Last year I ambitiously painted Christmas cards for many of my friends. It was a wonderful labor of love. This year I am going through some serious medical issues so I decided that I would do cards for my wonderful care team at UVA Health. I didn’t do as many, and some are repeats of last year, though each one is always unique. Here are some that I think are best.
Happy Holidays!
I know it’s been a long time since I posted. I have been busy dealing with some serious health issues. I am in treatment and I have vowed to focus on nothing but getting well and painting over the next several months, so hopefully you will be seeing more from me.
To be honest, I haven’t painted much. As I said, I’ve been busy and I’m kind of bored. I have it in my head to start experimenting with some different things, but that takes time and initiative and I haven’t really had either. That will change though. I actually just got my oil paints back out after a long hiatus. I am going to do some miniatures to get the hang of them again. I am not abandoning my watercolors, just mixing things up a bit.
So as an example of something different that I have done recently, below is a painting of a scene from Wintergreen that is painted on black paper using acrylics. I wanted to experiment with getting the deep dark aspect of the forest by painting on a black background. It was fun and I liked the result. I want to do more of this.
Stay tuned… more to come soon.
I will be participating in the Artisan Show at Mountain & Vine Winery (formerly Delfosse) this Sunday from 11AM to 4PM. Come out and taste a little wine while supporting local artists!
Location: 500 Delfosse Winery Lane, Faber VA 22938
In the past I blogged about my trips to a place called Nimrod Hall in Bath County Virginia. Nimrod is a place where I go for art retreats. It is a magical place where you can immerse yourself in painting for a week, spending time with other artists, and just being creative. I have always loved my time at Nimrod. I discovered it in 2013. I did weekend workshops when I was still working, but switched to full weeks when I retired.
Last year I shared a post saying that the owner of Nimrod Hall, Laura Loe, had decided to stop operating the workshops. She had been doing it for 25 years, first as a manager and then as an owner when she and her husband bought Nimrod in 2013. I understand that she was burned out, but I was heartbroken! As it turns out, she missed us! I checked several times at the beginning of the year when she usually posted the schedule, and there was no indication that she was opening it, but then I saw a random Facebook post saying she had a limited number of weeks available. By then they were all full, but I put myself on the wait list and I got in.
So, I spent last week at Nimrod. I did what is called an Open Artist week, meaning I had no teacher. I just painted on my own. It was brutally hot the first two days, but I didn’t care. Although, I do have to say I learned something. Watercolor doesn’t work well when it’s too hot. It dries almost instantly when it hits the paper, so you can’t do any wet-in-wet painting. I had hoped to paint big, but the one day I tried to do that I was so unsuccessful that I went back to small formats for the rest of the week. I really enjoyed just being creative, and spending time with some other wonderful artists. Below are the paintings I did while I was there.
The first day I warmed up with an ink and watercolor sketch of the main house, which was built in 1783.
Then I did a small (12×6) landscape of a nearby field looking up at the mountains.
On Tuesday, it was really hot. I tried twice to do a landscape from a photo a friend had shared with me. Neither was good. I wasn’t able to get the blending in the mountains that I wanted to show atmospheric distance. The first one is better, but I did that one in the morning, when it was a little cooler. The second was really a challenge. I did the flowers in gouache. These are both 16×12.
On Wednesday I decided to return to a smaller format. I painted this 10×8 scene with Scottish cows.
I also did a small line and wash sketch of one of the other cottages at Nimrod. I don’t really like this one much. Always good to practice though.
Finally, on Thursday I did two paintings of lilies. The first was a watercolor sketch that I actually started late Wednesday. The second was done on black paper with acrylic. Its more design-y than most of the work I do. I’m not sure it’s done yet.
Then in the afternoon on Thursday I did a 12×6 painting of the sunset photographed on Wednesday evening.
It was a great week. I am so grateful that Laura decided to open again. I’m sure it’s hard work and we don’t know what the future will bring. We shall see.
I am doing Shenandoah ArtFest in Woodstock Virginia again this year. Last year it was my first show and I did pretty well, so I signed up again and I was accepted. Sorry for the late notice. I hope to see some friendly faces there!
I need your help! The call for art for the next Trillium Gallery show is coming up soon. We are hoping that this show gets good traffic. It will hang during The Nature Foundations annual Wildflower Symposium. It will also be up during the Wintergreen Music Festival in July. I wanted to include something nature oriented, so I decided on butterflies.
I have this frame that it long and thin that I bought because I always need long thin frames for landscapes. This particular frame came with a mat cut for three 5×7 photos. I thought what I could do was put three small butterfly paintings in the frame together. Here is a photo of the frame.
With that thought in mind I started painting butterflies, and I painted a dozen of them. I played with different techniques. Most are watercolor and ink. Some fill the page and others do not. Some have spatter, a technique common in watercolor, but I’m just starting to experiment with it. I want to include the three best, and then I will turn the rest into cards and will try to sell them.
Here’s where my readers come in. Please vote for your three favorite butterflies from the 12 I have posted below (they are numbered). I’m very curious to hear your likes and dislikes for my learning process. You can vote and provide feedback in the blog comments if that works for you. I will also post on Facebook and Instagram, so you can vote in the comments there. And you can also send me an email if you’d like. I will share the results if I get enough feedback. I think this will be fun! Thanks!
