Dear Ben is a nature print painting in my ongoing Invitation Series. Each painting is an ‘invitation’ to an historical hero of mine. This invitation is to Benjamin Franklin. To get to know someone we might invite them to dinner, … Continue reading
Hope to see you at the reception for an exhibit of my recent nature print paintings. The McLean Library of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society has a beautiful, bright gallery space on the ground floor in their downtown Philadelphia offices. Come … Continue reading
Spring is so close I can feel it in my bones. I’m envisioning sprouting grape hyacinths, daffodils and peonies, greening herbs and rose buds. I can’t wait to get going in the garden, clearing up winter’s straggly leftovers, digging and … Continue reading
Art is subjective, we choose what we like. I like this painting. I like the tall, dramatic corn growing up into the bright sky. But I made it, so I know what I like about it. What makes us distinguish … Continue reading
We’ve been making art since ……… always. Early humans, homo-erectus, were creating cupules (a type of rock carving) hundreds of thousands of years ago. 15,000 to 40,0000 years ago, humans were creating expressive paintings of animals, hand prints … Continue reading
Almost every day, in all kinds of weather, Andy Goldsworthy goes outside and makes art. Nature provides the materials. He works with what he finds – leaves, flowers, twigs, branches, rocks, stones, clay, mud, water, ice, snow, feathers… The artwork … Continue reading
Creating a garden or creating artwork? Great advice, which can be applied to both, come from Gertrude Jekyll’s ‘A Gardening Credo’. An excellent gardener and a fine writer, Gertrude learned by doing… and she did a lot! Born in … Continue reading
“… the first real hero of the atomic age, if not the first personage on the scene, was Ernest Rutherford” for his work with subatomic particles. The above quote is from Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything … Continue reading
Wondering if I create paintings and nature prints just for form’s sake, just for appreciation of the beauty in nature, or do they have another purpose? The representations I create give another kind of life to the world I live … Continue reading
Experience is the real thing. And in creating art we marry the real, sensory experience to something within ourselves that is beyond the senses. The experience combined with our unexplainable-something is translated onto paper and canvas, into sculpted forms and … Continue reading