Thanks to the sage advice of artist, mentor and good friend, John Farnsworth, I started this daily 
painting blog 2 years ago on Jan. 1. How those 2 years have flashed by, and here we are, with painting # 615 and heading into 2013! I thought it fitting that I paint horses to celebrate this anniversary, since horses are my very favourite subject matter. The daily painting discipline though has surely broadened my range and honed my skills. It’s opened my eyes to new things and brought me many new friends, via the magic of the internet. So thanks to each and every one of you who have visited my web-site, my blog or my real life! Thanks for your comments, likes, and your unflagging support. Guess we may as well carry on! Here’s wishing everyone Joy and Peace and Light in 2013.
Category Archives: (un)limited palette
Amee Again!
Well if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying! Portraiture is one of the hardest things a painter can attempt, and as you all know I really find it challenging. Amee was such a beautiful model with her sculpted face and fabulous dreadlocks. This time I tried her portrait in watercolour…..it looks more like her, but I’m still not convinced her mom would know her!
If you’d like to own this original watercolour, email Gena with your bid today! gena03@telusplanet.net Minimum bid $100 (plus gst and shipping). First bid, or highest bid wins the painting.
Talking Possum
This cat has lost her marbles lately. After wakening me from deep sleeps last night because she figured she wanted to be out rather than in, she then spent the day imposing her will upon me as well! When I try to ignore her, this beseeching look along with loud plaintive wails, soon have me hustling to do her bidding. Not sure when she stopped being my cat and I started being her bell hop.
If you’d like to own this original watercolour, email Gena with your bid today! gena03@telusplanet.net Minimum bid $100 (plus gst and shipping). First bid, or highest bid wins the painting.
Under Dusky Skies
Today’s painting isn’t a little one…this one is 8 X 16″ on watercolour board; the Q Ranch horses as they jog to the corrals the night before branding.
It’s such a treat to see horses in groups; they move together as if of one mind. Add a wild sky and some waving prairie grass, and you have an dramatic story.
Truckin’ on Through
Remember Bruce’s Beautiful Broncs, one of my “dailies” from late summer? Well this is them again. Pacing with nervous energy in the morning before the rodeo, they bunch together like the herd animals they are, the air absolutely crackling with their collective power. Horses rock.
If you’d like to own this original watercolour, email Gena with your bid today! gena03@telusplanet.net Minimum bid $100 (plus gst and shipping). First bid, or highest bid wins the painting.
Front Range Rhythms
There’s something so elegant about the contours of unaltered landscape; the undulations, carvings, upthrusts and foldings. This landscape has all of those as the mountains rear themselves up from the flat bed of the plains, each segment carrying it’s very own eco system and micro-climate. How dare we ever think we can “improve” on any of that.
If you’d like to own this original watercolour, email Gena with your bid today! gena03@telusplanet.net Minimum bid $100 (plus gst and shipping). First bid, or highest bid wins the painting.
Chet’s Pup
Well, here’s the portrait I did last week, before my portrait class. What can be cuter than a child with a pup (and a cuter kid would be hard to find!…which which doesn’t hurt either).
There were several elements that made this a real challenge to paint, and when I see it here I feel it’s not finished yet. However, for today, this is it!
14 x 10″ on 300lb Fabriano
Amy
Well, today we got a real live model, and you can’t tell from this how very beautiful she is! I’m in trouble all the time with my instructor (the brilliant Liz Wiltzen) because I gallop away in all directions, forgetting to measure and go slowly and methodically through the process. I’m like some of the boys in my grade 8 math class, who sat at the back, raced through their equations and got most of them wrong! And then I wonder why it doesn’t look like the model!
We only had 3 hours to paint Amy, and this isn’t finished, but it was really a lot of fun. Tomorrow? A different model, and we get all day with her. I intend to go slowly and carefully, meanwhile everybody in the class is betting I’ll the first one done again. DUH!
Manny
OK this is what I painted today! Oil painting no less, 16 X 12″. Nine of us gathered around 2 styrofoam mannequin heads and painted from whichever angle we got. It was intense. It was demanding. And because I was there and using oil paints, it was also messy.
It’s interesting to be surrounded by the stunning landscape of Canmore, and be painting human heads. I think the mountains would be easier!
Tomorrow we get a real live person to paint.
We’ll see if it gets posted.
Sunshine on my Shoulder
Today I was practicing a form of denial….As the wind howled outside and the radio kept a steady stream of weather updates and heavy snowfall warnings, I painted this beautiful sunflower. I grew this guy and brought him in the house in September. Being the size of a dinner plate, brilliant and radiant in every sense of the word, he totally dominated the room.
I think it’s lovely that I can bring all that beauty and loveliness into my life on a blizzardy day in November. Now I’m passing it on to you!
If you’d like to own this original watercolour, email Gena with your bid today! gena03@telusplanet.net Minimum bid $100 (plus gst and shipping). First bid, or highest bid wins the painting.