Art Life Update and New Paintings

I continue to keep busy in my new Michigan art life. Here are some of the things that I have been doing.

 I attended the Three Rivers Artist Guild "artist play date".  This was a gathering of the guild artists at one of the members gallery/home in downtown Three Rivers.  Everyone brought a project to work on and a snack to share.  It was great fun to meet the other artists and to see the art they create.

 I went to the opening reception at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art for the 2016 West Michigan Area Show.  The institute is a great venue with multiple gallery rooms and much more.  There were over 500 entries and of that number, 100 were juried into the show.  I felt honored to have one of my paintings chosen.  It was a multi-media show with all kinds of art including, fabric art, jewelry, sculpture, photography, paintings and much more.  It made for a very interesting show.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had 6 paintings hanging in LA's Cafe.  I'm happy to say that I sold two of those paintings in the short time I have been showing there.  I also had an order from Tucson for two of my Mexican Domino Train Stations.  That meant I had to get busy painting.  I had to do the commission and replace the sold paintings.  My new studio no longer looks as neat as it did in the photos in my last post.  Here is what it looks like now.

I completed the order for the train stations and sent them off to Tucson.  One was to be of butterflies and the other was to be done in blue, grey and black but I was given the option of deciding the subject to paint as long as it was not southwest style. Here is what I did.

Actually, before I did the above paintings I did two canvas paintings.  One was to go to the Vicksburg Cultural Arts Center and the other was for myself.  Here is what I did.

This is an 11X14 version of Forest Royalty which I sold at the Carnegie Show that I did for the Vicksburg Gallery.

I did this one for myself.  It too is 11X14.  I needed something to hang in the empty place in my living room where I had hung "Paisley aka Persian Pickles"  which I did for myself but on a whim entered it in the KIA show and it was accepted so that meant I had that empty place to fill.  If  "Paisley" does not sell, I will get it back in July and it will be in my living room again.  I case you don't remember it, here it is. It is much larger than the one above.

I finished one more painting yesterday.  While I was painting the blue jay on the domino train station I decided to do a canvas painting featuring birds.  I remembered I had an Audubon Book so I looked through it for inspiration for my bird painting.  

This is a very large coffee table book with hundreds of pages of birds. I spent a long time looking through it.  For that reason I titled my bird painting "Audubon Inspired"

I took this painting to the Vicksburg Cultural Arts Center Gallery today along with "Forest Royalty 2" and also "Endless Rose" which I had done in Tucson before we moved.  There is going to be a "Meet the New Artists" reception at the gallery on April 22 so I wanted to have a number of new paintings on display along with the ones already there. Speaking of the gallery, I worked there today for the first time.  Thanks to Lisa for training me on all the duties that go along with the job.