Flowers and Route 13 Farm

I felt I had to give you all a break, and so in addition to "Flowers for Jojo III" (left, 12x36), I'm posting "Route 13 Farm," above oil on canvas, 20x20. Please click here to email me for price and availability. 

I am on my way back from grief over the death of my dear dog Jojo, but it is not a steady climb

I will say that these broken-color paintings I've been doing seem to be helping me mend. Helping me cope.

This is how painting came to me, as a way of recovery, when I was 50. I was struggling to cope with my mother's death, and I was failing. Painting came into my life unbidden and unexpected, and it lifted me, helped me get my head above the grief. It helped again, months later, when my boss died, and again, four months after that, when the job I'd thought I would have forever was eliminated.

It is not a surprise that painting is rescuing me again.

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I'M HEADING OUT this week to High Point, NC, where I will participate in the Piedmont Plein Air Paintout, Sept. 17-20. This is a fun event. Twenty-five artists will paint on site from Thursday through Saturday around the pretty town of High Point, then sell the paintings, still wet, on Sunday.

On the way, I will put new paintings in J. Gallery in High Point, and with JWV Artists in Charlotte, NC.

The next weekend, I'm in Dayton, Ohio, at Oktoberfest, an art and, yes, beer festival at the Dayton Art Institute. 

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Dog of the Day

Smokey had been with us for about a year when we brought Jojo home, and they became friends instantly. Smokey is part chow, part shar-pei (we think), and Jojo taught him to play, entreating and inviting him again and again and again and again, until he finally got it. 

For the past 10 years, Smokey has slept nights in the doorway to our bedroom. I believed he was guarding us. But since Jojo died, he has moved out of that doorway and set himself down within eyesight of the back door. 

I think that all these years, he was protecting Jojo, not us. And now, I think, he keeps waiting for her to come back. 

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A Final Thought

"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to. The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures." 

- Vincent Van Gogh