Originally Posted on May 3, 2010

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending my friends Patrick and Shannon’s beautiful wedding in Calistoga. The ceremony was lovely, the weather was perfect and the reception was good fun. I took my bff Andi as my date and we made some lovely new friends.

As a wedding gift, I painted one of their engagement photos. I found one photo in particular to be such a sweet and tender moment between them that I just had to paint it. I was initially just going for a simple high contrast image with a solid brown background, but once I finished it I wasn’t happy with how stagnant it seemed. I had a tight solid painting all planned out, but the background seemed to call for movement so I did something totally out of character and just went crazy with some red paints. I was really happy with the end result :0)

Originally Posted on January 18, 2010

Sometimes when I’m laying in bed I’ll look for shapes in the texture of the ceiling. One day I saw a girl’s face so I jumped up and started to sketch her. That’s when Yoshiko was born. I called her “The Girl in the Ceiling” for a long time until I finally settled on the name Yoshiko. I think it suits her. I did this painting in December, followed by the smaller painting of her and a couple of linoleum cuts. She’s been hanging out in my head, getting up to all kinds of things that I have yet to put on canvas (or linoleum) and her personality is becoming more interesting by the day. You’ll be seeing more of Yoshiko soon. She’s quite ambitious :0)