Earth

This is an unusual painting. It started with an assignment in grad school where we were each given a clump of earth and we were required to do something with it. I thought it was beautiful and I wanted to paint it. So I dissolved the soil away from the lower roots in order to expose them, and I used the resulting mud as paint. I painted the earth with the earth. Many paints originate from earth colors, taking their names from their place of origin, like Burnt Sienna, or Raw Umber, so this was a natural thing to do.

Portrait of Sally

This is a life-sized oil portrait of a wonderful woman, one who was willing to sit for a portrait rather than requiring the use of photography to shorten the sitting time. We both thoroughly enjoyed the time we spent together in the process of creating this painting.

Self-Portrait with Mannekin

This is an unconventional self-portrait. My image is reflected in a tall vertical mirror in the studio and my face is turned away from the viewer. The contents of the studio are included, or rather the left-overs of the creative process--the trash can overflowing with discarded paint, the back of a stretched canvas leaning against the cabinets, the papers on the table. The headless mannekin and the faceless figure are related. I was thinking about being mindless (an oxymoron?) and about the ego involved in making a self-portrait. The heating duct growing out of my head amused me--it looks like the crazy hair-do on the Bride of Frankenstein.

Sue's Painting

This is watercolor and pastel, a combination of drawing and painting-- a river, a woman, a baby, and a bird. The baby is superimposed over the woman and they are both in the river, but separate and possibly moving in different directions. Both mother and baby are swept along and each are seemingly asleep. The bird, in silhouette, witnesses.

The News

This is a large oil on canvas of a small drama, the kind of ordinary moment that occurs every day. The young man enters the room as the girl sits lost in thought. There is an implied tension. This is the actual subject of the painting; it invites the viewer to speculate about the relationship between the two figures and about the story they share.

Casino

In this 30" x 30" oil on canvas I wanted to capture the feeling of sensory over stimulation that happens in places like casinos. This was part of a series using images from a cruise ship. The life-jacketed man wandering in the background, the electrified witch-like woman playing the machine, and the man leaning into the picture are each isolated from the others, taken over by their surroundings, disconnected.

Offering

When I created this small floral arrangement I thought of it as sculpture, like art made with flowers. I sewed the palm frond to itself to make it arc, and the beautiful flower and leaf came from my brother's garden.

Ellen's Rat

This is Peach Rat, now renamed Anaharat for her qualities of the heart. She was a late but fine addition to the rats of Hanukkah and Christmas. Notice how the cast shadow of her head in this photo resembles Snoopy.

The Rats of Hanukkah & Christmas

Pink Rat, Turquoise Rat, Green Rat, and Lavender Rat belong to special friends of mine. Here they are gathered for a group photo before taking a trip to their new home.

Portrait of Picklejuice Rat

This is another rat portrait, oil on canvas 12" x 16". His crazy shorts are larger than most, and he struggles with an aesthetic challenge, but never the less, he enjoys a special place in the rat pantheon.

Portrait of Casey

This is oil on linen, 30" x 40". I painted each of the children in this particular family when they reached the age of seven.

India Seedpod Doll

This is the first figure I made in India--I found these great seedpods that were just begging to be made into something. She was a little like a shadow puppet, tied together with green dental floss I had in my bag.

India Doll

I made this figure from found objects while studying in India. The very interestingly shaped sticks that suggested knees and calves were the starting point, and everything else had to be gathered from the small courtyard where I was working and fastened together using whatever straw and string I could find there. The native women who were working in the garden nearby were delighted when I showed this to them. What were very familiar plant materials to them looked strange and new to me, and they laughed when they saw how I used them. We couldn't understand a word of each others language, but our common amusement bridged the gap. This was about 10" tall.

Mortimer Rat

This is a portrait of Morty, the rat who is just a baby. Though small, he packs a huge intellectual punch. His stance is indicative of his unusual courage. Oil on canvas, 12" x 16".

Little Family in the Spotlight

This is a giant triptych--each of the three paintings are six feet tall and almost four feet wide. They were a big part of my thesis show called Little Family which was based on tiny sculptures I made and used as models. Here I wanted to play around with scale, showing them against the baseboard and near an electrical outlet. I placed them each in a spotlight--it reminded me of reading The Borrowers with my son, a book about teeny people living their lives unnoticed in the normal-sized world. In the photo of the painting hanging at the show, notice the actual sculptures in the glass case to the left of the painting.

Self-Portrait in Studio

This is a combination self-portrait and still life painting. The central part of it is of everything reflected in a tall rectangular mirror in my studio, with me surrounded by all of the stuff it takes to paint. There are not only the materials of painting, like palette and paint and brushes and canvas (the depicted canvas is the actual canvas of this painting) but also some of the objects I have painted, like bird's nests. It also contains a few portraits within a portrait, and other clues about my life at that time, if you know how to read it. It is oil on canvas, 30" x 40".

Christmas

This is a small oil painting on panel, 12" x 12". I challenged myself by including all kinds of objects, with a variety of textures and surfaces, in the set-up.

Four Peaches

This is a small oil painting on linen, 9" x 12". I painted it after seeing a still life with peaches at the High Museum in Atlanta. I wanted to see if I could make the surface of the peaches look properly fuzzy.

