Snoqualmie Falls

I've been working on some new paintings. Here is the latest one that I finished. It's currently hanging in my living room so that I can collect my thoughts on it. I love putting a painting on the wall as soon as it's ready so that I can look at it, ponder it and decide what I think about it. I'm not sure if this is normal or not. If I had more artist friends, I might check. Sometimes I will change something about a painting once I have time to look at it on the wall. I usually leave them as they are. I'm not a fan of editing. This is true about most types of editing. Not a fan. I like the big picture, I like the process but I do not enjoy going through and checking for errors. I could probably work on that.

When I started painting this, I had just finished a few different fruit/veggie paintings that had not a trace of blue, so I was literally giddy about painting with blue. I didn't know that it was possible to have such strong emotions about a color. I grinned from ear to ear as I was putting blue onto the canvas. I must have really missed that color.

This painting took some twists and turns along the way, but I think that I'm happy with the finished product.

I took the original photo at Snoqualmie Falls in Washington. It's a beautiful place. I hope some of that beauty is evident in this painting.

Opal Creek

Opal Creek is the first commissioned piece that I have done. I did this for a woman that had first seen my art at the Salem Saturday Market in 2005. The following summer she commissioned a piece for her house. I used a picture that one of her friends had taken years before underwater at Opal Creek. She loved the original photograph, and she had started to incorporate colors from the photograph into her home. It was a treat to do this painting for her. The painting was 30" x 40". I tried to give the idea that the rocks were underwater, so there seems to be a lot of movement in this piece. There is a high level of detail, as I wanted each rock to be unique and stand apart from the others. The beautiful colors are quite true to the photograph.