"It's Not the End of the World" - oil on deep canvas, 24" x 24" x 1.75".  Ready to hang.  Available here and at Artfinder.  Note: this piece ships in two weeks, as the oil paints require drying time.

It is the final week of the seascapes course, and Pauline Agnew is pushing us to fall off the edge of the paint cliff and just GO FOR IT.  We watched her throw a massive band of pink paint across a painting she wasn't satisfied with and then transform it into something completely different and amazing.  Jaw-dropping paint bravery!

So today's piece began as an underpainting in oils, waiting to be transformed.  And it nearly broke me!  It isn't easy to toss paint and make amazement.  Poor hubby listened to me stomping around and grumbling as one version after another turned to cow patties.

But I kept at it, walking away and coming back. And finally I turned the whole thing upside down and got a glimmer of ...something.  Following that glimmer - letting the paint speak until BOOM, there it was, a painting coming together.

This process is not for the faint of heart!  Or for the easily frustrated. But if you like a sense of artistic adventure, this will give you a treasure hunt through treacherous waters and an end result that feels like you earned it by golly.  In the end, a troubled canvas is not the end of the world.  It is the beginning of another one.

Meanwhile, back in the studio, my intrepid intern, Fiona Denihan, has been  soaking up marketing knowledge like a super absorbent sponge.  Only a month in, she has created a website, identified her brand AND launched some products on Redbubble!  

Take a peek:

Fiona's website

Fiona Denihan on Redbubble

"​Delilah" - mixed media on paper, 18" x 24".  Unframed.  Available here and at Artfinder.

Mercury retrograde slammed into the Walls's house like a two-ton toddler on roller skates this week.  Technology snafus!  Paint disasters!  Miscommunication and a two-steps-foward and three-steps-back line dance among the clumsiest of humans.  Oy vey!   But this was not our first retrograde rodeo, so the weekend landed without injury or computers set on fire.

Maybe it was just the humbling prelude needed before I saw a local shaman in Multnomah Village, which turned out to be likely the most awe-inspiring, soul-sprouting and transformative experience I've had yet.  

Bob White is a gentle bear of a man and a practicer of Tibetan shamanism.  After some hours in his sacred space, surrounded by primordial sounds and energetic healing and a host of things I lack words to adequately describe, I feel like my life here in the PNW has been sanctified and the path illuminated.  I wonder what will happen next???

Week three of Expressive Seascapes was tough!  My mojo was whimpering in a puddle as board after board was painted and then scrapped.  Sometimes we have days like that.  Especially during the retrograde.

So my recovery plan included a big piece of 300 lb arches watercolor paper and a mess of acrylics, squeegees, water bottles and chopsticks.  Another Ireland-inspired piece to heal my bruised ego.   That and a bit of ogling Norwegian painter Ornulf Opdahl, whose glacier paintings leave me weak in the knees.

"Everyday Diviner" - mixed media on illustration board, 15" x 20" .  Unframed.  Available here and at Artfinder.

​Signs, signs, everywhere signs.

A seated hummingbird greets hubby and pooch.  Robins marching across the mulch.  Birdsong echoing morning and evening.  Daffodils and tulips lifting their sleepy heads.   It might be 40 degrees, but someone thinks spring is around the corner.

Reading the signs in our lives can be as easy as robins and spring flowers.  But it's more often like reading tea leaves or tarot...not always scientific and requiring a heap load of intuition and instinct.  We are diviners on the path...searching without maps, sometimes with closed eyes. 

This piece, "Everyday Diviner," practically drew herself.  Telling me what and where.  Lucky for her, I kind of knew how.  I'm watching closely to see if she points me in one direction or another.  Maybe then I'll know why.

​Meanwhile, in the seascapes class, we channeled our inner Barbara Rae, working to mix a color palette similar to her exquisite abstracted landscapes, then use them to inspire a seascape study.  My selection of oil paints is still quite limited, but I was able to get some wonderful pops of color without losing the lovely neutrals that make her pieces work so well.  

