she paints; she is a painter

Deck the Halls of Gallery 888 in 2003!!!

The Christmas show is truly fun! You usually get invited to participate in this show if you had been a client in the gallery during the year (and, you hadn’t been too difficult as in, “prima donna”). This is the chance to show your work to another audience. Generally you have things from your previous show that hadn’t sold, but still deserve to find their rightful owners. For me ART is totally personal. The beholder and potential buyer need to relate to a piece of art in visceral way. The content, the color or the form must resonate on some level either conscious or unconscious … a time, a place, an experience, a feeling. So, the more exposure a piece of art gets, the greater its chance of being recognized and claimed!

Fortuitously all my pieces were gone, but I did have a new source of inspiration between June and the December Christmas show – a trip to Santa Fe! Fabulous Santa Fe! I was actually an “add-on” to a trip already planned with a very tight itinerary. We were seven women sharing a palatial house within walking distance to the center of town. One of the motivations was to see the Hot Air Balloon Show in Albuquerque , which we did two times, one in the morning to see the lift-offs and one in the evening to see the balloons lit from within.  A magical experience!

But now, you must imagine the logistics of loading up the van every morning with seven women, each with a strong personality. The result was that we spent many hours driving in that van.

Even though we were surrounded with wonderful vistas, charming architecture and stimulating food with extraordinary color during that week, one of my most enduring images is the vanishing landscape seen from the van window!

This is my favorite painting from that trip. The challenge was to show the pinon trees straggling up the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. This painting is  personal to me. It’s the image that was important for me to interpret. There is no telling whether someone else will relate to it or not! (Watercolor on 300 lb. paper with gesso.) … Justice is not being done to New Mexico here, but future posts will feature more trips to Santa Fe!

Another source of subject matter is the Toronto Zoo. When my daughter was in school all day and before we acquired our Westie, I used to spend days at the zoo sketching the animals, many of whom were very cooperative models.

This camel was my signature piece in the Christmas Show. (pencil sketch, watercolor wash with ink on paper)  I had 9 pieces showing. Only four pieces sold, including the camel, but the rest of the paintings eventually found good homes. The very first of this animal series, a mighty rhinoceros, was given to our nephew Eric on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah.

The Show …