First painting of my summer vacation!

Painted from a photo taken by a friend on a trip to Oregon. It has been raining every day since my summer vacation began, so I've been painting indoors. Hoping to be able to get outside soon!

Georgia O'Keefe said.....

"When I teach, my main point is not to teach them to paint pictures but to show them a way of seeing....there is art in the line of a jacket and in the shape of the collar as well as in the way one addresses a letter, combs one's hair or puts a window in a house."

Andre Gide said....

"Let the important thing be how you look at things and not what you are looking at."

Onions from Middleton Farm

We bought these onions at the Healdsburg Farmer's Market last year. Nancy, who owns and operates Middleton Farm, grows some of the most beautiful produce around. I plan to paint a lot of it this summer!

to see this clearly

....Here is a road sign, a notebook, photographs of those I have loved.
    Here is a slice of bright blue sky, a hummingbird
    thrashing her wings around an apricot tree.
    To see this clearly
    is enough.
             
         -From "to see this clearly" by Maya Stein

From my sketchbook

Island off the coast of Sicily at sunset. Painted 2 years ago, from a photo in a travel magazine. This is my first day of summer vacation---a glorious day! Should have more recent paintings to post soon, as I'm planning many painting excursions this summer.

Saul Bellow said....

"I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction."

From my sketchbook

Tomorrow is the last day of school! I hope to paint a lot this summer. Apart from painting in acrylic on canvas, I want to get back in the habit of doing frequent, quick, watercolor "sketches." 

Oliver Wendell Holmes said....

"Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside us."

Ananda Coomaraswamy said....

"The man incapable of contemplation cannot be an artist, but only a skillful workman."

Still working on this one....

Adjusting colors. It's not done yet....

Spanish castle

When I took the watercolor class at the junior college, I brought in a photo from a calendar I had of images of Spain. I was trying to practice painting "wet-on-wet," where a brush laden with paint is brushed over an already wet paint surface. It was a lot of fun to just see what the paint would do. It is WATERcolor, after all!

Joseph Campbell said....

"One looks, looks long, and the world comes in."

Work in progress....

My favorite beach to walk, and such a happy thing since it is only a 20-minute drive from my house! Once school is out in two weeks, I hope to come here often to paint...

Philip Kennicott said....

"If you know your limits, and dwell on the fact, the canvas will remain blank."

Sonoma County, California

Painted two years ago, when I had just started the watercolor class I took at the local junior college. From a photo I took somewhere in Sonoma County (I don't remember where). Am planning to paint another version of it, in acrylic on canvas. I'd like to see if I can create a better feeling of depth.

Arthur Koestler said...

"Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher & the pupil are located in the same individual."

More fruit....

Painted for the watercolor class I took last fall.

Joseph Chilton Pearce said....

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong."

Spanish village

This was painted as part of an exercise to experiment with layering different colored washes, one over the other, letting each wash completely dry before adding another.

Osho said.....

When I say be creative,

I don't mean

you should all go 

and become great painters

and great poets.

I simply mean

let your life

be a painting,

let your life

be a poem.

-Osho 

Fava beans

Painted last summer, of fava beans from Middleton Farm bought at the Sebastopol Farmer's Market.

Watercolor pears

The photo of this painting is not great; it's hard to tell the background is white! Pears are my very favorite fruit to paint because I like their lumpiness and all the color variation.

Bright limes

Watercolor value study

This is a value study from the watercolor class I took at our local junior college. I need to do more of these in order to learn to see clearly the value differences in a composition. I get impatient doing the top portion, but when I finish I always like seeing the two versions next to each other. 

Watercolor apple

I took a watercolor class in the fall of 2010. It was very helpful for many reasons, one of which is that it got me in the habit of painting regularly. My favorite still life subject is fruit because of the color variations and the irregular shapes.

Robert Rauschenberg said....

"You begin with the possibilities of the material and then you see what they can do; so the artist is almost a by-stander while he's working."

Massachusetts Seascape

This one's for my sister-in-law Stacy, for her birthday. She grew up in Massachusetts and went to Plum Island (seen in the painting) with her family on many weekends. Today, she lives in Greenwich, England. She just purchased a flat in Ramsgate, a coastal town. I thought she might like a seascape for her new vacation home.