Three new paintings done this week

I am finally feeling better after my bout with the flu.  I spent this week working on three paintings.  The first is based on a photo of some friend's new rescue kitten.  They found it in the motor of their car awhile back on a freezing cold day.  They planned to take it to the rescue center but on the trip there they fell in love with her and decided to give her a home themselves.  Her name is Mocha.  I saw this photo of her and decided to use it as inspiration for a new painting that I titled "Little Ball of Fur"

At the same time I was working on the kitty painting I decided to do an abstract painting so did the base coat on the canvas in beige and then sponged some brown on top of that.  I thought that after it dried I would add more to it but when I was done sponging on the brown I liked it just the way it was and declared it a finished abstract painting.  It took maybe a half hour of my time to do it.  I am going to keep it for myself because there is something in it's simplicity that I really like.  I think I will hang it next to my "Stormy Day" painting.  I call this one "Brown on Beige".  It is a large painting but shows up here as much smaller than the true size, also, I just noticed that I didn't sign it.  I'll have to do that and I think that once I hang it I'll take another photo which I will include in a future post so you can have a better perspective of the size.

The third painting I did this week is another version of "Phantom Herd". I painted variations of  this painting four times in the past and sold all of them.  Here is the newest one which is number five.

Here are photos of the other four paintings shown in the order in which they were painted.  The third one was commissioned  and the client wanted it facing the other direction.  The other three were sold in exhibitions.

Now that I am feeling better I am anxious to get to work on some new and original subject matter.  The problem is that I am going through an "artist block".  I can't decide  what I want to paint.  It was so easy to come up with ideas when I lived in the southwest.  Since I moved to Michigan my idea pool seems to have run dry.  I'm thinking of maybe doing a lighthouse painting.  Being close to the Great Lakes, there are lighthouses everywhere.  That is the only idea I have come up with.  I may hold off on doing a canvas painting and work on some old chairs that I got at a yard sale last summer. They both need stripped of the old paint. I'm suffering from a bad case of cabin fever and need something to keep me busy.  Stripping paint might just be what I need to fill my time while I wait for my creative side to kick in with some new ideas.