Update on upcoming France trip

I don't know how much I've already posted about this; but for friends who are interested (since I don't touch FB anymore unless a family member tells me some nice family photos are there for me to see), I'll mention my plans a bit here.  As I may have already said previously, my plans have changed considerably because of a certain little child who doesn't want me to be away from her for very long.  Now I'll be going just to Paris for a month in the autumn, with the ultimate intention (if I still want to do it after having spent a few months there over the next year or so) of possibly moving there for at least part of every year.  For now, though, my plans are pretty much set in stone.  I'll be spending a month in Paris, half of it just myself and half of it with my family, except for my husband who can't go this time but will probably go the next time.  He's disabled, permanently in a wheelchair, so we'll have to make special plans for him to be able to go.  We're all really excited about the trip, and I feel quite confident about my French language abilities now -- hope I'm not wrong!!!

I'll be posting a few photos of my stay in Paris and will be doing a lot of painting while I'm there, so expect to see a lot of what I hope aren't touristy paintings when I return.  I'll probably do a few animal paintings, but I hope to spend a lot of time painting interest scenes that I find here and there.  

Now that I'm not going permanently at this time, I won't be talking much about how I go about getting there because anyone can figure that part out on their own.  And I'm kind of sad to say that I hear that since I was last living in France, over 20 years ago!!!!, many, many more people, especially in the large cities, speak pretty much fluent English.  So for that reason, although I'll be staying in Paris for reasons of convenience and ease, I'm staying far from the touristy areas in a quiet residential neighborhood, in the 18th arrondissement for those who know the layout of Paris.  I've found a smallish apartment and will rely only on public transportation while I'm there. 

The hardest, by far, part of planning for my trip has been finding an apartment; but that's finally been finalized.  Now I have to take care of the much less important things such as having Verizon show me how to get my smartphone to work there, which metro stations to take, etc., etc.   My sweet husband is going to be taking care of my online orders (and my precious dog Harry) while I'm gone, so that's a great relief.  But next time, both my husband and Harry are going!  Well, it might be too hard to take Harry the next time, I guess, but he'll get to go with me eventually.

A Guernsey cow painting that I finished recently

 This is an 11x14x3/4" acrylic painting on stretched canvas that I recently finished.  In the first photo, I painted her exactly as I saw her in the field, with horns.  Then I thought about it a while and wondered what she would look like without horns, so I digitally removed them in the second photo.  The original painting has the horns in it; but if you're interested in purchasing the painting and don't want the horns, I can remove them for you at no charge.

 I've been doing a lot of paintings lately, but I don't feel comfortable showing many of them because, as I've said before, I'm learning to do landscape paintings, and I still don't feel confident enough to show very many of them.  But I will before long!!

Rooster Painting! Something Bright and Fun!

This is a really fun rooster painting I just finished today.  He's going to grace my own kitchen until he sells because I love him.  He makes me smile; he'll definitely wake me up in the morning even before I've had my first cup of coffee; and he was a lot of fun to paint! 

The original painting is on 16x20x3/4" stretched canvas, with the sides painted the same color as the background.  The background shows up in the photo as a  bit blue, but it's more of a greenish grey actually.  I'm selling both prints and the original.

Now I absolutely have to start on my next custom painting, which as I think I've already mentioned, is another beautiful cat.

Greater Swiss Mountain Dog Puppy Portrait

Why do puppies often look so sad?  I've never figured that out, but they do.  And this little sweetie is no exception.  I just finished him today, and the original is 16x20x1.5, gallery-wrapped canvas.  I also have prints for sale, of course, as usual.

Cat Painting, Black and Blue Tabby with Green Eyes

This is another cat painting I finished very recently.  He's another custom painting, so the 11x14" original has already been sold.  I think he's a beauty, and I'm quite happy with the outcome of the painting. 

I have another custom cat painting to do and a dog custom painting, which I think is a Weimaraner puppy (can't remember exactly at the moment). 

Although ceramics are still taking up a bit of my time, I'm getting more and more painting done -- and loving it.

Spring is still struggling to take hold here in Oregon.  We get a few nice days, then back to nasty rain again.  I'll be missing rain, though, in just a couple more months when we get pretty much no rain until late September.  Wish it weren't so "all-or-none" here. 

I still intend to go to France in September and am still excited about it.  Just kind of waiting at this point, though.  Still don't know how long I'll be there, though.  We shall see . . .

We have my son-in-law's parents visiting from  Denmark at the moment, and everyone is having a good, but busy, time.  My little granddaughter is the most excited as all grandparents I think love to shower little ones with whatever is their hearts' desire at the moment.  They're up on Mount Hood for a few days now, and she reports that she's having a grand time!

