I did another study of zinnias from my front yard but this time I tried to show the stems in water. This was hard to do, and I looked at a number of other artists’ paintings to see how they did it. I think that one of the tricks I learned was to paint the surface of the water in the bowl first as an ellipse, then to paint the water in the bowl and the glass reflections. After this, I painted the stems stopping them on the water surface. Next, under the ellipse I painted the rest of the stems. The water does distort the placement of the bottom stems some.
Old tree by creek in January snow
This painting was actually started several years ago and I finally got it finished! Sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what I did wrong and make the corrections.
One of the artists I most admire is Richard Schmid. In his book Alla Prima, he said that muddy color always turns out to be a color that is an inappropriate temperature– a too cool color within a warm shadow.
Zinnias from my front yard
I grew these zinnias in the one sunny spot in our front yard this past summer of 2016. This painting is done in acrylics on gallery wrapped canvas.
Another songbook using my art
This cover is a painting of mine of the home place of Luke Peeples, a Bluffton, South Carolina composer . This is Volume II of the Collected Works of Luke Peeples.
Snowy evening
This painting was used by the Arkansas Children’s Hospital as a holiday card several years ago.
Summer at home
This is one of my oil paintings that I have in my dining room. I was experimenting with a new brush for the foliage! It is 24 x 36 in a wide gold frame.
I have just published another songbook!
Velvet Nights and Other Songs includes eight original songs and is now available as a spiral bound print book or as an e-Book. The cover is my art. Details about the book can be seen here. A YouTube video for Velvet Nights can be seen here. The YouTube video for My Red Hair, another song in the songbook, can be seen here.
Velvet Nights and Other Songs was my first songbook and is being reissued in a revised Second Edition. The songs in this collection are about spiritual transformation. I am influenced by Brugh Joy’s book, Avalanche, for insight into the Fall from Grace as neither mistake nor sin, but a movement from unity to duality.
The song Velvet Nights portrays a woman’s fall from grace and her resulting psychic move from unity with the loved one to independence as she faces the dawn of her new consciousness. Just as Velvet Nights refers to Eden (“we enter Paradise”) and the Fall (“dark shadows over our love”) so also does the song A Distant Eden. This song pursues the earlier reference to Genesis with references to the serpent in the garden. Eden is lost in this song, and death is hollow.
My Red Hair is about my own attempts to deny aging and death by dying my hair as I try to “delay the black night of silent time–the night of profound silence.”
Click here for a downloadable printable file of the first page of my-red-hair-2.
Another song in the book, The House of Spirits, is truly autobiographical. While at the University at Fayetteville, Arkansas, I lived in an old Victorian house on Leverett Street. One night in October I saw the spirit of a woman without a face.
I painted the cover design for this collection to reveal my personality structure—a massive white wall of pragmatism and rationality supported only by a flimsy pole at the base of which coils a serpent, my shadow. In the distance is the longed-for Church illuminated by white light. Alas, the distance between the self and salvation is dark with sinister rust-colored bushes encircling the self.
