Distant Pond, 8" x 10"-Sold

This little one was finished last night in preparation for the Finger Lakes Lavender Festival in Skaneateles next month.

I have been on a slump of sorts with respect to painting simply because I've been painting with a wide brush: my house facade is finally getting the TLC it needed and my husband, daughter, and I are doing all the work. It's not easy to stand up in front of your easel when you are physically tired from the morning chores.

The house is looking nice and I'm starting to feel that I can produce new paintings again.

Fall Reflections (reworked) 8"x10" - Sold

Sometimes a blurry photo is the perfect beginning for art exploration. Over a year ago I painted two very different fall scenes based on such a reference (see Two from One). The main objects in the photo that triggered my interest were a pond, a pasture right behind it, and a hill.

When the other objects that compose the landscape are not clearly defined you just make some up! Sometimes this works, but other times the made up objects look too out of place.
This was the case with my first version of this painting which I'm posting here so you can compare it to the newer version:

I had it framed for a local group exhibit because I did not have anything else that was new, but when I brought it back home something about it kept on nagging me. So I took it out of the frame and reworked it. It has gone through so many changes but I think this is it. I feel that this newer version is more poetic or romantic and certainly less static than the first.

Now I'm letting my paintings rest for while before framing them.

Spring Flow, 10" x 9"

Rocks have never been my favorite subject to paint but at a recent workshop with Robert Carsten, one of his paintings inspired me to challenge myself on this subject; after all, what's the point of taking a workshop and paint easy things?

This was my second workshop with him, but this time I spent most of the two days working on a single scene with a rocky wall. Robert kept me going at it when I would have given up or would have considered the painting done. His point was that I need to learn to go the extra mile! I also learned that you reach a point in the painting when you need to stop, think, and make decisions that sometimes deviate from what you originally wanted.

Most of this scene, was done during the last hour of the workshop, by then, rocks did not seem so scary a subject anymore.