Oops, I Forgot

The idea was to show you all the paintings in my solo show at CACHE, one per day here on the blog, for the duration of the show.

I have a virtual friend named Elisabeth, who posted a beautiful photo on her blog that reminded me of two of my paintings. I wanted to show them to her and while looking for my posts to show them to her, I realized that I skipped an entire section of paintings!

Looks as if someone could use an administrative assistant, a secretary, a Girl Friday, an apprentice, something. Oh well, I’ve been bumbling along on my own for many years, and so far, no one has died or gotten cancer from my mistakes.

So, here goes:

MISSING PAINTING #1

Sunset Over the Kaweah, oil on wrapped canvas, 16×20″, $650

It is available on my website store. Here is the link, and the price on the website includes sales tax, which is why it is higher than shown here. (If you live out of state and want to buy the painting, just email me and I’ll sort it out for you.)

The Kaweah River runs through Three Rivers, with the North, Middle and South Forks giving the town its name. It is pronounced “kuh-WEE-uh”.

More Sold Oil Paintings

This time I am showing you the complete paintings rather than allowing Blog Boss to squish them into various rectangles and squares that don’t fit.

Sold Paintings This Fall

The pictures of sold paintings stacked up in a file, until I realized that there were more than belonged in a single post. The last time you saw the sold paintings was July 30, so I’m glad that the file wasn’t empty!

This method of showing photos doesn’t allow for them to be seen completely, because sometimes the painting is the wrong shape for the square or rectangle on your screen. Oh well, you get the idea, yes?

There will be more next week.

Too Much

My first blog post was April 15, 2008. Since then, I’ve posted over 4000 times, and my “media library” has around 19,000 pictures.

Tech is continually updating, which is just a euphemism for “complications”. Stuff that used to be easy becomes more difficult. Companies that used to sell products (virtual products in this case) outsource their services to other countries, where people can work from home on the phone, while practicing their English. Services that used to come with the virtual products now cost money.

Programs that used to be bought on a disk to get installed in your computer became available only through the interweb airwaves. Then, they became outdated, stopped functioning, and updates started to cost money. Next, you have to subscribe instead of owning the program (now called “apps”, short for “applications”). The price starts out small, but incrementally increases.

The pressure to buy continues to increase, often built on the fear that you might lose your information.

This is happening with my website. I’ve had four or five web designers, and each one either quit working for him/herself* and went to work as an employee of a company that charges 2-3 times as much, or quit to have a baby.

Now I have to pay to get help, pay to protect my information from getting stolen, pay to store my information, and pay to protect from getting invaded by anonymous creeps.

IT’S ALL TOO MUCH!!

So, I am now deleting all my old photos and old posts. Nobody cares, so why am I keeping it stored in some virtual cloud, paying some mysterious company full of advertisers, fear-mongers, pushy sales people, and strangers from even more companies to protect it all?

So, here I go. . . trash, delete, trash, delete.

I wonder if anyone will notice? I wonder if anything will improve on my site? I wonder if I will be able to back it up without getting an error, a message that I don’t have enough space, a warning that my whole site might “crash”, and someone with a difficult-to-understand accent telling me I will need to rebuild my entire website from scratch?

I just came here to be an artist, to depict the things and places that we know and love, and to show and tell you about them.

Okay, back to the virtual dump. . . thanks for showing up today and listening to all this.

*Nope, not going to use a plural pronoun for a singular situation.

Last Few Days, Last Preview of Simply Home

My 2-1/2 month show, Simply Home, at CACHE is almost over. I’ve done my best to show you all the entire exhibit so that if you live far away, you can see my entire current body of work.

Here are the final three oil paintings.

BELOW PANTHER GAP, 12×16″, $375
BIG & TALL, 18×36″, oil on wrapped canvas, $1500
FOUR GUARDSMEN, 16×20″, oil on wrapped canvas, $650

CACHE HOURS

Friday, 10-4, Saturday, 11-4, Sunday, noon-4 and then the show goes away.

Last Few Days

My 2-1/2 month show, Simply Home, at CACHE is almost over. I’ve done my best to show you all the paintings, and now I have 2 blogging days remaining with three paintings left to show you.

That worked out pretty well, except I didn’t show you the three pencil drawings.

What’s an artist to do?

How about the three pencil drawings today and the three oil paintings tomorrow?

FAREWELL GAP, 14×17″, graphite on paper (that means pencil), matted and framed under glass, $400
HONEYMOON CABIN, 15×17″ graphite and colored pencil on paper, matted and framed under glass, $400
SLIM’S GRANDSON, 11×14″, graphite on paper, matted and framed under glass, $250

CACHE HOURS

Friday, December 27 10-4, Saturday, December 28 11-4, Sunday, December 29 noon-4 and then the show goes away.

The Gift of Art

Tonight at CACHE!

Most of Exeter’s businesses will be open for the annual Christmas open house evenings. I will be at CACHE from 5-8 tonight—will you? (125 South B Street)

SIMPLY HOME

You can see this painting in person tonight.

