Mystery

Here is something very unusual for me.  I began this many years ago when I was in Trails End Art Association in Gearhart Oregon.   It is an exercise of flooding the paper with watercolor and then picking out some images.  For those who care about color, it was alizarin crimson and indigo blue.  I am not sure where the apparent yellow in the image comes from but...hey...OK.  Recently, I took it to my Capitol Hill Art League critique group and got some ideas about improving it.  Unfortunately, I don't have a "before" picture.  Their suggestions were great and now I consider it a finished painting....though there is still a high level of mystery about what is going on.  In this case, I like that.

TY Smith family

Peter, Louisa, Griffin and Sophia recently took a trip to the West Coast, including the San Juan Islands.  In Friday Harbor, they visited Palindaba Lavender and brought back some special lavender treats for me.  It was quite a bounty---lavender and chocolate candy bars, lavender sugar scrub, traditional lavender oil and a treatment stick that is a lavender balm.  All wonderful.  I particularly like the treatment stick which is a natural (and fragrant) antiseptic.  It is, as they say "ALL GOOD."  I don't think I had ever tasted lavender and chocolate bars before.  The white chocolate one was particularly tasty>

I made a little painting from the photograph of the farm that is on the Palindaba brochure as a thank you!!!!  And thanks, Smith family, for thinking of me when you were there.

Cherry Blossoms

Here's a recent painting of cherry blossoms.  I was trying to catch the beauty of the blossoms seen up close and the chaos of the background.  It is primarily watercolor, with some brown pencil outlines of the blossom closeups, so technically mixed media. 

Under the Sea

This is a recent painting that I thought I had  posted, but I can't find the post.  Apologies if this is the second time.  It is based on a photo sent to me by my friend Sheryl.  It has a free form underpainting and then I added shapes by "negative" painting--painting around the shape.  I also added color for the starfish and darker tones for the holes in the sea urchins.

Thank you Jenifer!

This is a flag that is on a bike that is on a t-shirt that Jen sent to me for Mother's Day.  I decided just to paint the flag because Jen and I had a fun conversation about flags while the shirt was in the mail.  Somehow, I knew it involved a flag.  It's a very cute t-shirt and the design is red and white and then "batiked" and navy blue.  I made an abstract red and white painting and used frisket blocking (which is like a wax resist, only easier to get off watercolor paper.  This t-shirt is just the sort of thing I love to wear.

TY Sophia

My adorable grandaughter Sophia and I like to make a special pastry that involves very thin sliced apples placed in pastry dough and rolled into roses.  

What a great treat it is to spend time with a person you love and do something beautiful that is also good to eat.  I don't think it gets any better than that.  We were having a problem, though, getting the apples thin enough and so we had to cook them which kind of detracted from the final product.  Sophia found a solution---a mandoline cutter that would make very thin and very even slices.  She gave it to me at Christmas but it wasn't until recently that we were able to use it together and make the creations we hoped for.  I do say they were amazing.  

Thanks, Sophia, for the time we spend together...and for the great gift of the mandoline which is useful in many ways beyond slicing apples.  I love it!

River Scene

This is very unusual for me.  It is actually a painting I started several years ago after taking a workshop from John Salminen.  I recently pulled it out and decided I should either finish it or toss it.  There had been a large white shape and I softened that.  I also added some of the more "fuzzy" shapes.  I then cropped it quite a bit.  It had been a full sheet (22 x 30) and is now 16" x 28".  I am pretty happy with it.  It's got lots of interesting colors and shapes and I like that.  There is a lot of glazing, which is a technique of painting an area, letting it dry completely, and then painting over it with a different color, or colors.