Art Zoo

Once Handmade Hopewell (HH) finished, I could spend more time working on art again instead of working on presenting art. Here are recent animal paintings.

This sea turtle was “finished” a few weeks ago, after HH. To give a sense of scale, it is leaning against a door.

At the start, there were some energetic, sketchy elements I quite liked, eg., around the flippers, but most of those areas ended up getting more refined or painted over. Looking at it now, I wish I had preserved more of them. Even so, the painting satisfied my need to do something artistic besides re-painting tulips and working on my video for HH, and I am generally content with it.

The Wednesday after HH, I got a call from neighbors who asked whether I were willing & able to come up with something artistic & humorous that night to mail Thursday morning to a couple getting married that Friday or Saturday. Although these wedding pandas are not punny of themselves, my neighbors were encouraged to send the happy couple a note congratulating them on going forward with their wedding during the panda-demic.

There are also some bird paintings, but I will save them for another time.

I hope you enjoyed today’s trip to the zoo.

2020 Show Updates

Both shows in which I was scheduled to participate in the next few weeks have been postponed or modified. Princeton’s 50th Communiversity has been rescheduled to Sunday, Sunday, October 11. Handmade Hopewell’s street fair has been cancelled; however, there will be a virtual fair the weekend of the original show (May 3rd). The plan is that there will be a map of what the street fair would have looked like, and visitors (to the website) can click on each booth and see a short video created by each participating studio. I will post the link closer to the date the fair goes live.

In the meantime, please enjoy this painting inspired by my trip to Hawaii in September. Also, happy Easter (yesterday)!

April Flowers

Central Jersey has had both showers and flowers lately — varying degrees of drizzle & splatter (with a handful of rain-free days) and many beautiful flowers beginning to bloom. Indoors has some similar activity: the splatter of paint water and new floral art. I have been exploring variations on the Tulip Trio painting (which some of you might recognize since it is available as a notecard); in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d share some. Click any thumbnail to enlarge the image.

Wherever you are, may the promise of springtime bring you joy.

First Painting of 2020

Happy New Year! I hope you are off to an inspired start to 2020. I’ve been playing around with watercolors recently. It has been a while since I painted with them regularly, so I’m brushing up (pun intended).

I began this piece to experiment with techniques and water/pigment ratios in preparation for some upcoming projects, not to create a new, finished painting, but in the end it appeared to have enough going for it to stand alone. It is called Cosmic Brush.

Here’s to another year (and decade) of art adventures.

Merry Christmas 2019

Merry Christmas, everyone! Hard to believe there are just 10 days to go. (To the Peanuts/Schroeder fans out there, only 1 more day until Beethoven’s birthday.)

The painting shared today is not particularly Christmassy, but one could say the red is kind of festive. Nothing fancy about this piece. Just a quick one for fun and economy–another one of those that started because I wanted to use up remaining paint from another project. When I used up what was left on the palette, I didn’t yet think this painting was “done,” so I did the unorthodox and squirted some paint from the tube right onto the canvas board. Tally ho, palette knife!

The shape of the lighthouse reminds me the faintest little bit of Kilauea light on Kaua’i, which I visited in September; however, it was not intentionally painted to look like any particular lighthouse.

Now the oil paints will hibernate for the winter, and I will use less odorous media until I can open windows & doors for a cross-breeze that doesn’t affect the cost of heating. 🙂

May the Christ light your days this holiday season &  your way in the new year.