Update: And the winners are 2, 6 and 8. Thanks to everyone who voted!
At shows, I sometimes have people ask me if they can buy my work online at a later time. I’ve also had distant friends ask if they can buy my art online. For a while I had a link to an Etsy store, but keeping it up to date was a chore. I’ve decided I need to have an online retail store, so I’ve built one. In some ways this terrifies me, because it feels like I’m opening a big can of worms.
When I started doing shows I signed up for a Square account so I could take credit cards. It has many other handy features like calculating and tracking sales tax, which is required at most shows. It’s worked very well for me.
My site is built using WordPress, and there is a plugin suite called WooCommerce that links your Square account with WordPress to allow online sales. I think I’ve got that set up. So, as of today, we are open for business. I have only put a subset of my available paintings in the shop. I will try to keep adding them to keep it fresh. I’ve also indicated that people should ask about availability if there is something that they like that’s not in the shop.
Right now I’ve limited my sales to the US. I may add Canada if it goes well. We shall see!
I mentioned in my last post that I would be doing a show at Mountain & Vine, a local winery, on Saturday February 3rd from noon to 5. That’s tomorrow! In addition to the pieces I’ve shown in the past I will be showing some new paintings that I also shared in that last post, including this one.
I am also trying something new. I have a lot of nice artwork that I’ve never framed. Much of that is because I don’t have frames to fit. I have observed in past shows that people sometimes like to buy unframed art because it’s a little cheaper and they can use a frame they already have, or chose one to their liking. I also painted a few new pieces for this show that I chose not to frame. These will all be on display in a bin on my table in my booth. I am curious to see how people react to that. Here are a few photos. These were harder to photograph because they are in plastic and there is a glare if I light them directly.
These first two are things that I painted for this show and matted but did not frame.
These two were in a sketchbook but I like them. They are very tiny, but I removed them from their sketchbook and matted them and I think they are cute and would go well in a small space.
Finally, the opening of the second show in The Trillium Gallery went great! We got some fabulous artwork from our local art community. We had a wonderful turnout and sold four paintings! There is still a lot of good work up so hopefully sales will continue. This show will be up until late April or early May.
Sorry it’s been a while, but I have been busy! Happy New Year to all.
First, the Trillium Gallery has been doing well. It’s had good traffic and we sold four paintings, which I think is not bad for a first show. We plan to rotate the work on display quarterly and that time is nearly upon us. We have grown our mailing list considerably by including a signup sheet in the gallery. We are taking submissions till tomorrow, and we already have 44 artworks to select from. We have refined our selection process and I’m really looking forward to presenting another strong body of work. The new show will open on January 27th. We have also worked on our branding and I created a logo, which is not my forte, but it came out okay.
I am doing a show the first week in February at the Mountain & Vine winery. This show is only open to Nelson County artists. I don’t know if I will sell anything but I’m proud to support the winery and other local artists. I’m doing something new for this one. I’m going to try including a bin of unframed original works that will be less expensive than my framed pieces. We will see how that goes. I have painted a few new pieces for this show, and for the next gallery show. Here are a few that I’ve recently completed.
Finally, every few years I get ambitious and decide I’m going to hand paint Christmas cards. Usually somewhere in the process I kick myself, but in the end, I look at it as a labor of love. I did 21 in total this year and it was really good for me to focus on painting that much. I got to experiment a bit with some new techniques. And the recipients were all very appreciative. Several have told me they plan to frame them. They are all included in the gallery below, which I learned does not appear in the email version. Hopefully people will click through.
First a little background about Wintergreen. There is an independent organization here called The Nature Foundation at Wintergreen (TNF). They are a naturalist organization that performs several important environmental functions, maintains our hiking trails, tracks wildlife sightings, etc. Inside TNF there is a meeting room maintained by the Wintergreen Property Owners Association (WPOA) for use by residents.
When this room was opened last year, the WPOA noted that it needed art. I suggested that it be a gallery where local artists could show and sell their art, to which WPOA said they didn’t want to be in the business of selling art. Understandable.
TNF has a gift shop that does some retail sales, so I suggested that they could do the sales and take a commission. I thought it was a win-win. People resist change, so I was not able to get any interest from TNF, until I learned that a friend and fellow artist, Carolyn Velletri had the same idea. Carolyn and her husband do a lot of volunteer work for TNF so she had the attention of the right people and we managed to get them to commit to a trial.
Carolyn and I wanted this to be a class act! We wanted a professional gallery where local artists could submit art work. Carolyn, myself, and a representative from TNF would curate the work submitted and select art for display. Art would have to meet the mission of TNF which is “to foster an understanding and appreciation of the natural and cultural heritage of the Central Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and our community through conservation, research and education.”
We wanted to hang the first show well before the holidays in hopes of getting gift sales. The art will be rotated quarterly. We worked hard to create a submission form and disseminate it to local artists. We got some great submissions and held our grand opening on October 28th. It was well attended and we received numerous compliments. Most importantly, we sold three paintings!
I am excited about this new venture. It will give me more credibility as an artist and it will help me grow and foster our local art community which is very important to me. Here are pictures of the art shown.
Here is a photo of me and Carolyn.
Here is a photo of several people viewing the art. We were having too much fun to remember to take pictures so we didn’t get photos of the crowd at its height.
Now we need to keep the buzz going.