Lucy...and other news

I Love Lucy
Oil 12" x 12"
Sold - Commission

I just mailed Lucy off to her home in North Carolina.  Lucy is a Miniature Black Angus.  I didn't know anything about Miniature Black Angus, so I googled it!  Interesting what you learn through painting.  Lucy's photo was hanging in my studio for several weeks and  during the painting process my husband and I became very attached to her and affectionately started calling the painting "Not For Dinner".   We couldn't imagine eating her!  She's so cute!  How could you commission a painting that would soon become dinner?  So, I emailed my husband's niece, whose family raises these, and asked her about this.  They use the females for breeding and the males for meat.  So, with a life expectancy of 12-25 years, Lucy will be a part of that family for years to come!

Other news....I have hardly posted this past month, because I haven't painted much this past month.  I recently had partial knee replacement.  I've had knee problems for decades and finally realized that it was time to fix this!  The last several weeks I've been recovering, going through at home physical therapy, laying around, watching netflix, hobbling around in a walker, taking naps...everything you do after knee surgery.  Painting and standing (or even sitting) in front of my easel just hasn't been possible.  I didn't have the physical or mental stamina.  Drugs take it out of you, and although I've been thinking that doing some abstract painting might be fun, I wasn't quite ready for drug induced abstract.  So, I'm on the mend, doing more each day, and am looking forward to painting again soon!

Colorado Springs Airport Show

Morning Light

Standing Bull

Two of my paintings, Morning Light and Standing Bull, are hanging at the Colorado Springs Airport as part of the Ranchlands Artist Gathering Show.  The paintings in this show were from the Artist Gathering at the Medano Zapata Ranch last June.  

The Ranchlands Artist Gathering was formed to support art and illuminate the important work that is occurring in land and wildlife conservation through ranching, creating a window into modern ranching through an artist's point of view.

The medano Zapata Ranch is managed by The Nature Conservancy and Ranchlands in a unique partnership that stresses conservation and the establishment of a wild bison herd.  This body of work represents the ranch's unique landscape, 2,500-head bison herd, the adjacent Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range, Great Sand Dunes National Park and native wildlife and plant species.

I'm thrilled to be a part of the Artist Gathering and loved seeing the work at the airport.

Panama Palms

Panama Palms
8" x 6"  Oil
$100.00 + $10. s/h

When ever we're in the tropics I always end up painting palm trees.  I've never lived anywhere where palm trees grow, so they just seem like such a unique tree to me.  This was painted from the same spot as the last Panama post.  I just moved my easel to another view.

One day while in Santa Catalina, we went snorkeling at Coiba National Park, about an hour and 15 minute boat ride out into the Pacific.  Coiba National Park is a World Heritage Unesco Site, formerly a prison, and made up of over 30 small islands.

This is the first island where we stopped to snorkel.  The reefs and fish in this area were unbelievable!

It was great snorkeling!

We stopped at this island, the actual site of the penal colony, for lunch.  Our boat (in my mind not very big for an ocean trip!) is one of these small ones.  

We walked around the island after lunch.  This sign says:

  Crocodile Area "Tito" Beware!

We never saw Tito, he must have been off in the shade.

On the ride back we stopped at another reef for more snorkeling.  Spectacular schools of fish!

We had a great captain who pointed out lots of marine life throughout the day.  

Here is a whale shark.  We stopped to watch him and the captain told us we could

 put on our masks and jump in!

All in all, another great day in Panama!

Santa Catalina, Panama

Santa Catalina
Oil  6" x 8"
$100.00 + $10. s/h

My husband and I recently got back from three weeks in Panama.  We like to go some place warm for a bit each winter and a visit to the Panama Canal was on our list of places to see.  So, off we went.  We spent four days in Panama City, part of one day at the Miraflores Visitors Center ie:  the Canal Museum, and one day on a trip through the canal.  We chose to do the full transit, which took all day as you go from the Pacific all the way across the country to the Caribbean side.  But, that was one of the reasons we went to Panama, so the full transit, vs the partial transit, was it for us!

We spent the rest of the trip in three different towns, Bocas del Toro, Boquete, and Santa Catalina. 

This painting is from Santa Catalina, which is below the town of El Tigre on the 

south west-ish side at the bottom of the smaller peninsula.

This is the front lawn of our hotel.

  I had no idea that the tide was so great, 18 to 20 feet!  When we arrived the first evening and looked out at the ocean, we saw just that:  ocean.  The next morning we saw more or less 2-300 yards of rock, then the ocean!   Much of the time we had overcast, grayish days.  Even still, the sun was strong!

This is the view from the hotel front lawn.

Here's the beach down the road from our hotel.  It was interesting to me that one beach in Panama had black sand and just a few miles down the road the beach was white sand.  In this picture the tide is way out.  When it came in, most of this was under water.  Santa Catalina is a surfing beach and town.  We estimated that the surfers had to paddle about a quarter mile out beyond the rocks to the big surf and huge swells.