Barn in a Meadow

I painted this for the A Day Not Wasted challenge.  The hardest part was the roof--I don't know why.

Orange

Orange became the color that held this painting of Centennial Bridge together.  It started in the sky, but was the answer to unify the background trees and make the foreground trees interesting.  It was fun to discover that.

Kansas City Public Library

Joseph has been visiting this week, and today we finally got in to Kansas City, MO.  We went to the Kansas City Public Library, which I have been wanting to visit.  It is in a great old building that was originally the First National Bank of Kansas built in 1906.

I was delighted to find an exhibit there, Fred Geary:  Missouri Master of the Woodcut.  I've never heard of Geary before, but enjoyed looking at his work.  Since I've been working so much with color--and reading Betty Edward's Color Theory, I was struck by the art of black and white.  The pattern of light and dark is perfectly orchestrated in his prints.  Look at these steamboats--to make one a night scene, the boat goes black, not the sky.

 One of my favorites was a New Orleans street scene.

The Beach

I'm feeling a little landlocked right now and would love to spend a week at the ocean.  That prompted me to post a painting I did in 2006 of a house that was across from us at Edisto Beach, SC.  It is a nod to Ed Rice, who I discovered at the Morris Museum of Art when we lived in Augusta, GA. 

Any suggestions for the best beach?  I really do want to go on vacation.

Aspens

I've always wanted to paint something that was a little bit "Fauvish."  Les Fauves (Wild Beasts) were a short lived expressionist movement that was all about color.  I think it is easy to rely so much on color that the work looks clumsy or amateurish--even paintings of the original Fauves sometimes do.  I decided to just do it.  As I was painting I thought, "I don't know--I don't know," but then all of a sudden, it worked.  What do you think?

I am going to submit it to DPW because the challenge this week is stripes.

Shows

Last month I had my Bowls in an exhibit at the Mutual Bldg. downtown,

and this month I have my What if Cezanne Painted a Bowl of Tomatoes in an art show at the Heritage Center.

I also have the "one-woman exhibit" I tongue-in-cheek referred to, which is really just office space the LCAA rotates artist through.  Their June artist fell through, and they called me. Since I am working on and saving some pieces for an exhibit in the library in August, I just grabbed some old things--and the White Lillies--to hang there. (Notice the nod, once again, to Cezanne in the blue vase of flowers in the background?)

 I included a painting of Hueco Tanks near El Paso, TX that I like.

Music in Leavenworth

I have discovered that there is a very active music scene in Leavenworth.  Meredith has had a "gig" for the past two weekends at different restaurants in town thanks to Cricket (the owner of Scrivners).  It is fun for all of us--we are becoming her groupies.