It is about time I get aback to updating this site
Painting displayed is a watercolor on tissue paper adhered to watercolor painting.

I found an interesting art site a couple weeks ago and have joined Artwanted.com as a premium member. There is also a free membership available to try to see if this might be the place for you to exhibit your art. I think that most of the visitors & lookers are fellow artists but they give feedback to the images that you upload to your site. Besides selling your original painting there are prints of different sizes available at a reasonable price and the artist can order prints or cards of the original art at a discount.

Armando posted this painting challenge, he sent a sketch to those who wanted to participate and there were about 25 artists who submitted their paintings to the site. It was interesting to see how different all of them were presented from the same sketch. The participants were encouragd to use the sketch exactly as drawn or just as a reference.

I went to the Brownsville Art Museum today to assist in getting invitations ready to mail for an upcoming exhibit. We had some good volunteers show up to help.

After months of neglecting my blog site, I am back among the living! I have posted new paintings done earlier this year following a workshop with Carol Dillard Stroud that I attended in San Antonio, Texas. The workshop was one of many sponsored by the San Antonio Watercolor Group. I must say that I was disappointed in Ms. Stroud's workshop demeanor, although she is a well know, excellent artist and writer of many great articles and books, in my opinion she was not a good instructor. My reason for saying this is that she did not try to "connect" with the students, she was unorganized in her presentations, did not cover topics that were to be covered, did not have students use the supplies she asked us to bring, took two hour lunches away from the workshop, and seemed more intent on finishing her demo paintings than assisting the class.

Well I guess I am done sounding off about that subject and fortunately, I am pleased with my paintings using some of the techniques she demonstrated. They included making my own rubber stamps, using masking tape to grid off areas etc.

This painting of the Yellow Hibiscus was completed in my studio after the workshop and exhibited in the Brownsville International Art Exhibit in March, 2008 and was awarded a 2nd place ribbon by the judge of the exhibit, Anita Diebel of Rockport, TX

Improvision

This painting was completed a couple years ago during a workshop I conducted at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art. The painting contains aluminum foil and collaged photos and is painted with Golden Fluid Acrylic paints. It is now in the collection of Joe and D'Ann Huth.

One of my art mentors, Doug Walton, said "You always have what you need to create art". In one of his workshops we painted on roofing tar paper with acrylic paints! I am not sure how archival tar paper or aluminum foil may be but I am sure the paintings will survive my lifetime or more.

This is the challenge that turns me on- to to look around in my studio and surroundings use what I find and enjoy the process of making art happen. Improvisation is creativity.

This week I prepared many handouts and excercises to conduct a workshop on values and contrast in watercolor in Mercedes, Texas. After spending hours getting prepared, I packed up my portfolio and painting supplies and drove the 50 miles to the workshop. When I unpacked my supplies to begin the workshop to my dismay, I found that I had left all of my handouts at home in my studio! Talk about improvising! There to my right on a bookshelf was Nita Leland's book, Exploring Color to use as examples of making value charts of all their pigments .

I had left my drawings at home that I planned to have them trace to do a quick monochromatic value painting but a student had a partially finished painting almost identical to my drawing, we used a lightbox and her painting to quickly draw and paint the study. Then I drew another quick sketch to use for a landscape painting using light, middle and dark values in different perspectives as they were working on their assignment. We continued throughout the day doing value paintings that were probably better than my best laid plans.

Improvision is the key to being creative!

The name of this mixed media piece is Change. The painting was created in September, 2007 before I was aware of Obama's campaign slogan. If you double click the image you can see a close up of some of the quotaions I have written on the painting referring to "change". Do you suppose

Obama wants to buy this for his campaign posters? Wishful thinking never hurt but I have never won the lottery!

A Day of Procrastination
I went into my studio early this morning with great intentions of getting out my paints and paper and creating a couple small watercolors of Texas landscapes. Instead, I found myself doing office work connected with ordering supplies for students, balancing my checkbook, looking at sites on the computer, driving to a glass shop to get glass for a painting, organizing some of my teaching supplies, stopping to have a glass of wine with hubby and finally about 4 pm I managed to get an underpainting on a piece of 11.15" paper! Now it is almost time to fix dinner and then run out in the unusually cold Brownsville weather to a church meeting. Maybe tomorrow. Anyone else like to comment on procrastination?

This painting, "Through the Window of My Mind" was a result of playing with the watercolor media and discovering shapes and design, color combinations that were spontaneous as I progressed and became emerged in the process of painting, not thinking about the final product or results.

Following is a quote from the book, ART & FEAR by David Bayles & Ted Orland.
"Making art and viewing art are different at their core: The sane human being is satisfied that the best he/she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment. Such sanity is, unfortunately rare. Making art provides uncomfortable accurate feedback about the gap that inevitable exists between what you intended to do, and what you in fact did. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork.