A quick drawing.  It is so fun to draw an abstract face that has two sides that work together while having nothing in common.

My first time to combine a face with a landscape in one painting.  I literally made the landscape (the building) part of the face.  The canvas size is 6" x 8".  

What I was thinking while painting is showing what dreaming looks like - to show the actual elements in a dream.  So I put part of a face in the composition but spent more time adding the landscape that the person was thinking of.  The result is interesting but I think the next time I will use a larger canvas so I can put more dream elements in it so the viewer gets a better sense of what the painting is about.

On November 15, Georgia O'Keefe would have been 133 years old.  I am not just a fan of her work, but also the manner in which she lived her life.  The shapes of bright and vivid color on large canvases, of flowers so large that it is not obvious it is a flower.  We, the viewer, just enjoy the feeling of being mesmerized by enormous, gorgeous works of art.  I loved that she worked to find her personal style.  She was not content to paint just like everyone else was.  Toward the end of the 1920s she traveled around the US looking for inspiration; studied at several art schools and with well-known artists.  I greatly admire how she made a decision to learn and set out doing just that during a time when women didn't routinely have much autonomy and it was almost unheard of for a woman to earn her own money and have a career.

Three ladies out for a day of shopping (14"x18" oil on canvas panel).  Several years ago I took a fashion illustration class and now and then I add that vibe into my work.  It was a fun class and learning to draw/paint fabric, even in an abstract style, gives me more to work with in composing a painting.  I paired that style with an abstract background of color shapes.  When I studied painting, the teacher taught us a way of painting with color to create shapes instead of depending on lines.  The fun/challenge was making it work without adding too many lines.

This is a painting of the Jones Point lighthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.  The size is 6"x8" oil on canvas panel.  I really enjoyed painting the lighthouse from this position because it was a painting in basically three pieces.  The fun and challenge was to make each piece interesting while blending into the whole composition.