Notecards have been a mainstay of my art business since 1987 (maybe you weren’t born yet). There used to be many stores throughout Tulare County that sold these steadily, and I spent copious amounts of time packaging cards, sometimes with the help of my parents or my friend Gnat. The packages had two each of […]
Two Starts, One Finish, One Start-to-Finish
Translation of the title: I started two new paintings, finished one painting, and completed one in a single painting session (called alla prima in ArtSpeak, which means you layer wet upon wet). With a sequoia painting in the queue but not wanting to waste paint in non-sequoia colors on the palette, I chose to begin […]
A Little Painting Session
Recently, I had to leave Three Rivers at 10 a.m. This presented two choices: A. waste time until 10, or B. paint for an hour or two before leaving. Being the responsible mature adult that I am (oh hush, you!), I wisely chose B. Creating Tulare County-based paintings is what I do; wasting time is […]
Growing an Oak Tree (in Oil Paint)
Let’s review. I really liked this painting, but no one was willing to give me green pieces of paper with dead presidents’ faces on it in exchange. So, after going through some photos and thinking about my current inventory, I decided to grow a big oak tree on the canvas. Jackson required some attention. He […]
Drastic Do-over in the Painting Workshop
A friend of mine sells agriculture real estate. When I used to waste time on LinkedIn*, occasionally I’d see a photo of his and ask to paint from it. That’s where I got this painting, Springville Ranch. Apparently, no one else shared my interest in this subject or my happiness with the colors. Bye-bye, Springville […]
Fridays are about Mineral King*
I have some new friends, acquaintances really, because we haven’t met in real life, but we are learning to know each other. They are bloggers like me, but with much bigger audiences, so I feel honored that they show up here from time to time. They don’t know about Mineral King so here is a […]
Finishing Tasks in the Painting Workshop
The reason I refer to “the painting workshop” instead of “the studio” is because I paint in a different building than where I draw. The drawing studio came first, and when I began oil painting on March 8, 2006, it was imperative to keep that mess away from my pencil drawings. It still is imperative; […]
Sold in Spring
Learned in May? Who had time to learn anything when I was painting like a machine and paintings were selling at warp speed. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It only felt like warp speed (nope, no idea what that actually means) compared to a s l o w s l o w s […]
Finishing Two More Oil Paintings
This painting has been on hold for many months. Finally, I felt able to finish it. After working on Sawtooth #66 with the water, and Sawtooth #65 with all the made up things, this suddenly felt quite manageable. Success breeds confidence. Let’s paint a sunset at the beach. First, I mixed a bunch of sunset […]
Gittin’ ‘er dun at the Easel
This painting had the tightest deadline of all the paintings in progress. After a day of doing many non-painting projects, I got a day to paint uninterrupted (except for Jackson). The edges are painted. It needed to dry, be signed, get photographed, varnished and get rewired from its previous iteration as a horizontal painting. This […]