Well, as usual, I'm months behind on posting even the important stuff.  Of course the big news right now is the fire, but to get caught up  little first:

I finished the boat & oars, it was a thing of beauty(I do say so myself) and rowed like a dream.  I had a solid 6 or 7 months of exercise and adventure rowing and sailing.  I rowed around a few islands, through canals, cuts and channels, Atlantic and Gulf sides, went several miles offshore once or twice, chased some fish, and found out just how strong some of the currents around here can be. I rowed at dawn with the ospreys and fishing captains, at sunset with some lovely ladies and and at midnight accompanied only by the moon and dolphins, breathing quietly but unseen in the velvet dark around me.
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Over the summer I joined a new gallery--The Gallery on Green, owned by Nance Frank.  Its a nice gallery and I'm honored to be there.  My first sale there was last month:

"Morning Glory" Oil on panel, 32 x 40".

Some of you know I undertook a small boat-building project recently.  I had intended to show progress here along the way in real time, but never got to it (too busy building!)  But here are some progress pics and notes:

I'm living on a houseboat now and needed to get more exercise, so what else to do but build a rowboat?  I have rowed sculls in the past and liked them, but wanted something I could use in more conditions than dead-flat water on a calm day, so I started looking at plans.  Firefly and Liz both appealed to me, as did CLC's Annapolis Wherry, so I did a lot of comparison to those boats (each 18') when I designed mine( 15' 6").  Somewhere along the way I also decided I wanted the possibility of taking a passenger, or perhaps diving or camping gear, with me, so that had to be factored in also.  In small boat design, pretty much everything is a compromise between exclusive optima.

This was the second iteration of the design, based on those comparisons, and my own seat-of-the-pants calculations regarding buoyancy, weight distribution, and "length and skinniness":

 I'm building it stitch and glue(cool method, look it up), so the first order of business was to scarf together 2 sheets of plywood to get 16' lengths.  Here are the 1/4" sheets planed to a fine taper (8:1) to make the overlap:

 Here clamped together:

 Here I stitched together 2 pieces (using tie-wraps in holes drilled on 4" centers.  These are for the bottom, I only trimmed off 1/4" from each edge to get a feel for how much V-bottom that would create.  Doesn't take much!

Here I'm laying out the curves for the shape of the panels using a batten.  Though I had scaled several station heights off of the model, I found the best way to get nice curves was to use as few control points as possible (this of course is not news to anybody who's done it before :-)  I mostly used 2 endpoints and one or two points in between.  Let the wood do the work!

Here's the first test fitting.  You can see all the tie-wraps holding the bottom seam, the mold defining the V in the middle, and the spanish windlass at the front encouraging the wood.  The sharp eye will note a nice bit of compound curve developing in the surface of the panels, but also a slight upward convexity in the top edges. The convexity didn't look right to me so I flattened it again and re-cut the top edges and trimmed the bottom edges.

A closer look:

 The re-cut bottom panels, from the stern:

 One of the things I realized (over and over) during this project was that it would be going a lot faster if I had plans to work from.  I enjoyed doing the design, but never having built a boat before, there were a lot of decisions I couldn't make (or even envision clearly) until things progressed to a certain point-- had to be able to see what it looked like along the way.  I'm glad I did it this way, but if I were doing it a second time (which, gasp, has occurred to me), I would either spend more time up front creating a detailed design, or choosing and modifying someone else' plans.

With the bottom shape determined (except for details like the stern), I stitched the panels back together and started fitting the sides.  Same method, determine some control points and let the wood make the shape.

 And presto, a hull!

 You may have noticed another, smaller, boat next to mine in some of the pics.  That one belongs to A.D. Tinkham, another painter and studio neighbor of mine.  Great guy, I first got to know him last fall, and we've spent some good time talking together about painting, life, etc.  He's also an accomplished sailor and boat captain, and has built several boats in the past.  It was his decision to build himself a new tender for his sailboat, and the availability of the workspace, that really turned my daydreams of having something to exercise with on the water into action.  He built his with a more traditional process, creating molds and frames on a strongback, then planking it with plywood.  So I couldn't really copy his process (plus his boat was so short), but he was an inspiration and a source of information and encouragement all along the way.  I think we both benefited from having someone to bitch to when things were going sideways, or to bounce ideas off of.  Some of his advice was worth(in his words) about what I paid for it, but still...
Thanks, A.D.  !

Next up, joys of fiberglass!