"Morning Meditation"

I have been trying to get away from painting strictly from photographs. I have been using my visual journal to sketch out ideas and work on perspective. I really liked painting on the round canvas and decided to do another one.

This one was inspired by my previous painting "Moonlit Dreams" and I wanted continue with the figure of the girl in my paintings.

Using what I had learned from painting previous sunrises, the colour and style for this painting emerged.

Morning Mediation - Oil onCanvas
10 inch round

I have recently  finished the online Strathmore Visual Journal Workshop. The workshop has been great and I have met some really creative artists online. Everyone has been so supportive.

I have done a number of entries and I must say that  I really like journalling. I have found that I can have fun, and try out new techniques focussing mainly on the process rather than the outcome. That in itself is freeing. Not every entry is a masterpiece, but it definitely is a learning experience.

While I have been doing this, my 7 year old daughter has been doing a journal too. I love watching her creativity, the way she just goes for it, not caring if the result is perfect or looks a certain way.
She is certainly teaching her mother a few things!

Rain

"Change" My daughter made the heart 

as a gift for my journal inspiring the rest of the page.

Visual Journal

This week I started on an on-line visual workshop with Strathmore Visual Journal Workshops. I am hoping it will help with developing my creativity.

It will be interesting to see how the pages progress from beginning to end, a bit of an experiment. I plan to post my pages periodically. So far it has been fun especially working with a variety of media.

Here is my first attempt.

Coffee

"It Never Hurts to Ask..."

I have always been told this by my mother, grandmother, friends but for some reason I have hesitated many times, held back by shyness,  or the possibility of no. Well this time I asked.

I have many of my mother's paintings and I have been trying to decide what to do with them. I have picked out my favourites, saved some for family, but there are still quite a few left. Some are damaged as they are 30 years old, but I can't bear to part with them.

My mother was a teacher, and also worked as a guidance counsellor. She worked for a number of years at a  High School in a small town in Nova Scotia. It was because of her work there that she took up painting. She took lessons from her friend and the art teacher at the school. The school now has an Art Gallery named after the art teacher.

I contacted the gallery and offered to donate one of my mother's paintings and they accepted! I am so thrilled. What a wonderful place to hang one of her paintings in a school she worked hard in, in the gallery named after her good friend. So fitting.

Happy Mother's Day.

Artist Gladys - Oil on Panel - 1981

The Moon in May...

I returned back to work this week after an amazing year home with my baby girl. So fortunate to have the time off. Since I was going back to work I wanted to do a new painting and decided to try to paint a scene I imagined rather than one I had experienced.

This is the first time I did my own composition and it came out completely different than the original plan! I picked up a round canvas and really wanted to do something with it. Initially, I first thought of painting a spring scene of flowers, but the canvas reminded me of a porthole, which inspired a scene of the ocean. I decided to continue with the theme of nighttime and which led to the full moon reflecting on the water.

Funny how our mind works.

Here is the result...

Moonlit Dreams - Oil on Canvas
10 inch round