It has been a while since my last post.  I have been doing some painting, but I have been distracted by health issues.  .

About the paintings:  the "Tea Party" features some of my wife's dolls bought for various grandchildren, and live at our house.  The bears are from the explore.com website on the Kenai River in Alaska.  It is a continuous stream of video of the bears fishing for salmon.  Since I have seen many bear in Alaska, I was fascinated.

I want to share two more paintings....the first one in my series of people in cafes, seems a bit stark to me.  I have been trying to use Bob Burridge's color wheel, which was the source for the color choices.  I was fortunate to attend his workshop here in La Conner last spring.  He is a fine teacher, and a real dynamo.  His colorful abstracts are fun to look at, and fun to try and use his ideas into one's own paintings.  That explains the 2nd picture, of flowers in a vase.  I had a lot of fun painting it, and it has had a lot of paint added at various times!

    

Another beautiful day here in La Conner, and we are awaiting the arrival of our youngest daughter, her husband and our 7 year old grandson.  While waiting for them to arrive for the rest of the Memorial Day weekend, I finished up some paintings.  They follow the same flat style I seem to have discovered.  The one painting was referred to as the "Last Supper" by my irreverent artist friends when I first started painting it.  I really had a birthday party in mind all the time!  The other two paintings are part of my people at cafe tables, a series I started several months ago.

This was fun to do, and fun to conceive.  The ladies are my daughter Kathy, and my grand daughter in law, Holly.  The dogs are theirs, of course, Moser and Buck.  Moser is named after a picturesque bay twenty five miles north of Ketchikan, AK. 

I am going to call the painting "Sit".  Anyone who has had a Labrador retriever as a pet knows that "Sit" is a relative term.  I don't think the dogs are going to stay still much longer!

I had fun painting these new paintings.  It is a bit difficult for me to paint flat, resisting putting in all of the shadows to define the planes of the figures.  I think that I am beginning to get it.

First Post

Have been developing a series of cafe scenes in Acrylics and have done relatively well with them.  Here are two I have worked on in class, and am pleased with the results.