Having my work photographed, and framing it

I took lots of my work out of frames and schlepped it to a nearby town a couple of days ago, to have it photographed by a recommended photographer. I'll see the results in a few days. I'm pretty excited about this. It's a step I've known I needed to take if I was serious about getting into galleries or shows, so of course I've put it off! Well, part of the reason for that was that I worried about how much it would cost. But I had inflated that in my head. So I came away a happy painter. Now all I have to do is put it all back into those frames. It's all over the dining room table - there not being room in the studio for such a messy job. I have high hopes for the results - and I'll be showing it off here, maybe just about the same time I get indexed.

There are some great things about watercolors and pastels, but a drawback is that you have to mat and frame things to show them. Speaking of expenses. I think I've gotten the process down as cheap as it can get. I watch for sales on inexpensive frames at the big box "craft" stores like Michael's and JoAnne, and I order mats, and better frames, from framesbymail.com. I've had great luck with them so I recommend them. Once I made a mistake myself, which I took to be their mistake, and they fixed it without arguing. Only later did I realize it was my mistake. So I'm making up for it here by recommending them. I think I shopped around a bit and found them to be at least as cheap or even cheaper than everyone else. And they have a good selection. And since you shop online you can live anywhere and shop there.

Go paint!

Yaquina Head Lighthouse

I did a series of lighthouses a couple of years ago. This one is on the Oregon Coast. Email me if you're a collector of lighthouse pictures - the original watercolor is for sale, as are high-quality prints. I'll be publishing more from time to time. ep

Theorizing about women painters

I have wondered about this for years: i'm not aware of many women painters who are driven to paint - so driven that other parts of life are subsumed. I mean driven like Van Gogh was driven. That's why Louise Nevelson is one of my heroes. She knew what she wanted from when she was young. She was sidetracked temporarily by consenting to marry and have a child, but then she left the marriage - and the child - and spent the rest of her life doing whatever it took to keep on producing. She was driven. She didn't have a well-placed mentor like Georgia O'Keeffe did, she was on her own. I totally admire her. I wanted to be "an artist" when I was young, and spent hours drawing. But one of my teachers in high school didn't appreciate my stuff and had another favorite student, and it squelched me. My ego, or whatever, didn't survive. It was easy for me to do other things, since my ego wasn't tied up in those things. Through my life I've gone through phases of drawing, then doing no art, then taking another class, then doing nothing again. It wasn't until my kids were grown that I started producing fairly consistently. If you believe, as i do, that practice is a large part of "talent," I have a lot of catching up to do. Any comments on this would be welcome. In the meantime, here's another painting - this one is a view to the west from a friend's house, showing off the wonderful Puget Sound with the Olympic Mountains in the background. I love this area - but I grew up in Eastern Washington which has a totally different ambience - high, dry, spacious and dramatic in its own way. I'll be throwing in some of those kinds of landscapes too.