Not Your Granny's Europe

                                      16x16; contact me if interested
This is the reworked lower portion of the painting I cut in two. It's a comment on the contrast you see in the "old country"- very very old buildings juxtaposed with modern technology. The one I don't get is high heeled shoes on cobblestone streets. The women seem to manage just fine, but I can't imagine trying it! The high heeled shoes alone are challenging enough.
We're leaving early tomorrow for points south. We'll get no further than Portland tomorrow as we have people to visit. There's no hurry though; this is a road trip and road trips are meant to be savored. I'm taking paint supplies to Arizona, but no light box, so I doubt there will be many still lifes. Don't know just what I'll paint, but I'll find something!

Portugal Rooftops

                                           16x16 Contact me if interested

More of the Spain/Portugal series. I have wrapped it up with 11 paintings (I created 13, but 2 have sold) and this week I will be framing them and preparing them for a show at the Seattle Design Center. In the past few days I have been working on color. My husband says my paintings have become dull and unexciting. I had been trying to work with neutrals and spots of color, but when I took stock of what I had done recently I saw that he was right. My neutrals were "blah" . I needed to move toward more neutralized color rather than flat beiges and greys. I went back to what I learned from Robert Moore's workshop and mixed up a big batch of good neutral using complements (cad orange and ultramarine ) and used that to unify the painting by mixing just a bit of that with all my colors. I use just a bit of pure color for "pops" in selected places. I often pooh pooh my husbands critiques at first (he's not an artist) but end up deciding they have merit.

Outside the Cafe

                                         16x16; contact me if interested in purchasing
This is the larger version of one 6x6 I painted a few weeks ago. I just love this lady; I think I will paint her a few more times. I decided for this larger version that her sweater needed to be a bit more varied in color and her skirt needed some pattern.

House On the Hill

This is one of the Spain/Portugal series I've been working on. It's 24"x30". Thus far, I've done 3 landscapes and 2 figurative. My goal is to have 12-15 paintings including landscapes, figurative and city scenes- rooftops, street scenes, etc. Oh yes, and one with cows in the street. I have an idea that it could be interesting to display them along with the photographs that inspired the images and perhaps a little narrative about them. At this time, I don't have a venue for the exhibit, but I have some ideas for that as well. Right now, it's just fun re-living the trip through these paintings.