"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!