Pasture at Janet's Farm watercolor 5.5" x 8.5"

Study in watercolor. Sketch in preparation for a possible larger work. Those aren't splatter in the sky. I'm sure those must be birds flying off.

Watercolor sketch 5.5 x 8.5 (Strathmore Sketch book)

Sister Janet lives in Oregon writes poems, trains horses, and is a nurse. Her pasture.

Mena 8 x 10 Acrylic

Brodie in his wagon 8 x 10 Acrylic

This is the original study. Sometimes things work out better without planning or a drawing. Brodie will grow up in Lake Tahoe, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.

Childe Hassam at Work acrylic 10 x 12

I am reposting this one as I did a bit more work on it. Childe Hassam 1859-1935. This is from an old photo in a great work on Childe Hassan by Ulrich W. Hiesinger. It's to remind me of his working conditions. I like the street scenes and horse cabs Childe did before and just after his French stay. After a time he got too much into the French style of Impressionism but eventually returned to be an American style painter.

My first art teacher

When I was 12 an artist set up across the road from where I lived and painted our neighbors fields and barn. For over a week I stood just back of him each day after school. Somehow I knew not to bug him. He was the one who talked. I didn't have the sense that he was a great painter but someone fully engrossed in creating something special. In the following years I recreated his initial sketch many times -- a large mulberry tree towering over a few sheds and fruit stand just in the distance across the strawberry fields. And that's all I will say about that.

It wasn't until I took an art class at a junior college in Maui that I actually started painting.
The instructor let us go out and just paint. The smell of paint, and mediums drew me in. I took some lessons from Betty Brown in suthern California in portrait drawing. But then academic stuides took me away from painting for a number of years.