Breathing

Hello--and greetings from the Pacific Northwest! I needed a change of scenery so this summer I decided to move to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. The water called me up here--as did the trees and the mountains. Finally got the studio set up to work; here is a new piece titled "Breathing." When I walk along the seashore and listen to the waves, it is the sound of the world breathing. ...

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Troubled Waters

Deconstruction of a painting... Beginning with the finished piece and working back through the process. Post-modernists should love this. This is a very emotional piece for me. When I began it I was feeling fiercely jubilant and wanted to create a piece celebrating life and wonder. (I was listening to Beethoven's 6th at the time, that symphony usually has that effect on me!) Life events occurred in the meantime as I ...

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Wax Job

I have had so much going on in the studio lately I have not been able to keep up with my computing! I'm posting a little encaustic work I did awhile ago to keep things moving until I can post more of my process-oriented articles. I have two new large-scale sepia toned pastels I am in the process of finishing right now, as well as a brand spanking new don't-brush-up-against ...

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The Marina at Stillwater

Hello there: here are a couple of pics from my new work titled "Stillwater." In retrospect as I title this blog posting, "Marina at Stillwater" would have been a better title, but so it goes. It's easier to keep the current name than to scrape the painting down in order to re-name it!This is from my trip to Minnesota last summer; it was a very hot July day and the ...

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It was a dark and stormy afternoon…

I don't have a title for this painting yet, but I think "Dark and Stormy Night" is taken, by Snoopy. The painting is from a day we were up on the Grand Mesa when a major summer thunderstorm moved in. It rained so hard so fast that on the way back I had to get out of the car and walk across an area of the dirt road that had ...

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More Water

This is a new watercolor, titled at least for now "December, Eagle County." I started this piece as a demo painting for my watercolor class at the Western Colorado Center for the Arts--amazingly enough I did not completely destroy the painting as I usually do with demo pieces! It is 19x25 on 300# Canson 100, my favorite heavier weight watercolor paper. (It has a great dual surface--rough and smooth, is ...

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New Encaustics

Two new encaustic paintings: these are exciting to me as they are the first pieces I have finished successfully using this new-to-me media. The black & white is titled "Mesa Feed," it's an old feed mill (still in operation) in Grand Junction. This piece is 16x20. The other one is, as yet, untitled. It is small, 8x10 in size. I am going to try to make my ...

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“Chasing Down the Sun”

So here's a new piece from the studio. This piece is 30x40" in size on stretched canvas, and I was trying to capture a certain effect of light we notice along this stretch of I70 pretty much every time we come back home from the Front Range of Colorado. We usually hit this area, no matter the season, at the peak of sun glare, yet it is beautiful. This piece ...

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Unaweep Ranchers

So here's a classic de-construction of an image, starting with the finished piece and working backwards through the underpaintings to the initial outline. This piece is titled "Unaweep Ranchers," it is an oil on canvas and is 36x48" in size. I laid this one out a little differently than I usually do. Since I wanted the final image to be very low-key in color, I rendered the underpainting monochromatically using ...

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Watercolor-a-Rama

Yes, the next piece in the ongoing series is a watercolor (gasp!) It has been awhile since I completed a serious watercolor, or at least one I took seriously. This felt really good--this piece is 20x30 on 300# Canson 100 paper. (If you have never worked a watercolor on this paper you have to try it: it is not terribly expensive. This paper has two distinct surfaces on either side, ...

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