Click on any photo to see more detail.

I’m really liking working on multiple panels for one piece, so this may be a continuing trend. I’m not sure what the next one will be, but I’m already thinking about it …

Since November, I’ve been working on a triptych of paintings for a client who had planned to give them as a surprise on Christmas. I finished the paintings a couple of weeks ago, but I have been waiting to post the photos. It would be pretty unforgivable if my client had kept the paintings a secret and then I had been the one to blow the surprise.

With Christmas as far behind us as New Year’s is ahead of us, I figure it’s safe to post the photos now. 

Here they are, side by side. Click on any of the three images to see more detail:

The colors are more muted than my usual, but as the piece came together, the brown, beige and gray started to remind me of a wintry forest.

I’m now working on a similar series of three, but this new group has more green than gray. (They need more work before they’re ready for their photo-op.)

First, Old Stone I and Old Stone II.  They’re 24″ x 12″, acrylic and paper on canvas.  You can see earlier photos and the inspiration behind them here.

Old Stone I

Old Stone II

And Paper Flower is also done. It’s 36″ x 24″, acrylic and newsprint on canvas. I’ve been talking about this one for a couple of weeks, here and here .

Paper Flower

Here is a detail shot, too.

I have been thinking about curlicues and curlicues make me think of quilling. I called around and found some quilling paper at the art store, but in the end, I didn’t feel like buying any. I didn’t know how much I would need, whether it would work, and I wanted to work on a bigger scale than 1/8″ wide quilling paper would allow, anyway. As an experiment, I rescued the thicker color circulars from our newspapers and painted one side of them. Once dry, I measured and cut the painted sheets into strips and spent hours curling, gluing and pinching them into different shapes. If I were better at this, I suspect my fingers would be less sticky. But what can I say.

Here is the first dry-run of a design I’m considering. More in the way of paint needs to happen on the canvas, but I’m still thinking about that, too.

Last Sunday, I ran the Big Sur Half Marathon.  It was fabulous and gorgeous and my time was 10 minutes faster than the half marathon I ran this past February.  My improved time really surprised me.  I can only conclude that eating and drinking my way through Spain for 10 days when I should have been increasing my mileage was even smarter of me than I had suspected.

Last Saturday, before we headed off for Monterey, I touched-up the painting I gave my sister for her birthday in August.  It was damaged in transit, and I still don’t understand how the protective styrofoam corners ended up melting into the paint.  Anyway, I am pleased with the new and improved version.  I hope my sister will be, too.  And that safe little repair project made me really start thinking about the work I ultimately did today.

Here is the photo that inspired my work today.  It’s a piece from the Museo Taller del Moro in Toledo, Spain.

Here is my interpretation, in progress. I’ll post more photos when the paintings are finished.

Today’s painting soundtrack: La Oreja de Van Gogh, Compilation Jazz 2002 Edition Speciale Du Festival.

Ahhh.  Much better.

This morning around 11, I returned to my desk to see the red message light lit on my phone.  That light rarely means “SPECIAL DELIVERY” in a good way, but today was an exception.  Look what had arrived for me!

I brought them home tonight so I could enjoy them in a less paper-filled environment than my office.

An original limerick came with this lovely bouquet as well:

It occurs to me that “cease” should maybe be substituted for the second “feast.”  And I have to say that I can’t blame the florist’s message-taker for getting stuck on “feast”–he or she was maybe a bit overwhelmed by the cleverness of the rhyme and the thoughtfulness of the gift.  (I mean, I was totally surprised and overwhelmed … )  This kind of mistake could happen to anyone.  Especially if that person was VERY hungry …

I am looking forward to writing proper thank-you notes for these, but in the meantime, I just wanted to share that my friends are awesome, with a side of fabulous, and a heaping serving of wonderful.  (Thanks again, you two.)

She has asked (politely and repeatedly) before, but I wasn’t quite sure what to paint for her.  Also, I was only working on big pieces for awhile, so I was not sure how I would ship one of those to her all the way back to her in New England.

But now I have done this 8″ x 10″ painting, along the lines of the hydrangea painting from earlier this week.  This time, though, I have added little green seed beads along the edges of the leaves, and at the white center of the pink flowers, I have added tiny pearls.  The piece is still wet, but here is an early photo.

(I think she’ll like it.)

Happy Birthday, MK!

Anyway, the bottom line is I have been setting aside less and less time to actually PAINT. I miss it!

You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, I took some very colorful photos of the hydrangea flowers in our garden. (They’re still blooming like crazy, by the way, but lots of the new flowers are much paler pink …) Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about how I would like to represent them in a painting.

I am happy to report that the painting finally came together. I went with a deep green background, the suggestion of leaves, and the lush, sort of springy and yet somehow still delicate extra-pink-with-a-side-of-pink blossoms.

See what you think. This one is 14″ x 14″, and I am pretty sure it’s done … but I may tweak it a little bit more in the next few days. We’ll have to see.

Hydrangea