My New Life

This is the last post I will make on this blog. I am starting a new life painting the sea. Animals will still be part of my art, but not the focus as they were here. My future art can be found at caubinfineart.com a new website and blog I will be starting. Thanks to all who have shared comments here and shared my love of the fourfooted and winged.

Hope to see you at my new site, which should up and running by June 2012

At Long Last,

Well I fianlly did it, after years of using my blog as a website, I have now an official one it is under construction still but serviceable...so I hope my friends and visitors will go see it and give me some feed back.....for some reason it does not show up on a goole search yet....maybe more visits will help.

Please let me know what you think and if you have improvements please feel free to mention them....I'm still changing things

Power of Puppies

Just could not resist one more painting of puppies, this too is from Canine Companion archives, and I met some breeders at the event, with my foot in the door, I will have access to puppies year round now as there are always some growing up for training....they are amazing dogs to be with, such a gentle nature and so smart, from decades of breeding programs for the traits that make them assistance dogs. Some are Golden Retrievers, some Golden Labs, and some are crosses of these two.

Canine Companions

I do several events a year donating art to help animals as a way of paying back to the all the inspiration they give me as an artist.
This is a new place for me Canine Compaions

On a huge 11 acre campus in Santa Rosa, this amazing place helps raise, train, and match dogs for service to exceptional people. I'm so happy to help them

here is the first piece capturing the love and protection all life needs when newborn,

And the Winner Is.....

Well I didn't get the top award but I made up for that in quantity, receiving a first in oils and a second and third in pastel at a well respected juried local art show. That makes 3 winners of the 4 paintings I entered.

The Apple Blossom Festival art show has been going on for 26 years and draws thousands of people. The art group I just joined puts it on each year and does a fantastic job, well run, well lit and beautifully hung. So I'm honored that the animals were put up they don't always appeal to the jurors. A pastel landscape took best of show and deserved it, getting second and third next to that was a treat.

Here are the winners ( all are available, contact me by email)
First in oil/acrylic Come Closer:A Portrait of Me and 2 Kids in a Giraffe Eye 16x20 sorry for the long title but without it many miss the point of the close crop
















Second in Pastel 10x20 The Chase, done from an actual experience I had at Animal Ark in Reno NV one of the very few places in the country where you can see cheetah running free at top speed. A real peak experience. They lay out a cable in a huge field and put a lure on it, a motor runs the lure up to 60 MPH. at this moment in the painting the lure had done a 180 and so did the cheetah, I added a secret part a tommy gazellle leaping out of the painting but no one finds this unless I tell them .












Third in Pastel 8x10 Portrait of Cordelia, long horn Owl. she is also a resident of Animal Ark and pastel was the perfect medium to capture the incredible texture of the feathers, tho I did not succumb to doing every feather.

Facing the Landscape and a Great Gift

I noticed out field sketching that animals live in habitat, and my habitat skills could use some sharpening. So for almost a year I've been 95% of the time painting outside and studying the great landscape painters past and present. In Dec. by some fluke I happened on to a forum where and Canadian man with a Dutch name, Johannes Vloothuis suddenly decided to share his 25 years of landscape painting for free in online demos and webinars, His genius in my opinion is his ability to distill into very pithy phrases you can't forget, about 100 pricipals of what makes landscape, or any painting work. You can find all the info an sessions he's teaching all online, so I never left home and recieived a college education on landscape, He lectured up to 7 hours a day for 3 weeks, sort of downloaded everything he knows into our brains in one fell swoop. It was intense but it saved me thousands of hours of work by revealing the major "secrets of the pros"
all in one place without expensive workshops. He put most of that info on Wet Canvas here Wet Canvas Live

Landscape is a lifetime task, so my one year self appointed apprenticeship, just got me some basics to start with. Through the long year, I found a new passion for painting the sea, and now I want to put the birds and sea together. Here are some from the the days along the Sonoma Coast, mostly late in the day, and a couple from a local spot called Ellis Ponds, where mute swans nest, these were done from life just as I saw it happen...all Plein Air( outside on the spot) quickly in an hour or so.
all oil on canvas unless noted

What Happened in 2010

Its hard to catch up so just going to post this one selected for the International Association of Pastel Societies show in 2010, sort of like the Oscars of pastel, there were almost 1000 entries from around the world and only 72 were chosen...I was gobsmacked as my UK friends say.

Coming Home, Portrait of Tuddy, 11.5x20 an unusual portrait, he often came home through a field of grass and weeds, I lay down on the groud to see things from his eye level, and I borrowed a lot from the great animal painter Bruno Liljefors, especially the dandelion heads.

2010 was the year of landscape and plein air, glad I did so much of it when gas prices were lower,