Golden Gardens Sunset

Here's an 18x24 oil of Golden Gardens beach in Seattle on a bright evening. Seattle has the greatest sunsets because of our clouds and long summer nights.

Astoria Road Landscape

Here's a colorful landscape from a photo taken on the highway toward Astoria, Oregon. It's fairly large at 22 x 28". Getting into a good work routine of several hours of art activity daily. Also almost through sorting and saving my art magazine articles. Only about 25 to go and I'm caught up.

Oregon Coast Landscape

Continuing to work on landscapes in palette knife technique. This one needs a few final touchups but too wet to work on it any more tonight.

New landscape

Have spent the past month on some other projects, including going through 16 years of art magazines to save only the articles I want. Have them in folders to use finally. Also did a custom mirror project, a left over from my art fair.

Now back to my palette knife painting from some of my old references. This is a 16x20 oil from a photo I took from a ferry boat in the San Juan Islands. It's a facade of trees and a little of the water.

Also set my 2010 goals which include much more art reading to keep me motivated. Spent 2009 not pushing as hard on the art as was waiting for my part-time job to end but now it's permanent so need to use my evenings and 4 day weekends to crank up the work again. Always have way more ideas than time so no problem keeping busy.

Next weekend go through my old issues of Art Calendar to pull out articles I want to save. Part of my year end clean up to enter the new decade lean and mean in my studio.

New figure painting

Finally finished my mirrors project and sold eight at my work crafts fair so was worth the effort. All the ones sold were my newer ones painted in oils so verified my change from acrylic as the colors are richer.

Now moving on to new projects including creating entries for an exhibit titled Unclad, the nude figure. I have had some prior experiments that I now want to enlarge and see how they look. Some were posted earlier on the blog. Here is a very abstracted "split figure" I just completed in a small version. There is something about the repetition and mirror image separation of the parts of the figure that resonates with me. Stay tuned.

Last of mirrors

I'm finished with my mirror project. Here are the last two. Now need to insert the mirrors and glue on backs and hangers. The fair these are for is November 6th so I'm right on schedule. Then, back to my regular painting projects.

The mirror on the bottom is another from my Magnuson Park photos that I have done small paintings from. The other is a classic Monet landscape.

Near the end of mirror project

Here is another mirror. Only a couple of "blanks" left but realized I need to save a few for possible custom orders. I will have about 20 plus new ones so should fill my need for the crafts fair. Still need to varnish and put backs on the completed ones so that will keep me busy. This brownish design is a Monet I liked so did another version of it.

After mirrors are done, will have to decide on next art projects. Have a few things in mind, especially entering my "split figure" works in a local art show calling for nudes called "Unclad 2010". May do a few more of these too as have some time before the entry deadline. Always felt these were fairly original and was looking for a place to show them.