New Year’s Art Projects

I’m back to work after visiting with family for two weeks over the holidays. Happy New Year!

In the studio on this sunny but frigidly cold first week of January, I have my five most recent Eclipse paintings laid out on the drying rack, all awaiting their final coat of varnish.

In 2016, I created 53 paintings–not bad! This is an average of slightly more than one painting per week, especially considering there were 5 weeks out of last year when I did not work in the studio due to various travels. So, 53 is my goal to beat for 2017! There are never enough hours in the day. I’m sure I’m not alone in this feeling.

I’m already working on my first painting of the new year, but it’s a fairly large one (30″ x 40″) and therefore a bit time-consuming, so it probably won’t be finished until next week. I like to start out a new year with something ambitious before moving on to the many smaller things I want to do.

I don’t want to show the new work in progress in entirety, but here is a close-up of a little piece of it.

Also in the studio today, I’ve just finished painting this belly cast for a friend. She requested a Tree of Life as the main theme, with the cycles of the moon across the chest.

Here are the colors currently on my palette after working on both my large work-in-progress and the belly cast. I always like to look at messy paint palettes–sometimes they can stand on their own as inadvertently beautiful abstract paintings.