A Gift from the Heart

Here is one of the commissions that I have been working on. My client commissioned two of the same house. She grew up in this house and now lives in it with her husband and children. One of the paintings is for her, the other she is going to give to her parents for Christmas. Many of my clients have given a painting of their home or vacation home to their spouse for an anniversary gift, Father's Day or birthday. I love hearing the stories of how happy and surprised the recipient was.

Plein Air Painting with Andy Evansen

Here is some of my work I did in a week long workshop with Andy Evansen. It was so wonderful to paint plein air all day for an entire week! We even had the most perfect weather, too. Andy is such a pleasant and humble teacher. He really tried to help each of us with our struggles to paint loose. He had us work on 4x6 or 5x7 paper in gray scale to practice capturing the values. Andy works very fast and makes it seem so effortless. My favorite quote from him that I will remind myself was "just indicate...". We do not need to paint every brick etc., just indicate it is brick.

My favorite piece is the value sketch in the middle photo. I feel like it has the eurythme I always want to capture. The darks, the movement, the hint, the looseness and the freedom. I did not finish the color image below it. This was all done on site. I didn't get the darks in as dark as in the value sketch. Notice one of the value sketches at top was from one of my plein air paintings from the Cape. The bottom photo is from the last day of the workshop. We painted in the trolley barn down on McKinney St. We did White Rock Lake, Farmer's Market, the West End and Turtle Creek.

This Saturday is the BIG day. The show runs through January 3. But, I would love it if you came by to see me at the reception this Saturday:

Where Texas Gets its Color
The Dutch Art Gallery
10233 E. Northwest Hwy (corner of Ferndale)
1:00-5:00