A Fireside Chat With Jane Freeman

My dear friend, Jane Freeman, got cornered into doing an interview with me for a forum that I'm on...Painting Friends...and it is up and ready for reading.  Hope you'll drop by www.paintingfriends.com  and take a look.  Just go to the site, sign in as a guest, and enjoy.  We met year before last when the Artcolony gang met for a face-to-face in Chicago, and I could still see her smiling eyes and hear her voice when we were "chatting" so it was lots of fun for me.  There are a handful of her paintings included, and some pretty good information and bantering back and forth if I do say so.  Janie's book, "A Celebration of Light" was one of the very first art instruction books that I purchased as a rank beginner.  I saw this gorgeous painting on the cover, and that was all there was to that.  It's amazing that from that painting and book a pretty special friendship has happened.  I think it's somewhat of a miracle that I so admired the book and her talents, then found her blog(Artcolony) and became a real fan of Jane and the other very talented artists there, then by some still unexplained event was asked to join the blog, and have become friends with the author of the book that started it all...go figure.  Our art world is a rather small world in the scheme of things...and aren't we all lucky. 

So, hope you'll go and take a look...you'll love her thoughts and wonderful advice.  This landscape is one of her latest paintings...and we're all drooling over the others.

One of our friends just e-mailed me for more instructions...so...click on "What's New" and scroll down to the chat, or click on "Quick Links", then click on "Today's Posts" and scroll.

Crystal Blue Persuasion

Thanks to one of my Artcolony blog friends, Bitsy Gibson, for the title to my latest painting.  Had so much blue going on except the pinks and greens in the hydrangeas and was totally stumped for a good title.  This paintings was mostly done in mid-tones...which is pretty hard for me to do since I usually charge in with lots of color...but I'm enjoying the calmness amidst all the busy elements.  Now it's time for another one, and there are some "must paints" that are calling my name.

Silver/Crystal WIP

Here's where I stopped today.  Seems that I have another decision to make about the crystal.  When I did the drawing, I decided to keep it on the sparse side facet-wise as the rest of the painting is really busy so I wanted to "slow it down" a bit.  It is half sheet, so there's lots of "stuff" going on.   Now I'm thinking that there aren't enough facets in the decanter as the many facets seem to be what attracts me to painting crystal, and now I'm thinking it may be too sparse.  Also, I'll wait to do my value adjustments until I decide what to do here.  Ah, the trials and decisions of we artists...but...that's what makes us such perfectionists it seems...too much, not enough...I'll just sleep on it and see how I feel tomorrow.

Silver/Crystal WIP

After taking a really long time off from posting to my blog (and I'm ashamed of myself for having my muse stay in Portugal) I decided I'd best get back with the program and start painting seriously again.  Found this drawing from last year that I had just not wanted to tackle...and I'm still thinking I'm crazy for jumping back in with this one...but I do love to paint silver and crystal...so...this one is coming along nicely.  Hopefully I'll get it finished this coming week.  The silver topped decanter is one from my sister-in-law and the karaf is from a neighbor after I admired it so...too bad both are empty...ha.

Dream Trip to Portugal

It's been too long since I've been on my blog, but did have a good reason...a really quickly planned trip to Lisbon, Portugal fell into my lap and I've just gotten home.  Thought I'd post at least one photo of the first cathedral we visited...it's going to be a tough decision on what to paint...but it was a wonderful trip...just need to get back on Texas time in my head.

Little Blue Cottage...Indian Rocks Beach, Florida

Here is the little blue companion cottage I painted this year from our wonderful week of painting in Indian Rocks Beach.  These little cottages are all strung out together with parking in the front and they're on a little side street opening...unseen from the main street...we just happened to stumble upon them last year and were determined to paint them again.  Now there's another waiting in the wings...and it has a name...Key Lime Cottage.  Of course I'll get that one painted also as key lime pie is my very favorite and that little cottage has my name written all over it.  Didn't get the demos of the crystal and silver finished, but they did do a video of both...you can find it on YouTube.  The one from last year is listed as "glass" and this year's is listed under my name with "crystal" for one and "silver" for the other.  It was so much fun, and we got out of there in enough time to miss Hurricane Isaac. 

A friend from California and I drove from Florida to New Orleans and spent a few days there...she caught the train home...I caught the plane home.  Got lots of wonderful photos of the FrenchQuarter, very interesting casual photos of people, the wonderful architecture of NewOrleans, some of the local scenes...and left some money at the local casino...that part wasn't much fun, but it did add to a wonderful vacation of play and painting.

Airport Greeting...Flowers...Love It.

Not everybody gets flowers upon arrival in an airport...lucky me...my condo roomie, Judy Buckingham from Oregon greeted me with these gorgeous red glads.  What a wonderful surprise...and what a wonderful week we had painting with our Painting Friends forum artists.  I'll post some photos when I get some resized, but couldn't resist showing my flowers.  When we got to the condo, a guy was finishing up the cleaning duties and nearly scared the begeebies out of us when we opened the door, but was nice enough to take this shot for us.