Blog

There are a lot of peach faced love birds that congregate daily in my back yard.  They are very beautiful and have quite noisy squawks.  From my studio window, I watch them and have been wanting to paint them for some time.  I have a small "1 bird" swing they sit on, so when I decided to paint the birds, I took artistic license and made the swing larger to accommodate 3 birds.  While I was working on it, that old John Anderson song, "And they were Swingin" came to mind so I decided to name it that.  Hope you like it.

One of my favorite things to do in life is take a road trip and paint and one of my favorite places to paint is Utah.  A couple of years ago, I went to Capitol Reef National Park in Central Utah, where I took a workshop with Kathryn Stats.  It was a great workshop and this park is a real hidden treasure.  Some of the most beautiful country and great painting spots with very few tourists!  It was so beautiful there with the sun shining on the rocks to the left and the shadows on the right and foreground.   While we were out painting, I got everything done but the foreground, when a sand storm blew in like nobody's business!!  Easels and paintings were scattering everywhere!  It really was kind of funny.  That painting session was over!  I liked my study so much I knew I had to paint a larger one.  So here it is, two years later and "Quiet Beauty" is finished. I'm pretty happy with this one.  I think my foregrounds are getting better.  I love to see landscape paintings that make me want to go where they depict.  I hope this one gives you that feeling.  Thanks for reading.  I'd love to hear comments on my blog and my work if you are so inclined.

This blog is going to be about "my Creative Life".  I feel so blessed to spend my life doing what I love.  I'm hoping that with this blog I may be able to inspire others to "follow your bliss" or at least make it worth your time to read it and look at my work.  Or...better yet, buy my art work! So, this week I'm going to talk about one of my most current paintings,  "The Rose Tattoo".  It's a watercolor of a young couple I saw at a bar in Laguna Niguel, CA.  They were so intriguing to me.  She was beautiful and surrounded by lots of young men.  In my mind, the story was that the man sitting next to her was her boyfriend and he was thinking, "Am I good enough? She's so great, what is she doing with me?!  Should I pop the question?".  Or, he could have just been thinking "Am I gonna get lucky tonight?".  When one of my friends saw my painting, I asked her what she thought was going on and this is what she said.  "Oh, he's on the hunt!  Look at his eyes!  He's on his way out of that relationship".  That's the great thing about paintings of people.  Everyone can make up their own story about the subjects.