Paintings With Soul

Inspired by the work of David Shevlino, done overtop a sketch completed in Aprils 30Dogs30Days. This is "red Shevlino," an 8x10 acrylic painting done on canvasboard. He is $199 plus s&hto the first asking nicely. I take paypal, venmo, personal checks and payment plans. Inquiries may come   to me   - thank you! Artists pull inspiration from a variety of sources. A revisit to The Little Prince firmly lodged the fox's words in my head:  "One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eye." And that got me thinking, how the heck do I paint things that are essential and therefore intangible? It got me googling last night - I started out with an exploration of edges and how various treatments achieve different results. I got distracted by   Gregory Manchess's   paintings, and ultimately ended up on   David Shevlino's   website (and of course I had gloriously colored, fractured, blurrey edged dreams!). This morni...

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...

A process video from 2010 featuring two Frenchies  Watching this video was quite the step back in time! In order to make these sorts of films the camera was set up - and not touched - for days. In some households that wouldn't be an issue, but in this one, it was a ginormous challenge. Because as soon as the camera was set up, someone needed to get into the closet behind it. Or a dog would come ramming into the tripod. Or I would forget it was there and back straight up into it. The real life hazards of filming at home. On top of that, I had to remember to turn the camera off when I left the easel (to take a phone call, lock a kid out of the house, set dinner to burning on the stove) and, most critically, turn it back on when I returned. You'll see a shining example at about the 56 second mark when I forgot to do just that. I spend a lot of time laughing at myself. It's a coping mechanism. My process has changed some in the last 9 years...

The Caped Crusader (my middle child) was enamored with dogs from the very beginning. We were so excited to welcome a puppy into our family when he was old enough to help out. We chose a cattle dog mix because we wanted a clever guy with enough energy to keep up with our boy who never stopped. Finnigan and The Caped Crusader had some pretty amazing adventures together - they got into all sorts of trouble, like any dynamic duo should. Finnigan has slowed down - at over 16, he's earned that right - but he remains eager to accompany one of the kids on whatever adventure they propose, whether it's a good couch snuggle or a drive to Starbucks. It's hard to summon up any memory of my kids' childhood that doesn't also feature this guy. Thankfully, over the years I have accumulated a number of paintings that will keep the memories bright once he is no longer welcoming us home. Pictured above are two pieces from my personal collection. I'm curious to l...

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...

I knew every dog in our neighborhood by name. I had read every dog book my library owned at least twice. I had a poster on my bedroom wall of AKC recognized breeds from which I sketched regularly. I begged my parents for a dog, preferably a collie (who didn't want their own Lassie in the 70s?!). And I loved relentlessly on this dog, Bridget, my father's hunting companion. This painting was done somewhere around 1978-1982, I think. It was a gift of some sort for my Dad. It's 15" x 20", acrylics on art board. I remember working on it with a tiny brush (Present Kim's toes curl when she thinks of Past Kim painting large pieces with a tiny brush - like nails on a chalkboard) and thinking that it was The Bomb. Now it makes me cringe a bit. Obviously it's from a flash photograph - that reflection on the bean bag chair is undeniable. And Bridget herself is literally white and orange - there is no nuanced or reflected color happen...

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 ...