For Mischances and Mishaps (and Further Adventure), All You Need is A Great Big Old Ugly Orange Dented Railroad Truck

Once upon a time,

(once a pond a time)…during the last month, my daughter moved into her own apartment.  Well, her own apartment…with roommates.  Much different from living with parents, siblings, or other relatives.  No sooner had she staked her domestic claim than she began to think of furnishings.  Giddy with autonomy, she and her new roommates rummaged the local thrift store.  They found a couch, soft and comfy, reminding them of grandmas (when I saw it, I realized that 80’s means grandma to them).  And a table, painted bright blue (someone’s previous repurpose).  And chairs (blue too).  All for under $100.  And my daughter remembered her parents telling her, when a for-real launch was still just a pigment of everyone’s imagination, that they would love to help her settle in.  So she texted her father to exact her share of the parental promise. [continue reading…]

I think I’ll call this painting “Little Muse”.

I reserve the right to change my mind. But for now: Little Muse, because…hmm.  Wordplay?  She looks like she’s musing.  And she is the smallest of my five muses.  All my children captivate and inspire me, not just artistically, but…what.  Anthropologically.  They are all marvelous, fascinating people. [continue reading…]

Lavender Companions, Horticulturally Speaking.

I do love lavender.  I admit that perhaps, at times, I’ve gone to extremes in my efforts to make it mine.  I am a little crazy…yes, true…But.  At least I’m nice about it.

I make sure that my lavender has good friends, that it blooms in the best society. [continue reading…]

Oil on Canvas: Mara On Sunday

This is a painting of my sister, Mara Lee.  I adore her.  I always have, always will.  She is the third in our large family (I’m the oldest).  With my feisty sister Leah between us, it was natural that Mara Lee and I would be allies, if an ally happened to be needed (Leah was either our best friend or worst enemy).   When we were children, Mara Lee seemed vulnerable to me. Large blue eyes, quiet voice, easy pace (my daughter Maurya reminds me of her). I loved to mother her (when it occurred to me; children can be pretty self absorbed).  Even when we were teenagers, hoeing in wheat fields for my dad or meeting strangers, I instinctively shielded her. [continue reading…]

Oil on Canvas:  Shari’s Poppies Painting

I painted these poppies with oil on canvas, using a photo from a garden magazine as inspiration.  I’m not a plein-air live subject purist; I’ve even painted the face of a woman in a margarine advertisement.  She became Mother Earth.  But that’s another story. [continue reading…]

Texas With Abandon, Oil on Canvas

I painted this from a snapshot I’d taken on a Texas getaway with Frank.  It was the middle of July, if I remember right.    We stayed near Fort Worth.  The light was intense, bright—but there had been rain, and so there was a bit of a haze too.  I had fallen in love (again) with the fields and trees I saw as we explored (what is it about fields and trees?), and had to have a picture.  Or several.  But my snapshot didn’t quite capture the vibrant colors as I remembered them (casualty of a mid-day photo session).  And the colorful flowers in real life were orange and yellow, not red (gaillardia rather than poppies).  So, as I worked later from the snapshot, I took liberties with my paint.  I wanted red flowers, in saturated shades.  I wanted a tree here and here and here, and not there.  I wanted to imply rather than represent literally (for me, earnest copying can only end in eye  poking, and thusly, in tears).

I did “Texas, With Abandon ” quickly, mostly in an afternoon.   Double entendre there…except not (I know what double entendre means).    As I painted I was thinking of my project  as a study.  Which turns out to be a clever trick, psychologically.  If I’m not too invested in a painting, if I let it be about experimentation and play and don’t make it precious, I usually like both the process and the results much better than a painting that I’ve doomed to painstaking masterpiece perfection.  In the end (as of today), I have no masterpieces.  Only beloved studies and experiments.

Also.  It usually takes me awhile to really warm up to my good paintings (the really bad ones are immediately dismissed).  I audition them for days…weeks…sometimes months, placing them in a safe, visible place where I will see them often, before I very gradually fall in love with them (if I am going to love them at all…thank goodness they aren’t children or pets).  I’m not sure why that is, though I have a theory that it has to do with a slow deconstruction of prejudices.  My own…there’s some maddening element in my character or mind or psyche that remains stubbornly ungracious and skeptical of my work…at odds with my happier right brain; it takes time for her to see the beauty of what I’ve done.  Thankfully, she does, eventually.

This painting is smallish, 16″ X 20″.  It is framed with old fencing, and hangs in my kitchen, familiar and happy.

Retrospective:  Columbia River Templed Hills

I thought I’d do a retrospective of the art (and other projects) I have featured on my website .  This will take awhile; there is a lot.   I have a couple of galleries of pictures (Paintings, Fashion) with no stories to accompany them.  Yet.

I’m still painting, though not as often as I’d like.   Because.  I’m parenting, lovering, gardening, sewing, wistfully wishing to decorate.  Oh, and still training a puppy.  And attempting to stay connected with my goats (they distanced themselves over the winter, partly because we were all less sociable in the cold, but mostly, I believe, because they are jealous of the puppy).

While I’m a little sheepish about my lack of focus, cousin Marissa sweetly tells me that I’m expansive.  A wonderful thought…I remind myself often.  Expansive.  Yes.

I sold this oil on canvas a couple of years ago to a local art director.  Though I’d sold (or traded) several paintings before, I still doubt constantly that I am.  So this transaction was validating (she loved the painting), as each sale is.  The painting is large; about  4′ X 4′.

It was an experiment.  Oil on canvas (I stretched my own on a frame Frank built…a real money saver).  I was trying to paint actual architecture; a myopic view of the Columbia River Temple, local to where I lived at the time.  It wasn’t going well…looking more and more awkward, wanky, self-conscious.  And I wasn’t enjoying painting it at all.   Frustrated, I wiped most of the painting out.  And I thought of poplars, not the tall skinny ones but the spreading ones that grow near rivers and lakes in the desert west (and the midwest, come to think of it…maybe everywhere).  I recalled my love for the desert’s yellowing hills of the Columbia Basin (sometimes wheat fields, sometimes ripening native grass).  They feel like home to me (they always will).  My painting became more simple, minimalist… and I started to fall in love with it, though my confidence that it would actually be good to anyone else was still in the basement.   The arches of tree branches became my architecture, the gentle hill swells communicated the tranquillity and peace I’d been reaching for.  A different sort of temple.

I held on to the painting for a couple of years, gradually feeling more and more confident that it was good, before I showed it at an art show in Utah.   After the art show, I was invited to show again at a community gallery, and the art director didn’t want to part with my painting when the show ended.

So I don’t have it anymore.  Sometimes I wish I did.  But I’m glad I have a memory, anyway.