Second Place!

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Acrylic, 9 x 12

This week I found out that this painting won second place in a local juried show! The entries for this show had to be on a ‘serene, inspirational or uplifting theme’. I was away in England for the whole show and so did not find out the result until my husband went to collect the paintings. What a lovely surprise!

A write -up on the whole show can be seen at www.rivercityart.org

Lessons in Acrylic-finished the book!

These are some of the last paintings from 50 Small Paintings in Acrylics, by Mark Nelson. It was a very good way of becoming familiar with acrylics. I discovered that I like Golden Open acrylics the best. Now I am using the book to teach a group of children. They love the projects!

Open Studios Visits

Saturday 21 Oct was Bloomington Open Studios Tour and I spent an invigorating couple of hours visiting three local artists (painters). I was especially impressed by Dawn Adams www.DawnAdamsPaintings.com and Meg Lagodzki www.meglagodzki-art.com

It was inspiring to see their working spaces, to talk to them about their history, processes and results.

Dawn Adams uses multiple thin layers of oil paint to acheive marvelously luminous landscapes and seascapes. That was very interesting to me, as I’m currently reading Glazing by Michael Wilcox

which I have on interlibrary loan. This method takes a long time and a lot of patience. I wonder what effects I could obtain with transparent acrylics?

Meg Lagodzki also paints in oils and had a very interesting series on local quarries, which seemed to me an unlikely subject, but she had created many beautiful paintings with fascinating shapes and colors, reinforcing the idea to me that beauty can be found in unlikely areas if you know how to look at it and interpret it.