This piece is based on a photo I took while in Ballyferriter, Ireland.  Tiny but mighty!

"Wait a Minute" - mixed media on gallery wrapped canvas, 24" x 24" x 1.75". Ready to hang. Available here and at Artfinder.

​It was BEAR WRESTLING WEEK in the seascapes course!  Working on clouds and sea meeting sky - and wrestling paint and my own impatience day after day.  And what I learned (or rather, was reminded of again) is to step away from the painting, contemplate and WAIT just a GOSH DARN MINUTE before making any more moves.

Which happened to take place at the same time my son's a cappella group was singing Willow Smith's "Wait a Minute" at the quarter finals in Florida.  Which they won handily.  Now how on EARTH could these things be connected? 

Well, patience and waiting, for one.

"Lilith, Reclining" - acrylic and charcoal on paper, 18" x 24".  Available here and at Artfinder.

Well it is seascapes month here in the studio. But life drawing continues and this piece was on the easel just waiting to be finished.   The pose was captivating, and the model strong and warrior-like, even in repose.  No soft flower, this woman.  The set of her jaw, her strong features, her unflinching gaze when she met my eyes - a woman freed from conventionality.

She was the ideal muse this week as I began reading  The Holy Wild, a poetic manual of sorts, intended to connect women with their wild feminine souls.  Oh yes.

Meanwhile, the seascape class this week included a survey of some known seascape artists, including the jaw-dropping, gut-grabbing work of Turkish artist Sahin Karakoc, whose landscapes and portraits had me drooling to rival my own slobbery Great Dane.

Karaoke's unapologetic use of color, line and texture inspired the technique used in Lilith, Reclining.​

"Mad for Ireland" - mixed media on gallery wrapped canvas, 24" x 24" x 1.75"". Ready to hang.  Available here and at Artfinder.

"Accidentally Happy" - mixed media on aquabord 11" x 14" .  Unframed.  Available here and at Artfinder.

It is snowpocalypse weekend here in PDX, where a little dusting of snow and ice has the city on holiday.  That's cool with Pongo, who would rather his humans stayed home all the time anyway. 

So it is quite surreal to be painting gorgeous seascapes from trips to Ireland while sitting landlocked in the city in a rare freeze.  But my imagination is clearly loving the strange irony, because I cannot stop painting these seascapes.  Blast you, Pauline Agnew!  I am hooked.

Pauline encourages her students to be brave with the paint (and with tools like squeegees).  Not only because it is a good way to feel empowered as a painter, but also because it is the best way to set the stage for happy accidents.

Which this little piece on the left was.  Entirely.  An accident.

You know I adore Ampersand Aquabord....the surface, its watercolor and water media friendliness.  But this week I fell head over heals for it again.  Because THIS, dear reader, is the simple result of my discontent.  A seascape with many layers of watercolor and charcoal and a bit of gesso-mixed acrylic once resided on this board.  But while it was still wet, I became thoroughly frustrated (it was an awful painting) and took it to the wash sink and hosed it down.  And there  this was.  An ethereal landscape, misty and soft.  Hiding under the paint.  Happy accident indeed!  Does that make me accidentally happy?

"Cloud Mother" - acrylic and charcoal on paper, 18" x 24".  Unframed.  Available here and at Artfinder.

Life drawing gesture pieces are grabbing me.  This one grew from a one minute sketch into a week-long love fest in the paint.  

I subscribe to a lot of blogs.  Every once in a while, a real gem lands in my in-box.  Last week, a post titled "What You and M. Night Shyamalan Have in Common"  on the Fine Art Views website grabbed my eyeballs.  M. Night Shyamalan?  I am a huge fan of this offbeat director, so had to give it a read.

The gist of the article was Shyamalan's belief that your creative journey cannot be about what others are saying about you or your work.  And that, as artists, we all fall into the pit of worrying/caring/mulling over that very thing - what HE said.  What SHE said.  And that gets in the way of our creative process.

I am reminded of a phrase often tossed about in our family: ​what other people think about you is none of your business.​