Yellow Irises

This is another one of my recent small paintings.  They have been so much fun to paint, so relaxing and exciting at the same time.  I took this picture and some other irises also from my yard.  And I'm painting a few of them.  It is so much more stressful painting portraits then it is painting flowers so I thought I would take a break. 

Daffodils

I recently went on our annual painting trip to Duck on the Outerbanks of North Carolina with some friends.  It was a wonderful retreat very relaxing and yet stimulating to the creative process.  We truly had a wonderful time. 

I have been painting so many portraits for a while now and it was great to take my mind off them and concentrate on my true love of flowers.  I have been wanting to paint daffodils this spring.  They were blooming everywhere but every time I went out to photo them it was too windy to get a good picture.  So I had to take the pictures I had and use my imagination and I was able to come up with this small little painting.  I can't tell you how much fun it was to paint.

Gladiola

This is my Gladiola painting that I worked on in Corolla. It was so much fun. I love the colors and the values as well as the size of the paper. I feel like it represents the direction that my style is going in. It was also nice working on a flower for the first time in a long time.

This weekend I'm in the Gosport Art Festival in Old Towne Portsmouth from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm and Sunday from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. It is a nice Mother's day weekend art show. You can come and see my Gladiola as well as the other artist's work. I think you will enjoy it.

Pineapple

I bought a pineapple from the grocery store and became so fascinated by the shapes and colors that I just had to paint it. This is how I usually come to paint something different than my usual repertoire. It was so much fun playing with the shapes and the colors. (I do believe that the colors are a little richer in the painting itself.) I also like putting it in a tall and thin shape. I think it exaggerates the height of the pineapple itself.

Now I have to say that taking a break and having fun painting a pineapple is not what I should be doing right now. I need to start working on paintings for the show at Pembroke 4 Art Gallery at the end of July and new paintings for the Seawall festival at the end of August. But don't I always tell my students that having fun painting is the most important part of your artistic experience and that your paintings always improve when you are enjoying the process?

I'm making a transition in focus at this point in time. I'm going to have alot more time on my hands to spend working on my painting and pursuing other interests. My problem is that I always want to do it all and I can't always allow myself to try to do everything at the same time. So I need to sit back and figure out what is the most important things to work on and try and just focus on them. Let's see how well I can do with that!