Still Life

Green Apples    approx.  8"X9" August 2010

This is an older painting that is not in my gallery.  I did it for a daily painting last year. Work has me finding it hard to make a schedule for painting since I work most of the day.  I'm also in the middle of concentrating on a commission.  I'm pretty excited to share how that goes when it progresses. Until then I'll be pulling some from the archives, or posting sketches a little more often than in the past. At least until I get a regular schedule worked out.

Plume

This is the image that came to me in my sleep the other night. It might look frightening here, but that wasn't the case when I saw it. Most images are quick flashes, but stay with me until I am at least halfway awake moments later.  I try to file them in my mind as potential paintings. It's advantageous to paint this way because I'm required to paint more through feeling than actual literal representation.  I'd be very interested to hear from
anyone else who gets these visions in their sleep.
 I'm not one who believes dreams have underlying meanings.  I think these images are combinations of thoughts I've had and images I've seen during the day.  These occur more often now that I'm painting because  I view the world as one potential drawing or painting after another.  However, I remember a number of times in past years when I wasn't actively painting or thinking about art when I would see images that were masterpieces (at least in my mind).  At those times I woke up excited but then became disappointed that I either couldn't remember details or didn't feel confident I could actually paint them.  I've since forgotten those images. I find it interesting that I woke so excited about what I had seen. That I saw them as actual paintings. They just popped into my mind at random times.  I can't  really explain why that happened. There have also been times when I've woken up and realized the image was not as good as I had felt it was when I was dreaming it.

Daily Painting in progress

Almost done with this dreamscape that appeared in my sleep last night. It was just a flash of a painting that looked like trees in the middle of a forest fire. A powerful image in my mind, and I can't quite get it on paper.
A nice little exercise nonetheless.

Demise of the Yellow Duck

The close to final painting.  I fiddled around with this abstract for awhile because the large yellow blob in the middle was bothering me.  in some ways I think it could have been left as it was.

The first post.  The image I had in mind when I started this abstract was a large yellow mass in the middle of the page, but something about it didn't feel right. I kept seeing this cartoon-ish duck in flight.  That bothered me enough that I went on to change it.

The first thing I want to point out is that the two photographs taken of this painting are not of the same value.  The first photo was auto-corrected and the colors really jumped out.  I didn't want to misrepresent the real painting because while the colors are vibrant, they aren't that bright.  So I tried to make the finished

Revisiting Yupo

Lutz Tavern  Watercolor on Yupo: the painting as it looks now...to see what it looked like before I tinkered with it, see the link mentioned below.  Hindsight is that the original was actually fine if not better in some ways.

May of 2012 the Lutz Tavern on Yupo original post    I found an artist who has been very successful using Yupo for his Watercolors.  This piqued my interest once again in using this water resistant paper for a water based medium.  The upside to using Yupo is it's resiliency.  You can lift paint with absolute ease, in fact all the