Tea Berry

This is a commission for a private collector.    Painted under low lighting in my studio...  Now, we'll wait until it's dry and send it off.

I'll be working on a rather large floral during the next few days (at least large for me. :) ) ... I hope to post it by  early next week.

Water to Wine

One of my granddaughters friends has a farm and recently invited us to come over and see his wonderful garden.  In the back there were some grapes growing on a vine and he picked a bunch for me to bring home so I could use them in a painting.  The leaf had been ripped and some of the edges had turned brown - more character as a subject.   The pottery is  a piece I picked up a while back.  It seemed the perfect choice for  the grapes to "pose" against.   The base is the antique oak library file cabinet I picked up in Round Top this year - proving to be one of my favorite wood bases to "pose" my subjects on.

    Water to Wine is painted on a 9x12 oil primed linen covered baltic birch 

     panel and I plan to float frame it to add still another touch of drama.  

Plein Air - North Carolina

Just returned from a four day Plein Air  outing in North Carolina with several artist friends (Garry Kravit and Althea Heaton).  It was an amazing experience to see the plush greenery, waterfalls, lakes, mountain streams and mountain scenes.  Every where we turned another painting opportunity - very hard to narrow down what to capture on canvas.  I completed several studies and am sharing a couple of them here.  Both are painted on  a linen covered baltic birch panel -  8x10.    I plan to turn these two studies into larger pieces this summer along with a few other scenes of the area.

One of the studies shown here is a woodlands scene and the other is of an iron bridge.  We set up on a wood bridge to capture the woodlands scene and on the rocks at creekside to view the bridge, stream and incredible rock formations.  Each of us gravitated to a different scene and all of them captured the moment.  (I LOVE my EASyL lite Plein air prochade  and easel I purchased at Artworkessentials !  It made the adventure  so enjoyable!)

Thanks to my friend Garry Kravit and his wife Karen who made this event possible and to both Garry and Althea who made the experience unforgettable!  Check out Garry's blog site for additional pics.

The Woodlands Scene

The Iron Bridge