Paintings With Soul

Above, in process, working title "Not Little Red," 24" x 30" x 1-1/2", acrylics on cradeled panel, $1299 plua a&h (when finished). I accept paypal, venmo, personal checks and payment plans. Inquiries may come directly   to moi   - and thank you very much! Last night I read   Abby Wambach's   new book   Wolfpack , cover to cover. It woke my head and heart up in a quite remarkable way. And for a change, last night's dreams were not doom and gloom - they were packed full of women doing kind things for each other despite stressful and miserable circumstances. And there was always a wolf there, ever present. So I HAD to indulge myself today, despite a challenging to-do list. I HAD to acknowledge the wolf and spend more time with book's message - that women have the power within themselves to rewrite the rules. The painting's title hails from Abby's belief that we were never Riding Hood, we were always the wolf....

THIS was crazy fun - settle in, here, because THIS is a good story. In the early part of 2007, the American Kennel Club invited artists to submit artwork for consideration as imagery for the 2007 Dog Show Championships. I couldn't decide on which Dog a Day piece to enter, so I decided to do a compilation. Actually, I did two of them, because I simply couldn't narrow things down. Using my scant photoshop skills (I am SO bad at Photoshop, still!) and scanned images of my paintings, I built composite designs which a local printer inked onto canvas for me. I stretched the canvases (as I recall they were about 18" x 24", not terribly large), and then went back into them with teeny tiny brushes, repainting the whole surface.** It wasn't a standard paint-by-numbers sort of pass - as I reworked things, I changed out the background on some of the paintings, modified dogs to better match breed standards, added different accents of color, changed the v...

As the   Painting a Dog a Day   project grew, so, too, did my own to-do list. My studio profitability had shifted from larger commissioned works which took weeks to complete to the smaller daily paintings. I was doing 3-5 daily commissions each week, varnishing and shipping them out within days. In between creating/ blogging/shipping each piece, I was fielding emails, perusing reference photos, writing quotes and having conversations with new collectors about their own portraits Each commissioned portrait brought new people into my life, and with that came all the stories inherent with getting to know a pet and what they meant to their family. (Do you know that the vast majority of the animals I paint I never meet?  I rely on email communication and a mess of photos to piece things together.) It was always fascinating, getting a glimpse into others' lives and loves. I think it was 2010 or so when N...

Puppy Butt, pictured above, is one of my all time favorite Dog a Day paintings because it provided a critical Ah-Ha moment. It's a little piece, 6" square, that hammered in a big lesson. He sold right away, but you can order reproductions and other items through   my FineArtAmerica storefront . I remember painting it - keep in mind that after more than 1300 Dog a Day paintings, I don't recall actively creating too many of them. I remember being excited to start, so excited that I jumped right in, sweeping the background in with a wide brush I hadn't bothered to clean or wipe off. My color became grayed out and muted color. I cursed myself for being lazy (it's my greatest painting vice), but then I said, hey, lazy girl, you might have just done something pretty cool. Laying the background colors down with a dirty brush mucked them up (I work in layers, and paint the entire background first before putting the dog/foreground shape in). They were...

I wish I had some of my early teenaged drawings, the ones I voraciously did while copying book illustrations. When I was a teenager (cue the sad violin music), there was no internet. Or easily accessible quality photo imagery, for that matter - film cameras were expensive, and photos were sealed under plastic in albums. There were no museums or art galleries in my town. Art was only available in books, and those came from the library. When I was deemed old enough, I could stay after school and walk to our local library, where I would hang out in the stacks for hours. Books were read, yes, but I would also study the artwork and draw from them. Jim Kjergaard's books were some of my favorites - heartwarming stories with beautiful covers (I wish I knew who this artist is, but I don't have this particular copy anymore). I can't tell you how many times I drew Red, in pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, acrylic...

My very first Dog a Day painting, Pink, a little 4" x 5" panel, private collection (THANK YOU!). This is where things really began to take off. But let's go back in time a little first. It's 2006. I had been creating larger than life sized pet portraits for about 5 years, selling them online (via ebay and my website). I was a little disillusioned, always moving from one commission to another, with little time for continued learning or experimentation (entirely my own fault). In October I decided to carve out a small window of time each day for just myself. An hour to push paint without any expectation but to have fun. I built   a blog   as a dedicated space to record my efforts, because I love to compartmentalize everything. Yes, everything. My Inner Marketer thought I should dovetail the daily project with the studio in some way, to further drive traffic to   my website   via keywords, regular updates and context ...