I wanted something about the viewer and viewed: knowledge and innocence, old and young, knowing and not knowing.

This is all complex lines and fine control of the pencil and mark making, knowing the undulations and pen control.

And pencil is the most rudimentary...

I painted this.

Then I sold it, which is great. But I missed it.

I liked it as an object to hang in my house....

So this is how I did it...

To get the accuracy in the pier sketch below, the correct perspective and spacing and such, I used my projector as a light box and traced the photo. Is this cheating?

Kind of....

I sometimes cheat by just tacking canvas to a large board. This way I can stretch and prime the ground of paintings but I don't have to nail my self down to a particular size. It then doesn't matter if the image strays off into its own tangent.

Blue Picnic 30x24 oil on canvas 2011

There are paintings drifting in my thoughts; snaps of thoughts and memories. They are breaths and wisps of colors and forms.

If I let my mind not my brushes do the painting, if I over plan...

It is easy to look back into the past though the eyes of painters and see their everyday world as beautiful. Their moments of normal life, like Vermeer's The Milkmaid, are transported through the act of painting it from mundane to sublime.

So after the great escapades at the studio, I have been on gardening leave. The flutter of morning doves and wild flower blossoms seemed just the medicine to blow over a little shooting.

Things to do when not at the...

So I have to admit, it is hard.

Before, I wrote about going into the studio with my little baby and continuing my practice as usual. The truth is that it is not that easy. For each hour I spend making art, there is two spent burping, feeding, rocking...

Sorry, I have been counting. The hard financial reality is that I have to make money.

So now that the business of making money and selling houses is out of the way, I am free to ponder Fine Art again.

It is nice to have these...

He is looking over at me, giving me the eye, flirting with a cheeky grin. Speaking the only language that he as learned so far. Tongue out, arms out reached, light grunting; my baby says "food."

As I have found particularly evident from using so much Skype lately, there is...

Image inverted

I had my first day back in the studio yesterday after having a baby. Armed with the little wriggling, giggling babe, a bunch of blank prepared canvases, and a plan for paintings that I had drawn up a...

I have not written for three weeks because I have been having a baby. It was not the easiest of births; passion and fear rather than a Disney arrival.

I did get to experience all the different types of births that one...

She had really long legs, looked a bit like a turkey, with a very small comb and a tentative step in her gait. I had driven out to Riverside County to pick her up.

A nice but strange little man...

I like painting commissions. Sure, it's of a dog. Not exactly high art, but the finished piece will be loved. I am released from the constant art school critique in the back of my mind.

I can settle down and play in a...

So I seem to spend a lot of my time wrapping up paintings and getting shipping quotes. I went to the post office and listened to a nice man cooing to his sweetheart loudly on his cell phone. He had a funny,...

I am often asked to provide a photo of me. A head shot like the one you can see of me in a cowboy hat above. Ideally I would have one of me in the studio, brush in hand, canvas at the...

So I woke up to a pounding at the door. It was early morning, the bright California sun streaming in through the tree leaves and telephone pylons.

I threw on a dressing gown, ran down stairs and opened the door....