Landscape of Virginia

Working on new paintings is a real joy even though one may look at it as work sometimes when a person gets down to the knitty gritty and does some art, its not so bad as it seems before you get to work on it. I don't know about you but my fears often paralyzed me and kept me achieving my greatest dreams. Once I took things in small pieces by not looking at how far I had to go, but instead working on what I had in front of me, I was able to get much more finished if I just tried to get started on it. Not matter what I do now I enjoy my life by just doing what I need to do for today and I let everything else take care of itself later on. In this way I am not overwhelmed by big projects or big paintings or an overwhelming task. The Japanese paintings are a good example of this, I looked at all my Dad's photos and thought that there was a lot of work to do, how was I to ever get it all done. After realizing just that I put it aside and just got to work on starting just...

An old long enduring year comes to a close and new possibilities open up with the start of a New Year starting tonight. It's all looking like a good one to come. I have some good ideas for coming paintings, I think I got a good lead on subject matter for my work. I am planning to do a number of paintings focusing on my father's Japanese photographs that he took while we lived in Kamahura and I was but a new guy on the block. I have done four so far and I am happy with the results. I'm hoping to get a good number of them together and then put on a show of them as a group with copies of the original photos just beside them with a short description of what's going on within the photo or what I might remember of the time when it was taken. While painting I could sometimes remember what the weather was like that day or what it sounded like when that photo was taken. All the memories were gone until I began studying them when I was painting, then some "flashback...