The Van Gogh Experience

June 30, 2021
Opening Day at the Show This past Friday, opening day of the show, I stepped into “Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” in Cobo Hall, Detroit, MI, expecting to be immersed in the work of Vincent Van Gogh. I have to say, it was not quite what I expected, and the more I look into it, I

The Creation of a Figurative Landscape

May 1, 2021
Commissioned Landscape: Kayakers on Indigo Lake, oil on canvas, 20″ x 16″ Just before sunset the neighbor’s yellow kayak slid through the water away from their dock next door to us, heading toward the far side of the lake. I sat on my dock sipping a glass of wine looking out at

Do You See What I See?

February 28, 2021
Optical illusions have always fascinated me, especially those involving the illusion of 3 dimensions in a 2D space. I adored my brown Bakelite View-Master. I sat for hours looking at immersive nature scenes and cartoons brought to life. My favorite was of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Flora, Fauna,

Fishing for Ideas & Tonalism

January 1, 2021
Fishing for Ideas Where do ideas come from? How does a realist artist translate the world around her into works of art? I thought you might find it interesting to see a tool I used for coming up with an idea for a painting, so here I will describe how I did that for a recent landscape. The Nudge

The Pleasure and Pain of Uncertainty

November 30, 2020
As I progress as a painter, I have learned to paint less of what I see in front of me, and more of what I see in my imagination. Being able to create things that do not exist in the real world brings with it the freedom to bring into existence that which is only imagined, and the enjoyment of

The Creation of “Indigo Lake”

October 5, 2020
Painting in scene above, Indigo Lake, 48″ x 60″, acrylic and gold on canvas Last year at this time Bruce and I moved into our newly built home in Fort Myers, Florida in a community called Wild Blue, on Indigo Lake. Perhaps I was inspired by the poetic name, or images of electric blue