Saving the Best for Last

Personally, I think fall is the most colorful season of the four. Sure, summer has it's moments, but autumn seems to pull out all the stops before everything falls asleep... for what seems like forever. Or maybe it's because orange and golden-yellow are such brilliant colors that pink and green pale by comparison. Just speculating here.

One of my favorite aspects of designing a painting is playing with shapes and the shapes that define those shapes (negative space). These peppers are a perfect example of the types of compositions that grab my attention. I can look right past the similar, almost monotonous shapes and get caught up in the black shapes between the peppers. Weird, I know.

Art-Startz Becomes a Reality

Tomorrow night, 5 brave friends and I will gather to explore some creative possibilities that I'm calling Art-Startz. At the urging of a couple of close friends, I have been imagining a way to coax others along the path of creativity. Believing that art has to be lived and cannot be taught, I see myself as a tour guide rather than a teacher. My own creative journey has been through years of self-experimentation, books and workshops. I would have been helped greatly by having a tour guide along my creative path, a path I nearly abandoned out of frustration. I'm very excited to see what grows from this special night.

It's coming. The leaves are starting to turn. As a kid, fall held an air of excitement, once the disappointment over the end of summer had passed. It was a chance to start again...reinvent myself, if possible. I don't think I ever did succeed at becoming someone new, but hope sprung eternal.

Summer's Swan Song

Here we are again. The calendar says we are on the edge of a new season. I always struggle with this particular seasonal change. I love fall, but I'm not a fan of winter. Well, I'll just have to make the best of it. New goals are waiting to be set. My new project, Art-Startz, is on the horizon. A new sewing and photography class and... of course... new paintings. Maybe I'll be so busy I won't notice it's 20 degrees outside.

Apple a Day

Remember when about the only kind of apple you could find in the store was a Delicious--take your pick--red or yellow. I usually picked the yellow ones because they were less mushy. I so looked forward to September when the Gravensteins were ripe. Now that the stores are packed with ten different kinds of apples, Fujis are my apple of choice. What a great invention, the apple.

A pear is a pear is a pear

Ever notice how pears always look like pears? If you say something is "pear shaped", people always know the shape you're describing. I love to paint pears because they always look like pears....no awkward questions to answer, like "What is it?".