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I started work on a big project: two 3’ x 10’ paintings. It’s a shape I would never have imagined myself using. But a friend was selling the stretchers and I couldn’t resist the challenge. And it is a challenge. I am, and always have been, more comfortable with a vertical imagination. Lines, space, form always added up to a tall image. I want to avoid landscape references. In abstract painting, a landscape format is often used. So these very horizontal canvases are definitely

Last week when I was walking in the woods with a neighbor and our dogs, I mentioned that I had been awake part of the night planning the exercise I was going to use in my painting class that morning. She wondered what it would be like to be “creative”. I, on the other hand, cannot imagine life otherwise, but just said it’s a twenty-four hour, non-stop way of being; it just is. Keeps me wondering how to approach all kinds of things. In this case, it’s the importance of composi

At ten months, Romeo is a beauty. My opinion! #Animals #Dogs #Image

Impossible Possibilities, no.9; 42″ x 42″ Recently I was visiting a friend who has a couple of my paintings in his living room. As we sat talking, I realized one of the pieces, although created a couple of years ago, was exactly what I am trying to achieve in my work now. When he chose this painting, I wasn’t sure it was finished but I also wasn’t sure there was anything else I could do to it. As I sat looking at it that day, I realized it was already ahead of where I was com

Here I am trying to explain the unexplainable. Not easy but interesting to try. Abstract art is non-verbal communication, not about words. So how does one interpret an abstract painting much less paint one. Where does one start, anyway. One of my students in Baddeck said her painting instructor suggested she tell her story in her painting. Wanting to work with abstraction, she didn’t feel this helped her get started. She did find, in the workshop, that just making a “mess”, a

Thinking about thinking back on the year that was and thinking ahead to the year to be, I received an email this morning from someone who quoted a post I had made on a short-lived blog I had on Live Journal several years ago. It read: Beginning to study jazz piano reminds me of when I began to paint (or try) abstract paintings. It was hard. I knew before I went to art school that I wanted to do abstraction, but my studies in school were all based on learning, using color, to