50% Off Sale on My Etsy Shop!

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I am back!  I was gone on a family vacation to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.  I've returned on July 13th.  But, for the last two weeks, I have been crazy busy getting ready for the big sale on my Etsy shop.

There are now 83 paintings on 50% off sale on my Etsy shop.  This is the first time ever I am offering a sale of this scale.  Some paintings are new; some have been reworked and improved; others are my Etsy followers' favorites.  There is something for everybody!

"Enchanted Harbor" (oil on stretched canvas; 18" x 18") sold

sold

As my husband is from Minnesota and has lots of relatives there, we often visit Minnesota.  We spent a pleasant day in Grand Marais on Lake Superior in northern Minnesota during one of our visits a few years ago.  It is a picturesque artist community with two harbors and lighthouses.  The reference photo for the painting was backlit and pretty much black and white.  But I loved the composition and wanted to make a painting out of it.

I transformed a bleached-out, afternoon scene into a romantic twilight moment.  I went wild with dots in the water, sky and everywhere.  I hope you like my pointillist style as much as I do!

"Rose Sprigs" (oil on stretched canvas; 8" x 10")

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By Thursday, the temperature hit 90's!  Prudently we painted inside, myself choosing a small bouquet of roses as the subject.  As it turned out, this painting turned out to be the most difficult project of the workshop.

My teacher, Danni Dawson, is a master of contemporary realism, renowned for her luminous portraiture and exquisite still life.  She showed us how to paint the rose, gooseberry, strawberry, melon, and glass bottle.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't paint like her; I simply did not have her patience of painting a petal by petal!

I brought the roses home, hoping to finish the painting.  The flowers died in a refrigerator.  The thing to do, as Danni assured us many times, was to paint the way I painted.  So I did.  Using the image on my smart phone as the reference, I made finishing touches on "Rose Sprigs". 

The beginning of the painting

Many steps later.

"Stone Cottage with Grape Vines" (oil on stretched canvas; 11" x 14")

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On the second day of Danni Dawson's workshop, I decided to paint the studio of her husband and fellow artist Mike Francis, a charming stone cottage with wooden doors draped with grapevines.  As I painted the scene in the shade of a plein-air umbrella, the overcast sky eventually cleared by the afternoon.  The sun moved to cast the lovely shadows of grape leaves on the old, patinaed doors.

I used to "mass produce" these plein-air paintings two a day during a workshop.  No more!  I took my time by carefully observing the growth patterns and cast shadows of grape leaves, and finished the painting on the following day.  It was a lot of fun and not as exhausting!

"Summer Roses" (oil on stretched canvas; 10" x 8")

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During the week of June 8th, I took a workshop of my teacher, Danni Dawson, at her house in Arlington, VA.  What a workshop it was!  Six of us painted in her rose garden, then when the weather became oppressively hot, we went inside to paint still lives in her spacious studio.  Danni, a gourmet cook, also prepared every lunch of an Italian dish made fresh with vegetables from her garden!

"Summer Roses" was the first painting of the workshop, which I didn't quite get to finish. Yesterday I worked on the leaves to make the painting more lush.  How do you like it?

I started the painting on the canvas toned with an ultramarine blue, which became part of the background. Cool, don't you think?

This is how far I got on Monday. After a heavy thunderstorm that night, the flowers were all gone!

"Harbor in Late Afternoon Light" (oil on stretched canvas; 18" x 24")

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I started showing my art on ugallery.com, the online gallery founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco.  It's a new era in my art career with larger, better paintings, as the gallery curates the artwork submitted by the artists.  I have already got four of my paintings turned down.  I'd better work harder!

"Harbor in Late Afternoon Light" is an old painting that I spiffed up with dots.  The late afternoon sun was striking Noyo Harbor, a small, working harbor in northern California at a perfect angle, making everything glow.  How do you like it?

"Black Muse" (oil on stretched canvas; 16" X 12")

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I am a little behind in blogging.  Better late than never!  The beautiful African-American model is wearing a turban-like head cloth from Mali.  I painted her chiseled face over the two Saturdays in Danni Dawson's portrait class at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA. 

I started blocking in.

I got this far at the end of the first-week session.