This piece was commissioned as a companion piece to Sky City Mission.
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This piece was commissioned as a companion piece to Sky City Mission.
We often hike in the woods below Sprague High School. This is the upper entrance to the trail. Lit from behind, the shadows are an invitation to walk in the woods.
During our trip to Spain, I fell in love with the mudejar horseshoe arches. This particular arch is in the Palacio de la Condesa de Lebrija in Seville. The Palace is an architectural hodgepodge, with mudejar and Renaissance elements and ancient Roman mosaic floors.
This painting has sold, but you may still purchase a fine art print.
Collage board is permanently mounted to black wood cradle frame. Collage surface protected with clear acrylic semi-gloss.
The glass pyramid as seen through one of the Louvre’s arches.
I love city light. The shafts of light created by openings in the tall buildings, the reflectivity of building and pavement, and the flat surfaces for shadows all lead to one thing—drama.
This particular drama is the long shadows and the warm glow of a Chicago winter morning. The crowd is up early and waiting for The Art Institute of Chicago to open up. The crowd and bus hide one lion, but the other can be seen peeking out from behind the traffic light.
This is a back “street” in Riomaggiore where the streets are not only likely to be too small for cars, but may include staircases. I loved the light at the end of the tunnel effect and the contract between the brightly painted wall and the natural stone stairs. The woman was both beautiful and big.
This painting has sold, but you can still purchase a fine art print.
For the last four years I’ve been taking pictures of the Oregon State Fair confident that with all those people and colors there must be a good painting in there somewhere. Four years of pictures with images taken from four different photos and I finally have one.
This is a hot summer painting for a cold winter day here in Oregon. It’s been snowing steadily for the last 40 hours or so. Everything is white and cold. But this painting warms me right up.
This is the view from Moki Dugway (sometimes spelled Mokee or Moqui). But however you spell it, it is a most spectacular pass overlooking The Valley of the Gods and Monument Valley. Utah Highway 261 traverses north from Gooseneck Sate Park north through the Valley of the Gods, at which point it becomes a set of dirt road switchbacks yielding the some of the most amazing views of the whole southwest canyon lands area. Those switchbacks are Moki Dugway.
We visited The Grand Canyon, Chaco Canyon, Bryce, Natural Bridges National, Capital Reef, and Kodachrome State Park, yet my husband found this little stretch of road the most scenic view of the trip. I can see why.
This painting has sold, but you can still purchase a fine art print.
I often get asked at art fairs how long it takes to paint one of my paintings. It’s an unanswerable question. Some paintings take days and even repeated attempts each taking days. Some paintings just fall out of the brush in minutes. This painting just fell out of the brush. And that despite being painted at the State Fair as a demo.
The reference photo is a picture I took of a girl friend’s cat some years ago. I don’t often paint animals, but my gallery is having a group “critters” show and so I browsed my old photos looking for a suitable cat, and this tabby popped up. Now that I’ve done him, I rather like him. He will be on display at Art in the Valley all this September.
This painting has sold, but you may still purchase a fine art print.
A little taste of Oxford—another poured painting.
This painting has sold, but you may still purchase a fine art print.
Another painting taken from our trip to Europe last summer. This charming little street is close to Nortre Dame, but at least a little off the beaten path. Like many of the streets in the area, it curves charmingly.
I poured this painting in much the same manner as July in Florence. The process is much like batik and leads to clear color passages that make buildings glow.
Or purchase a fine art print.
Old town Florence streets are shaded lanes so narrow they almost feel like tunnels running at irregular angles to each other. The view at the end of the tunnel is often as not another narrow lane cutting the street off at not quite a right angle. But here there the streets open into plazas with startling sunny views of churches, cathedrals, bridges, train stations and castles. Walking from our apartment, the Duomo complex burst upon us in much the same way–the light at the end of the tunnel.
Another poured watercolor painting, a process much like batik.
Florence in heat again. This time it’s the beautiful arcade running along the Arno between the Uffzi and the Ponte Vecchio.
This is Gig Harbor, Washington in the late afternoon, though it could be almost any harbor for pleasure craft. I love to do reflections and docks are a great place to find them. In the late afternoon, the water gets almost black and the reflections of white boats become even more dramatic. But it was the contrasting wooden hull of the right most vessel that really caught my eye.
I often delete the names of boats, but I liked the name Simplexity so I kept it in. I”m not entirely sure what “simplexity” means, but my painting is of a complex scene much simplified by the process of elimination, so it seems to fit somehow. The brightness of the light eliminated some detail for me and the deep shadows eliminated some more. I just went with the flow and removed some background boats, a lot of rope, and much hardware.
The real trick was getting the orangey wood of the boat to carry enough to make it the center of interest despite the extreme contrast of the white boats against the blue-black water. To get the orange I wanted I mixed burnt sienna with new gamgee. Then I glazed portions of it with quinacridone Rose Madder and more new gamgee. I deliberately downplayed the flag in favor of the hull. Down in the reflections the flag does become a secondary center of interest.
My palette also included cerulean blue, phthalo blue, and cobalt blue.
I worked without mask this time painting each boat, in tandem with it’s darker less vivid reflection. After I finished the boats I added the water in phthalo blue dulled with burnt sienna.
Our house is covered in floor to ceiling book shelves. So it was really only a matter of time before the shelves showed up in one of my still lifes. This time they feature only as a reflection.
Or purchase a print from Fine Art America.com. See more still paintings at: still life paintings
Years ago I celebrated a new job by purchasing a jewelry box I had coveted for several years. I love oriental furniture with it’s brass hinges and inset jade and soapstone. But I find a whole room full of such furniture much too heavy. But the jewelry box was everything I loved about the furniture in miniature. And despite it’s exoticness, it looks perfectly at home on my plain pine dressers. And it has the added advantage of actually looking better half open with the jewelry hanging out than it does closed.
It took me some time to compose a picture with my jewelry box at the center. The problem is that the box’s shape is really just that, a vertical rectangular box. Compositions with the complete box were brought to a complete and boring full stop by the edge of the box. In the end, I subordinated the box to the tulips and cropped it along one edge. The dark open door of the box makes a beautiful foil for the bright tulips.
Once composed, painting the picture was relatively straight forward. I masked the highlights and then began with the tulips painting them in a various combinations of hansa yellow, hansa gold, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow, and cadmium red. The leaves are combinations of the same yellows with cobalt and phthalo blue. I used the same colors for the jade necklace and insets as I did for the foliage.
I went on to painting vase and metal hinges using primarily yellow ochre, raw sienna and burnt sienna dulled with cobalt blue and cerulean blue. I added the box in combinations of burnt sienna, quinacridone magenta, and dioxazine purple.
The dresser top is layered washes of burnt sienna, raw sienna, and burnt umber. The wall yellow ochre and dulled with dioxazine purple. Layed the wall on very heavily to allow the tulips to pop.
This painting has sold but you may still purchase a print from Fine Art America.com.