Three, Four, Five Palms

This little 8x8" painting began as 3 palms and I found they aligned themselves in the way we humans almost always manage to do: perfectly evenly spaced. No, no! Nature doesn't do symmetrical, mostly placement is random, or asymmetrical, since birds dropping seeds, hurricanes, and high tides rule sowing of palm trees where human hands aren't involved. OK, I know, snowflakes are symmetrical, I love the famous VT photographer, Snowflake Bentley's gorgeous snowflake shots, too, but for palm trees... asymmetrical is best. Sooooo, I admit it, this one is Photoshopped. I selected the far right tree with my lasso tool, copied it, transformed it by tilting and stretching a bit, erased anything that didn't look right and voila! a better composition. Then I did it again with the far left tree, 5, even better, an uneven number. I love editing my paintings this way. I can do it in Photoshop and then fix the painting with paint if I like the results! Talk about a time-saver and less stress for the artist!

One More From the Beach People Series

Here's where I think I lost my way, the bottom half of the painting has the looseness I'm looking for but I couldn't keep myself from over-working the tops of the figures a bit too much....what do you think?

More Beach People2

This one is called Sandcastle and is 12x12', I forgot to say The Reader is 16x18", all recent work is acrylic.

More Beach People

I've been lax about posting to this art blog, teaching, gardening, yes, and even painting. Here are a few of my most recent paintings in the beach people series I began a year ago. I'm working on staying loose with my brush strokes but I find those darn hard edges cropping up throughout my work...."lost edges", Lisa, lose them! The Reader, was painted a few months ago and I think I captured the softness of hazy beach sun I was looking for (and calm beach reading).