Honeymoon Cabin I, 6×18″, $195

The show hangs until December 29 at CACHE in Exeter. Their hours are Friday 1:30-4, Saturday 10-4, Sunday noon-4. It includes about 50 paintings, 3 original pencil drawings, calendars, cards, coloring books, The Cabins of Wilsonia books, and a few pencil reproduction prints.

2025 CALENDARS AVAILABLE HERE.

A Day in Exeter

This is the view looking east from in front of the Mural Gallery & Gift Shop. See the awning straight ahead? That is on the third location where I had my studio in Exeter.

While at the Mural Gallery for my November shift, I painted. My goal was to be productive in between customers by completing some of the plein air paintings from the week in Monterey.

Worked out pretty well.

I liked these enough to sign them. When they are dry, I will show the before and after versions.
This one is better, but I can’t wait to put a railing on the bridge and bark on the sycamore trees.

As I was moving everything out to my car, I looked east and remembered many reason I always loved being in Exeter: tractors in downtown, the water tower with EXETER on it, seeing Sawtooth and Homer’s Nose, trees with fall color, the Post Office, all visible from where I used to have my studio.

One of the three places my studio was in Exeter was in the second story of this brick building, which houses the terrific store Rosemary & Thyme.

One last view in case you didn’t get enough photos today.

SIMPLY HOME

OAK GROVE BRIDGE #28, 24×30″, oil on wrapped canvas, $1800

The show hangs until December 29 at CACHE in Exeter. Their hours are Friday 1:30-4, Saturday 10-4, Sunday noon-4. It includes about 50 paintings, 3 original pencil drawings, calendars, cards, coloring books, The Cabins of Wilsonia books, and a few pencil reproduction prints.

Exeter’s Mural Gallery

Mural Gallery & Gift Shop, 121 South E Street

In the olden days when my studio was in Exeter and I was the president of the Mural Team, we opened a little store called the Mural Gallery. The idea was to have a place for visitors to learn about the mural project, take home mementoes of the murals, and for the Mural Team to have some income. Only mural artists were invited to show and sell their work.

This past summer, the store closed for refurbishing. Many of Exeter’s muralists are far away, don’t make lower priced art for sale, are retired, or have assumed room temperature. So, upon reopening, the Mural Gallery invited many local artists (whether or not they have murals in Exeter) to participate. A new option is for the artists to work one day a month in order to lessen the bite that the Mural Team takes from the sales (still much less than a commercial gallery, which starts at 50% and is rumored to be as high as 90% in some cities, no thank you).

I worked one day in October, met some new people, had some customers, caught up with some old friends, enjoyed being surrounded by pretty things while spending time in the town where my studio was located for 9 years, PLUS I finished one of the paintings from Monterey.

When we started the gallery, we didn’t have very many murals or artists to participate, so I did this drawing of Yokuts baskets and had prints made for the Mural Team to sell. I wasn’t a muralist, but we needed merchandise, and when we started the project, I told my teammates that I would do whatever it took to make the project succeed. Those first years were tough—the equivalent of having a second job without a second paycheck, a second job which shoved my business onto a back shelf—but the project made a HUGE difference in Exeter.

Since then, the Mural Gallery has sold many paintings and cards for me. I appreciate them enormously!

Today is my November shift. Want to come say hi?

SIMPLY HOME

Big Oak, oil on wrapped canvas, 11×14″, $300

Gallery Hours are Friday, Saturday, Sunday, different each day, in the middle of the day. Might want to call first!

This is Where I Work

The flowering pear tree is also beautiful in the fall. It is the skinniest 20+ year old tree imaginable, and it leans.

In the spring and in the fall, when it isn’t hot, I am struck by the beauty and charm of where I get to work.

When my studio was new here at home, I participated in a studio tour. Many guests asked if my husband built the studio. My answer was, “No, he already has a job”. The studio was a planing shed for the clock builder who owned the property before us. We used it to store avocado green sinks and other unnecessary miscellany from remodeling our house in 1998. A dear friend, now gone the way of all flesh, did the interior remodel on the shed in 2001. About 15 years later, he and Trail Guy added shingle siding. A few years ago, I had the cement floor covered with fake wood laminate flooring.

This is where I draw and do administrative things, along with give private drawing lessons.

When I began painting, I didn’t want that mess in my studio, so I set up in the adjacent workshop, which now also serves as the three cats’ home base. Two were born there, and Tucker moved in at around 8 weeks of age, so they are very comfortable with it as their dormitory and cafeteria.

Since most of my paintings are hanging at CACHE, I had to dig out all my framed pencil drawings to put up on the walls. I also had to spend time measuring them, determining prices, making sure the prices match the prices listed on the website and are consistent with size and framing quality. Sometimes I would like to have an administrative assistant for such tasks.

The few paintings here were done recently in order to resupply the places that sell my work.

SIMPLY HOME

WILDFLOWERS ON DRY CREEK ROAD, 16×20, $650