A Space for Poppies because it is all about those pesky negative spaces for me.  They have to be just right in value and color so that the piece is balanced and yet allows the eye to move around.  I have worked on this one for awhile now and have just put it in a frame.  It is going to Hill Design Gallery for the Stinger Studio Show in February. 

This is a group of paintings that are showing at the Credit Union in Round Rock.  They are some of my new abstracts on watercolor paper.  The theme of these paintings is Rock Collector because that is what I was thinking about as I designed them.  I enjoyed the process of glazing with Golden Fluid Acrylics and I look forward to continuing to work this way.  The address is 120 Palm Valley Cove (Hwy 79) in Round Rock if you'd like to take a look. 
Thank you to my friend, Vicki Brevell for inviting me to show and for hanging the pieces for me. 

Bottles Galore!  But no, I am calling this one Winter Fruits, for the pears.  Again, pears for Christmas.  They are more fun to paint than to eat, and eating them is fun too.  I have been working with pears in my classes this week and even though I did this one a few weeks ago, I am just getting around to getting a photo of it.  It is a bundle of analogous color fun!  Just looking at it makes me want to grab my paint brushes.  It is 22" x 30", acrylic on paper.

Rural American Sunset is my newest landscape in watercolor.  I have started teaching watercolor again and last week's lesson involved a barn in a landscape.  I wanted to teach the importance of creating a plane change with value and using color to create depth in a landscape.  After the lesson my intention was to paint an abstract, but the lesson came through as often happens these days.  The great thing about working this way is that the abstract composition underneath is still there, so the painting is stronger. 
This painting is 20" x 28". 

This is an acrylic painting that is part of the series of Texas inspired landscapes that is hanging in Round Rock.  It is large and colorful and I am hoping for poppies in April as I look at this.  We celebrate poppies here in Georgetown even though we don't have many growing wild.  People do plant them and have yards full of the beautiful color in March and April.  I know where to find them.  But when I paint them, I transplant them in my mind so that they are out there for everyone to see. 

Fleeting Images is an abstracted landscape, one of a series of paintings that I have done using the Texas landscape as inspiration.  This one is watercolor and it is 22" x 30."  I am showing it along with five other large landscapes in the City of Round Rock City Hall for the next three months.  I also have three small abstracts in the Credit Union there.  I will include some others that are hanging there in future blogs.  I took them off my walls so I kind of miss them, but bare walls inspire me, so look for some new pieces too. 

This is another watercolor that looks like Happy New Year wishes.  I call it Celebrations in the Garden.  I don't know what kind of flowers they are, but they look like fireworks to me, so they are great for either the Fourth of July or New Years.  They were a lot of fun to paint. 

Happy New Year!  I hope 2014 is a wonderful and prosperous year for everyone.  I have a few resolutions and one of them is to blog more regularly.  Now that I have put that out there for all to see, I have to stick to it.  I do love to blog, but I love to paint more, so it is just a matter of prioritizing. 

The painting above is not new, but it is bright and happy, so I thought I would post it along with my happy new year wishes.  It is crocus and those always make me think of a very early spring.  Growing up in Amarillo, the winters could be bitter, but lovely little crocus would would peek through the snow and I knew that spring was on the way.  That is why I call this watercolor Dreaming of Springtime,