Some summer updates

We'll Be All Right
Right now I am sitting in my family room by huge windows enjoying pouring rain showers and occasional thunder and lightning. I absolutely love rainy days, and we have been very, very dry around here lately, so the rain is extra welcome. I think that this weather is watering and refreshing my dry soul, too. Don't misunderstand please! Life is good. I just feel like my creativity tank is being filled at the same time as water is rising in the pasture pond.

Such great news! We'll Be All Right has been a favorite painting for me since the day I finished it, and so I have been saving it to enter in the Hoosier Salon 98th Annual Exhibition that happens at the Indiana State Museum. I am absolutely delighted that it has been accepted and will be showing there along with many exceptional works of art by artists who have Hoosier connections. 

I have really enjoyed painting en plein air lately. As one of the instructors at the huge PACE 2022 plein air convention said, "While I am painting, nothing hurts." Ha ha! She is right! As I mentioned once before (I think), I am not sharing a whole lot of my plein air work anywhere except my Daily Paintworks site for right now. These works are so different from my "real" paintings, that I am keeping them mostly separate. 

Pasture Grazing en Plein Air

Another lesson, learned at PACE from the well-known artist Kevin Macpherson, helped me with my recent painting of the cows in our pasture. I had been feeling like my plein air work was too bluish in general color, and I remembered him saying that he gave himself a challenge to paint with limited colors on his palette (I almost always use only a few colors too), and to take out a color and do a complete painting without it. He said he just used the color closest to blue to achieve the feel of blue, for example, so I decided to try that too. I loved how it turned out! This painting was a palette knife painting and was painted using 2 greens, one yellow, one red, and white. What a fun experiment! 


Well, it is time to get back into the studio today. I have a couple of abstract works that are nearly complete, and I want to clean up my very messy studio today. Talk to you soon! 

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