You see simple ranch-style red brick homes all over western Pennsylvania, where I live. You might drive by this one and not give it a second glance. Its not impressive or imposing. It doesn’t have columns or dormers or gables. It was built in the understated style of a typical 1960s ranch. But this little […]
Category: Paintings
Commission #2: A Stately Home in Atlanta
House portraits require quite a bit of back and forth communication with my clients. I usually ask for lots of photos of the property from different angles, so I can choose what works best for the composition. The client often requests a change of season for the painting, so there are discussions of what type […]
Commission #1: “Memories of Home”
I promised before Christmas that I would show you all the commissioned paintings I’ve been working on lately. Most of them were intended as gifts, so I couldn’t spoil the surprise and reveal them before the holiday. Well, now that the decorations have been packed away and things are getting back to normal around here, […]
Hanging Around the Villa
After a full day in the bustling city of Siena, it was nice to have some time to relax at the villa on Wednesday. Wednesday morning, and every morning, when I woke up and looked out my window, I just had to smile…I was in Italy! One of my sketches of the view from the […]
Winter Getaway: Sun, Fun, and Painting!
Five days of sunshine, warm breezes, and gorgeous aquamarine water are enough to lift anyone’s spirit. Stepping off of a plane in Florida in January is like emerging from a long, dark, damp, cold tunnel that you thought you’d never see the end of. There were palm trees and flowers and people wearing shorts! What […]
A House Portrait with a Twist
A good friend of mine moved to Florida a few months ago (even though I tried my darndest to talk her out of it!) I guess icy cold winters and shoveling snow can’t compare to beaches and sunshine. Her husband and daughter wrote to me shortly after they arrived in the Sunshine State and asked […]
Sunflowers!
10″ x 8″, ink & watercolor on 140 lb. watercolor paper I plant a packet of mixed sunflower seeds in my garden every summer. I water them, weed them, and prop them up when a storm blows through. I don’t harvest the seeds to eat or to fill our bird feeders. The birds usually cling […]
Blue Hydrangeas
My hydrangeas barely bloomed at all this year. The winter of 2014 was so harsh that every one of my hydrangea bushes died back, and it took all summer for them to recover and reach any size at all. Two of them began to blossom around the end of August and are now covered with […]
Adapting What You See…It’s Your Artistic Prerogative!
This painting of a Tudor house was one of my reserve paintings during the Mount Lebanon Plein Air event. I sketched it on a sunny day last summer, sitting on my little three-legged stool across the street from it, then finished up a lot of the details back home in my studio. But as you’ll […]
“Old Red”
I was walking through Mt. Lebanon one day and was stopped in my tracks by a red truck parked in front of Rolliers Hardware store. The red truck with the pink, white, and red geraniums in front of it just screamed “Paint me!” Trouble was, once I got home and looked at the photo I […]
