Teen Art Boot Camp

What a great week with working with a group of teens! We worked in acrylics, oils, graphite, charcoal and conte. They learned Art presentation, Art journaling and Art Marketing!

Still lifes, landscapes and portraits, all in the traditional mode helped expand their vision and stretch a bit more from them. We also taled about what to look for when selecting an art schoo for college-a very necessary topic to save tens of thousands of dollars for the parents!

Next camp is July 6-10 and the final is August 3-7. They run from 10-2 pm.

Blowing Rock NC Charity horse show

Hooray! I have completed the second of two pastels which will be sold at the two Blowing Rock NC Charity Horse shows this July. The images used on T-shirts . The first represented the Saddlebred show and the second is the Hunter Jumper show.

We LOVE this show. Held just off the Blue Ridge Parkwayin the NC mountains, it is wonderfully cooler than the Piedmont. There is something in everyone's DNA where some ancient connection to mountains manifests itself. Looking out over the incredible vews, we tend to drift into a time warp and we become our ancestors for a short period of time!

It just doesn't get better than that!

A breathing, living portrait

A fine art portrait is more than a likeness of the subject. A portrait should virtually breathe on it's own!
This 24 x 30 oil is a good example of that concept. By intertwining the likenesses of the subject with a visual example of their long term relationship and devotion to each other the portrait took on a life of it's own.

In other words, it went far beyond "looking like the subject" or what a photo is required to do. A fine art portrait creates a perpetual record of a subject on that day, in time and the interaction to the environment around them. A moment in time. A forever reminder that life is good!