I'm in Concrete, WA, again painting and working on some illustrations as well as having a little much needed vacation time. I started the trip off well with lots of tea. Since I left 73 degree weather for 37 degree weather, it seemed called for.

5b's bakery here is delightful and does a pot of tea just right, which is rare. They also have a quite lovely cinnamon roll, and it's a beautiful place to sit.

It's been rainy, but I got some landscape sketches in today as research for the book illustrations I'm working on. I'll post them when I get them scanned in. In the meantime, I also visited Sauk Pottery, a local potter who uses enormous wood fired kilns that hold 300 pieces each. Just amazing. Not surprisingly to anyone who knows me, I also bought a tea cup.

I finished printing the first batch of "Midnight" this morning. The print is based on a journal sketch I did of Amanda Parer's art installation Intrude at the Brooks Museum in Memphis. I did a number of color tests on this one and ended up with a lighter sky and paper. I had thought that perhaps a darker gray would be nice, but it didn't pop as much.

I was completely enchanted with this lit up installation. I have a major illustration project in house right now for the national Presbyterian Church, and I have a show to hang March 1, and all my brain can think is "BUNNIES!! I want to make art about BUNNIES." You can see that I caved. Sometimes you just have to go with what's calling your name at that moment.

Here are the color tests I did.

And here is the original sketch.

I am so enjoying the Intrude exhibition at Brooks by Amanda Parer. It delights me. Mr. Darcy and I stopped to sketch again yesterday on our way home from the forest. I like the nocturne better, but it was fun to do this one as well.

For some serious happiness, treat yourself to two minutes of Bard Cole's marvelous video of the bunnies, beautifully edited and set to music. He caught me there sketching, but of course Mr. Darcy is the real star of that small clip. Thanks to WKNO for putting this out.

I did a whole show of river paintings some years ago and largely haven't revisited it since. But the river is where you can truly see the sky in Memphis, and skies are fun in oils, and a photographer visiting Memphis got me back down there to sketch. I started this oil this morning, and it will get some cloud work and a second layer after this layer dries.

I'm planning to do a few small river oils for the self portrait show. The show is a wide definition of self portraiture with still lifes and dog/banjo paintings as well as ones of me. The show began as a "woman alone in a large world" series, but it took a turn along the way. Jude Dippold wrote a poem about the first self portrait I did, against the large window in Paris, and I'd like to use several of his poems about me as one lens to see myself in this show. He's also written two with the Mississippi River in them, and I think a few river paintings would complement them nicely. Here is one poem I plan to include in the show.
​

Skagit Dawn

​The last light of a winter's afternoon
glimmers on the hills
above the Skagit.
I hold to that amber glow
with thoughts of blankets
warmed through the night
and the promise
of the sun circling back
to rendezvous
with dawn
over the Mississippi
and you.

Below is the journal sketching working from that I did while we were down at the river last week. I can never catch the sunset the way it looks, but I was pleased with the sketch as a thing in itself after the fact.

Here are a few quick sketches from my week. My favorite is the installation of enormous, inflatable bunnies at the Brooks Museum of Art. It's an installation about invasives and the damage they do by Australian artist Amanda Parer, but she admits it's also winsome, and the child in me is utterly delighted. I was also excited to do such an interesting nocturne piece, and I'll have to go back and do more before they depart Memphis.

There was also cake in my immediate past (Muddy's Bake Shop, my favorite), and a trip to the Metal Museum. It's been a lovely week.

The river is always the most stunning thing about Memphis to show out of town visitors, so I headed there for a spectacular sunset with my house guest. It was a stunning evening and changed quickly, but I did one quick sketch during one of the permutations. I loved the bridge leading across the water into the setting sun.

S0ulfish for some great catfish (and sweet potato fries with remoulade) is also always a winner. They've expanded recently and doubled their size. I hadn't been since the remodeling was complete. I loved the funkiness of the old place, but it is nice to have plenty of tables for the popular spot. We didn't have to wait. And the silver fish on the wall are pretty cool, even though I miss the "EATS" sign.

Here is my sketch from the same painting that I did in the exhibition 13 years ago.

I've been so enjoying oils again lately. I almost stopped doing them eight years ago when I fell in love with prints. I seem to do things in spurts, focusing in for a while, and now I seem to be back to oils again. They're much faster than the intricate prints I had been doing, so it's fun to be able to push out a whole series of the images bouncing around in my brain in (comparatively) short order. The bigger ones, the full self portraits I've been doing, take longer, but these small ones (they're all in the 8" range) go pretty quickly. I come back and work more the second day once they've dried and I've thought about them a while, but SO much faster than prints. And since I have a show looming for March and a bunch of images that built up in my head through the Christmas show season, when I really couldn't tend to them, it's lovely to have a faster medium speaking to me at the moment.

These top two are from years past in Paris. I've pulled out my sketch journals to find see what images might be a good fit with my upcoming self portrait show. I've sketched my feet in various spots that are important to me for years. Having my feet on much loved ground is key to me as a landscape painter, and I both experience and celebrate meaningful things in my life by drawing them. So I drew myself in Paris.

Another meaningful part of my life is Mr. Darcy. And music. So here are two small self portraits that combine those two loves. I spend many evenings with Mr. Darcy and my banjo. I'm trying to push the envelope on what "self portrait" entails for the show, so I'll have some nice variety. I also think it will lend a full picture of my life.

The Hotel piece is finished. All of these others are in various stages of putting a bunch of color down (early) and tweaking (afterwards). I'm still monkeying around a bit with the other three.

I got to paint from a different angle yesterday. Here's the forest road, the new gateway by Tylur French, and a view across the treetops.