Maine Coast

I painted this while hiking along the Maine coast on Mt. Desert Island with a friend. I had a small paintbox with me and when we took a break to rest on a rocky ledge I quickly recorded the beautiful view. This is 8" x 10", oil on panel.

Portrait of Boy

This is an oil portrait of a 4" figure I made out of clay, wire, and cloth. It was part of a small family of figures I made as part of my graduate thesis project. I sculpted the figures and created environments for them and then used them as models for paintings. This painting is 12" x 14", oil on raw linen.

Abandon

This is a large oil on canvas, 40" x 60", one of a series of underwater paintings. For many of these I photographed the subjects in a swimming pool using a disposable waterproof camera.

Elephant

This is another found object sculpture made from scrap metal splashed on the ground during pouring. It's about 8" x 8".

Two Bird's Nests

Two more watercolor paintings of bird's nests.

Birthday

This painting is something about the cycle of life, this and that, the ephemeral nature of it. Oil on canvas, 30" x 40".

Roots and Tree

This is actually two canvases meant to hang together. The top is 30" x 30" and the roots are 9" x 30". I was thinking about the idea that it is only with well-nurtured roots that any living thing, plant or animal, can thrive.

Stepping Chicken

Stepping Chicken is only 1/2" tall, made out of a piece of left-over metal that splashed on the ground during a pour at Georgia State University's sculpture department. I made a huge series of these found-object pieces, but this is one of my favorites. I like his jaunty, self-confident swagger as he steps off into the abyss.

Portrait of Courtney

This is oil on linen, 30" x 40", one of a series. The setting is the Chattahochee River, which is a favorite location of mine for portraits.

Sail Away

This is from a series of small paintings where I used magazine pages as a starting point, mostly from Art Forum because I liked the square format and the interesting images. This one was a photograph of a sailboat inside a big tunnel and I painted in the figures wandering around in life jackets.

Laura's Painting

This painting was one of a series exploring the figure under water. I was interested in how the figure gets visually chopped, the head obscured, when viewed from beneath the surface. This is oil on canvas, 30" x 40".

Pansies

A bunch of pansies from my garden in a pretty jar that my dear friend Debbie gave to me. Oil on panel, 8" x 10".

Small Bird's Nest

This is a small oil sketch on raw linen, 16" x 16", part of the ongoing look at nests. Here I made the egg ambiguous--is there a hole in the nest or does it cradle an egg?

Portrait of Nike Rat

This is a portrait of the first rat toy, Nike, who was made out of an old and very soft Nike t-shirt. He set the standard for all future rats, with his long luxurious tale, beady intelligent eyes, and sausage legs, which are just barely covered by his crazy shorts. For these portraits I set each rat up inside a cardboard box and painted them life size.

Lemonhead with Self-Portrait

Ok, this one is a little more involved, and probably can't be easily explained.
It grew out of a grad school project, the purpose of which I fail to remember, but Lemonhead was somehow required to sculpt a self-portrait and he chose cheese as his medium, string cheese to be exact. And of course, a lemon for the head, and squash, tortilla chips, dry spaghetti, raisins, and an apple-skin bowtie.

Portrait of Lemonhead Rat

This is from of a series of small paintings of handmade stuffed animals which were favorite toys of my son. I approached these as if they were actual portrait commissions, looking for the personality expressed through pose, lighting, clothing, and setting. It is oil on canvas, 12" x 16".

Pepino Melons

This is a small oil painting on wood panel, 9" x 14". Here I was interested in just looking at the subject in the most concentrated way possible, with the most intense focus I could bring to it. This method of working creates a meditative feeling which the finished painting retains.

Bird Nest

Around the time our kids were leaving home I started to notice bird's nests everywhere I looked. I collected them and drew and painted them. This one is watercolor, 12" x 12".

Closeup of Offering.

Offering

The figure in this painting came from a drawing I did of a sleeping girl, but for the painting I wanted to suggest something about the attitude of meditation, a sense of abandon and trust that happens in the meditative state. Her hands cup a small blue egg in a classic pose of offering. It is 31" x 50" on raw linen, half drawn with red conte crayon and half painted in oil.

Beach House

This is a large oil on canvas, 48" x 60". It was done after the same trip that produced the Beach Goddess--my sister and niece and and a family friend passing time in typical beach house fashion.

Clouds

Just clouds, 3' x 4', oil on canvas.

Beach Goddess

This little sculpture came about during a walk along Grayton Beach in the Florida Panhandle. We made a giant sand castle and it seemed to call for a resident Goddess. Her distinctively shaped torso, made from some sort of sea plant, was all of the inspiration I needed.

Ocean Wave

This painting was inspired by the deep navy blue color of the ocean. I never realized how dark that color is, once you leave land and venture far out to sea, until I went on a cruise a few years ago. This is oil on canvas,
30" x 40".

Five Plums

This site will feature a variety of work, from landscapes to figurative work to still life paintings, both small and large. Some work will have been done very quickly, completed in one session on the day of posting, while other pieces will be more elaborate, either in terms of size, technique, or complexity of subject matter. While many Painting-a-Day websites adhere to the strict discipline of producing one work each day, I would like to use this site to present a wider range of work.

This is a small oil painting on wood panel, 6" x 14". It is one of a series of very finished still life paintings that required a meditative level of focus to complete.