I just went to Barcelona to visit my son.  He is studying abroad and I have missed him.  My daughter planned the whole trip. We had a great time traveling together.  It was a wonderful trip and I will always remember the time spent with two of my kids.  Having grown up with a creative mom, they are okay with going through art museums and sitting with me painting on the side of the road.  I have terrific children and obviously I am proud of them. Here are a couple of paintings that I started in Spain and one that I am working on.

I have been working hard on a series of larger paintings.  I find that I need to work on several paintings at a time to avoid over working.  I become obsessive about painting and before I know it, I should have stopped an hour before.  I like to have a fresh eye and working on several at once helps this.  So I have about four paintings in various stages.  While I am working on all of these different paintings, I sometimes decide I need to concentrate further on some aspect, i.e. lighting, capturing the expression on the face with minimal detail or perhaps draping with the minimum of strokes.  I decided that the way to achieve this without adding to my stash of paintings was to paint a small 6X8 study and work on the aspect that needs my focus. Today, it was expression and minimizing the strokes.  I would love to know what you think.

Here is a photo of the museum trip painting. For whatever reason, I couldn't get it to upload with the previous post.  I am sure I will get more familiar with the changes that have been made to blogger since I last posted.

Painting at the Museum

I am going to try to be better about updating on the site.  I have struggled with staying on top of all the social media.  I really spend more time painting than anything else.  Yesterday I went to the Cincinnati Art Museum with a couple of friends and painted for about 3 1/2 hours on a Sorolla. It was such a good experience.  I really concentrated on two things.  I wanted to keep the lights light on the face and capture the colors that he used as close as possible.  I left the museum feeling like I had received a lesson from a master.  I really would like to paint like this more frequently but like social media, my studio work will pile up and I need to focus there also.