"North Jetty Sea Grapes-plein air study", 14x11, oil on board, by Maryanne Jacobsen

"North Jetty Sea Grapes-plein air study", 14x11, oil on board

After almost two weeks of back pain, I woke up today feeling wonderful! Praise the Lord!

My fellowship group prayed for me last night and obviously the Lord heard my prayer because today I was out there painting with my friends from Florida's Sarasota County plein air group at Venice's North Jetty.

The light was awesome when I arrived around 8:45 but as soon as I set up my easel, and knocked out the bright light temperature in my first notes, the light disappeared and I was under a cloud for the next hour. So I stuck with what I had in my head and kept trying to remember the light. By 10:15 I was totally disgusted, when low and behold the sun made another appearance! Wow! Such drama!

The shadows were different but I kept at it for another 20 minutes. I shot a picture and went home and finished it up.

Nothing like painting plein air. The homeless kitties were meowing under the trees, the sunbathers were there in their various apparel and I even had a visit from a very nice Jehovah's Witness. I could hear the soft pounding of the waves of the Gulf against the shoreline just a dozen yards ahead. Here's a view of the seagrape trees that I painted today.

This painting is not for sale at this time.


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"Sophie the Mudhead", 12x16

"Sophie the Mudhead", 12x16, oil on masonite

I took a workshop last week with master impressionist John Ebersberger at The Southern Atelier. John studied with Henry Hensche during the last 10 years of the artist's life. John has certainly mastered this amazing style of painting in the impressionist manner, started by Charles Hawthorne over 100 years ago. John's paintings are filled with beautiful soft color and dynamic palette knife strokes.

We started the workshop by going back to the basics and painting block studies in the hot Florida sun. Over the weekend we headed over to Sarasota Bay and painted live models all day long. John is a hoot and we all learned a great deal about this technique while having an enjoyable time as well. All weekend there were fish literally flying out of the water every couple of minutes which added some levity to trying to learn a technique that is certainly not easy to master. We used a palette knife for every painting, but John allowed us to take out the brushes during the final afternoon.

This painting probably looked a bit more Hensche-esque before I messed around with it today, but nonetheless I was happy with the result.

John is a wonderful painter, teacher and a lot of fun. I'm very glad that I took the workshop and hopefully John will return next year to do another one in Sarasota!


To learn more about Henry Hensche and his teaching methods, , please visit the Hensche foundation website here.