plants on site to inform his studio work. All of my work starts with an onsite sketch or watercolor. Any print I create grows out of work I created sitting in that place, recording that moment in time and what drew me to the scene.

A summer in Greece in 2003 gave me the gift of painting beautiful and exotic places, and I have enjoyed painting on my travels in the years since. But I was delighted to be invited to create a show of current Southern landscapes to complement the exhibition of Southern Impressionists that Dixon will bring to town this fall. It's a beautiful opportunity to refocus on the scenes that made me a painter and which continue to delight and enrich my work. In the tradition of Constable, the places in the this show are my "heart places." Overton Park, where I walk daily; my family farm; a farm in North Carolina that have visited and painted through the years; and Dixon itself. Growing up in Memphis I have been amazed and schooled by the exhibitions here while I simultaneously kept painting the lovely gardens. Dixon has helped make me the artist I am, and I could not be more honored to create a show of my home landscapes to hang in the place that has inspired me over the course of my life."