Paintings With Soul

check her out, make her yours Profusion 2.0 (the first Profusion got a glow up), 20x20, acrylic, pure imagination and Mother Nature on cradled panel, $1900, available through my website. Profusion 2.0 will arrive wired and ready to hang. S&H inside the contiguous US is on me. Hawaiian, Alaskan and Canadian shipping available at additional cost. I’ve had the Bear+Mask paintings hanging together in the studio. This is a wonderful way to see passages with fresh eyes and allow the collection of work to inform other decisions. It’s also a great way to identify subtle shifts (or some not so subtle ones!) to consider as the pieces talk to each other. After a little time, Profusion (the first one) felt a bit like two different paintings competing for attention. I began thinking about how to resolve this - which of the two different parts was the most exciting to me? and then how do I to bring the other passage in cohesively..... This led to a demanding series of revisions - going slowl...

check her out, make her yours Metanoia, 12x12, acrylic on panel, $800, available exclusively through my website. S&H inside the contiguous US is on me. Hawaiian, Alaskan and Canadian shipping available at additional cost. Metanoia is ancient Greek meaning profound transformation. Something I am really aching to see in our world. This little one was borne from studying, extracting, and weaving together passages from past paintings and drawings. I am so enjoying the review of prior pieces, building little puzzles from their bits and filling my new sketchbook with possibilities. Metanoia is available for purchase on my website where you can also view her in a room setting or get your nose right up into the marks. In addition to the two new Bear paintings released in August, I completed a number of pet portrait commissions. I opened up six months of my calendar year to these and have one single spot remaining. Is it yours? message me for details and get started collecting your ph...

  check her out, make her yours Wish, 20x20, acrylic on cradled panel (no need to frame, painting will arrive wired and ready to hang), $1900, available exclusively through my website. S&H inside the contiguous US is on me. Hawaiian, Alaskan and Canadian shipping available at additional cost. I voted Tuesday in the primaries here in Michigan (along with My Better Half - this was the second time he, as a new US citizen, was able to vote, and it is wonderful to share this together). I may be a glutton for punishment, but I felt a sense of hope after doing so - not just because his voice is now counted, but because we do have a say in what we want for our communities. In a world that seems hell bent on all sorts of horrors, Hope is a powerful thing. That’s what this painting is all about - the fervor behind a wish, and the agency to manifest it. Wish is available for purchase on my website where you can an also view her in a room setting or get your nose right up into the marks...

check her out, make her yours Flutter, 12x12, acrylic on cradled panel (no need to frame, painting will arrive wired and ready to hang), $950, available exclusively through my website. S&H inside the contiguous US is on me. Hawaiian, Alaskan and Canadian shipping available at additional cost. NOTE: I have a 20” similar (unfinished) painting, along with a 6” square piece. Neither of these are currently available . I first painted Butterfly Masks on Bear this last spring. The results were intriguing to me, but I was particularly challenged by my treatment of Bear and Butterfly as two separate living beings. That prevented me from allowing the collision to become something new and evocative. I switched out Butterfly with florals and sky, knowing I could take artistic license with those forms and not have a mutilated life on my hands, and had multiple goes at various iterations. I also was inspired by the varied life forms in the Dungeon Crawler Carl  series of books (which I ...

check her out, make her yours Thistle, 16x16, acrylic on cradled panel (no need to frame, painting will arrive wired and ready to hang), $1450, available exclusively through my website. S&H inside the contiguous US is on me. Hawaiian, Alaskan and Canadian shipping available at additional cost. This painting is an empath watching a loved one ache, knowing the best they can do is listen, sit with and love them through it. I think we’ve all been there at some point or other…. In lighter news, my online pet portrait workshop opened yesterday - students from all over the world are eagerly introducing themselves and setting intentions for the course. This evening is our zoom launch party (the 23rd) at 7pm eastern. I’ve opened this session up to students and the public - I’ll show over 100 of my portraits, talk about concepts and compositions, share some tips culled from the last 25 years of commission work, and get us situated to push some paint. You don’t have to be enrolled in the cla...

check her out, make her yours Phosphorescent, 20x20, acrylic on cradled panel (no need to frame, painting will arrive wired and ready to hang), $1900, available exclusively through my website. S&H inside the contiguous US is on me. Hawaiian, Alaskan and Canadian shipping available at additional cost. Originally Phosphorescent had a dahlia over each eye. It was interesting and oh so beautiful, but distracting. The flowers overpowered her face and she became secondary in the painting. It was not what she wanted at all - she pushed herself back to the surface of the painting, and in the process that second bloom dissolved. I think this approach is still intriguing, but would be better suited to a full body Bear, with a stronger ratio of Bear to Flower. Like I said, I learn new ways to approach this concept with each painting. I have another one in process now where Bear’s mask is veil like, drifting across her face with the lightness of cottonwood. There’s something interesting that...

Profusion check her out, make her yours Profusion, 20x20, acrylic on cradled panel (no need to frame, painting will arrive wired and ready to hang), $1900, available exclusively through my website. S&H inside the contiguous US is on me. Hawaiian, Alaskan and Canadian shipping available at additional cost. This was a challenging painting week - as the complexity of these masked bears grows, so too does the difficulty level. I am literally learning on my feet as the pieces progress. Which frankly is one of my favorite ways to learn - by doing! Profusion hit a point where I thought she had further to go, but my critique group (yesterday) declared her finished. I weighed the possibility of stopping,** but ultimately it felt like I was copping out. So this morning I deepened her value relationships, added a passage of smaller marks, pulled one of the flowers forward and allowed the barely suggested eye to disappear. I am so pleased to have taken these risks - the painting is all the...

check her out, bring her home Summer Solstice, 20x20, acrylic on cradeled panel (no need to frame, painting will arrive wired and ready to hang), $1900, available exclusively through my website. S&H inside the contiguous US is on me. Hawaiian, Alaskan and Canadian shipping available at additional cost. This painting got her start last week at my friend’s house . She (my friend, not Solstice) invited a group of us to gather and paint in her garden ( her roses killed me) . It was a glorious day. Then she (Solstice, not my friend) came home to the studio for more work, informed by photos I took that first day along with bits and pieces from my own garden. I toyed with the concept of symmetry - in a square painting, a balanced design becomes critically important. Initially I was reaching for a mirrored take on that, but it was too easy to look at and move past - it didn’t grab the viewer and ask them to stick around. So I found a middle ground - some symmetry, some differences. Here...