The finished painting: Autumn -- Oil on canvas 20" x 15".

These are some of the paintings I have for sale at Teal Gallery, a great new fine art gallery opening Tuesday November 1st. Their website is still under construction but it should be up in a couple of weeks.

Teal Gallery    
42 Oak Street, Roswell, GA 30075
Open Tuesday - Saturday 11a.m. - 6p.m.
Sunday  and Monday by appointment. 

We are in fall mood now, Lauren and I have started hiking again on some great trails near Atlanta and we are enjoying the cooler weather.

We've had some rain lately but today we have a perfect blue sky, the leaves are changing their summery green for warm, bright colors and pumpkins are showing up pretty much everywhere you look (porches, front yards, lattes). I will be bringing in some of these fall colors to the painting I am currently working on (Shown above).

The picture above shows the underpainting, a thin application of burnt umber and turpentine. Once this has dried, I'll bring the colors in. Starting a painting in this way covers the stark white canvas, making it easier to judge the colors and values when bringing the colors in.


I'll keep you posted on the next step...

I am very pleased to announce that I am now represented by Teal Gallery, a new Fine Art Gallery opening this month in Roswell, GA. The owners are putting some finishing touches on the gallery space and it will be up and running soon. Teal Gallery will offer original art by several artists located in the Southwestern U.S.

Here are a few paintings I've been working on lately:

The sunflower in this painting showed a good deal of perseverance. I purchased a packet of Mammoth Sunflowers at our supermarket back in the Spring and planted them at the end of our driveway. A few of the plants suffered at the incisors of a hungry animal (those little bunnies did not turn out to be so cute after all!) when they were just inches high. One plant survived its broken stem and while the unaffected sunflower plants grew like crazy, this little broken plant kept fighting growing up just a few millimeters each week.  A few weeks later, I had about a dozen plants over two meters high with huge, beautiful sunflowers following the sun the end of the driveway and one tiny sunflower hanging out there below all of the action.

The little sunflower lasted longer than any of its larger mates. I had long forgotten it until it was time to cut down the dead sunflowers. The broken little plant had made it! This seemed to me a sign that I was to paint the tiny "mammoth" sunflower. (I had tried to create a painting from some of the larger sunflowers, but I didn't like how it turned out.) It may not be perfect, but I am happy with "Sunflower with Tomatoes".

Another one of our home grown tomatoes with some hydrangeas. I've done a few hydrangea paintings now and I really enjoy painting them. It's pretty challenging and it takes a lot of time to paint them, but it's fun to work on, and they are beautiful flowers (sorry, Madonna).

This small painting came together after our neighbor brought me some sacuanjoche flowers from the two plants she keeps on her deck. Lauren had just purchased two pears the day before and I was inspired to put the two yellows together in a painting to experiment with tone value.

Lauren and I have had a great gardening season -- well, maybe not as good as we had hoped, but still pretty good. 

This was the first summer that we had our own yard; sadly I choose the wrong spot for our main garden and our brussel sprouts and green beans failed to produce anything. We did get some radishes, but our best harvest has been our tomatoes. A couple of our plants look like they could snap at any moment due to the weight of so many tomatoes. 

My special project was a couple of cantaloupe plants. I wasn't sure if they would do anything, but we had great luck, we have been eating some of the sweetest and juiciest cantaloupe. We even had enough to share some with our neighbor.

We were also happy to see a bunch of beautiful gladiolas come out in our from yard. Our neighbor told us that she helped the last family who lived in our house plant them a couple of years ago. We had red, purple, orange, a few yellow and a bunch on white gladiolas. I was glad to paint some of them.

It was a bit complicated to paint them. Because each flower on the stem opens and wilts at different times over the course of a few days, I had to rely on photographs of the gladiolas instead of painting directly from life, as I did with the glasses and the orange. I'm glad I worked this way - by the time I finished the painting, the purple gladiolas at the bottom of the stem were already dead and the little buds at the top had opened into beautiful flowers.


Thanks for looking, please contact me if you have any questions or if you are interested in this or any of my paintings.