Musical Melodies
March 20, 2025
This series of musical instruments began years ago. The previous paintings were done in acrylic collage, which included saturated pigments and texture. I love the shapes and challenged myself to continue this series in watercolor. more »
Bebop Blues Guitars
March 22, 2023
This composition was inspired by guitars that we saw at the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, California, a few years ago. There was a display of many interesting musical instruments and interactive displays. more »
Asters & Buttercups
September 15, 2022
This collage painting was inspired by my beautiful garden flowers. My original plan was to use a limited palette of blues and yellows. more »
Orchestra Series #1
March 9, 2018
I love all the different musical instruments and their shapes that describe them. This painting includes a violin, sax, french horn, clarinet and piano. more »
Orientale Cadenza for Trumpet
February 15, 2017
Painting a series of musical instruments has been on my mind lately. This began with a very loose contour drawing in ink and turned out to be more complicated than I thought. I completed the drawing from life and included the many sections of details as I worked. Sometimes I like to begin doing a […] more »
Singing Strings Guantanamera
December 7, 2016
This design was started back in October and I put it aside for a while to think about the composition and colors. Sometimes the creativity flows easily, and other times I feel unsure what direction to take. The colors were good to start with; I liked the teal, turquoise and reds and ochre. Then I […] more »
Good Vibrations #2 (Guitar Trio)
November 7, 2016
My idea was to re-work an old piece with the same title, but I ended up changing the whole design. There was a spark of an idea to add a guitar to an abstract piece and it kept evolving. The colors changed along the way too, which is one of the benefits working with collage. […] more »
Joyful Music
June 16, 2016
Earlier this year, I wrote down many ideas for subject matter to paint. I intended to do a music series after the guitars and violin. For this piece I used my reference photo taken at the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, California. Beginning with a very loose pencil drawing and weaving colors and shapes […] more »
Poetic Poppies
April 29, 2016
Flowers are a consistent theme in my work. I work from life, drawing my garden flowers and taking numerous photos. I began with an idea for the design and sketched it out on tracing paper the same size as my paper support; in this case I used 300# Arches watercolor paper. The heavier paper doesn’t […] more »
Flute Music and Petunias
October 15, 2015
This painting was inspired by my garden flowers and antique bottle collection. Still lifes are one of my favorite subject matter to paint, and I love the bright colors of summer flowers! I decided from the start to use some of my flower sketches of our larkspur plants and fire engine red petunias. I began […] more »