Another Sweet Little Pig Painting

Several months ago I did another pig painting and found it so challenging that I decided to do another one (and I have some more planned, too).  This little sweetie is on a green background.  The original painting (available at the time of this post) is an 11x14x3/4" acrylic painting on stretched canvas, wired and ready to hang).   How any human being could eat one of these beautiful, intelligent animals is beyond me - but that's another post!

I am currently still finishing up the custom cat painting, which I expect will be done in just a couple more days.  Then I'm going to be doing a landscape painting, I think, one I've been planning to do for a long time - of a countryside scene in France, a late-afternoon scene with amazing colors in it!  It's a just-for-fun painting -- well, they'll all just for fun, but some are more so than others!

I'm still doing my ceramic pieces but at a slower pace than I was before.  I still like to do them, but I've been missing painting as much as I like to, so I've gone back to concentrating more efforts on the paintings.  I'll probably change again, though.  I always do.

Really Cute Cow Painting

I just finished this sweetie today, and I love it.  It's a fun painting to me, and I think his/her eyes are so sweet looking.  I have both the original and prints listed online if you're interested in having this sweetie hanging on your wall.

The original is acrylic painted on an 11x14x3/4" stretched canvas, no staples on the sides, and it already has a hanging wire on the back so can be hung up just as soon as you receive it.

My next painting is a custom I've been working on for a few days.  It's another cat and a beautiful one, too.  I'm really enjoying doing the painting.

The Finished Cat painting

Not a whole lot different than the one I posted before, but I brightened everything up a lot and made a few small changes.  I like it.  It looks like a happy kitten, who's thinking about mischief (aren't they all???)

Now I've got two more commissioned paintings coming up, so I'll be working on them for the next month.  Still trying to keep my commissions at no more than two per month so I have time to enjoy life. 

And spring is coming!!!  I can feel it!  Here in Oregon, it's v-e-r-y slow in arriving, but there are signs:  trees starting to bloom, bulb flowers in full bloom, a few days of real sunshine every so often, people out and about more and more, my thoughts turning to travel again (although, unless things change, my France trip isn't happening until September -- and as I think I've mentioned before, its length keeps getting shorter and shorter due to a certain little one who is too young just yet to go with me without both of us being miserable), just all kinds of signs that spring is, well, springing!!

I must close with:  An early springtime many years ago, my aunt was leaving her job at a neat old hotel (now destroyed, I'm sad to say) in Pensacola, Florida, called Hotel San Carlos.  She was standing at a street corner when an obviously a-bit-inebriated man approached her with a big smile.  She was a bit nervous, but then he said that he wanted to recite a poem for her.  Here it is:  "Spring is sprung, grass is riz, I wonder where them flowers is."  That's it!

We have enjoyed reciting it every springtime since then -- along with e. e. cummings "In Just Spring," of course!!!  One of my favorites!  Here it is if, one, you're not familiar with it or, two, you just want to have a warm, fuzzy remembrance:  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176657.

A Pretty Cat I'm nearly finished with

Sorry about the quality of the photo, but I think you can get an idea of what the painting is about:  She's a pretty little tuxedo kitten that I'm doing a custom painting of.  Her name is Bea, and she's lying on her favorite blanket.  I'll be finishing it today, so I'll post a photo of the finished painting later on today or tomorrow. 

Okay, off to work now.  Just wanted to show her off because I think black-and-white ("tuxedo") cats are so adorable, and she's a particularly pretty one.

I've been away a while because I've been awfully sick with a really, really bad cold.  It's almost conquered now!!  I'm such a wimp sometimes!

Five Cows

This is a painting I finished a few days ago.  Now I wish I had done it in a larger format.  It's five cows on only an 11x14 canvas, so I had to use really, really tiny brushes for too many of the details.  However, it is finished, and prints are available.  As the original painting is in oil, it is not ready to put up for sale.  It should be dry enough in a couple more weeks.  Hope you like it.  I don't think I'm going to do more than two or three cows to a painting in the future . . .

Bracco Italiano Completed

Sorry I didn't post any interim shots; I worked straight through to the end after my last post.  He's finished, but I still may tweak him a bit, of course.  I always do until they go out the door. 

Anyway, the original is for sale, and it'll be listed on Etsy, along with prints, in the next day or so.  The oil painting is on 11x14x3/4" stretched canvas, with the sides painted the same dark green as shown in the background.  I'm pretty happy with him. 

Oil paint is so much easier to use than acrylics and the colors are just amazing, so clear, clean, and bright when I need them to be and dark when I need dark.  But I am having a bit of difficulty with the medium I'm using with the oil paints.  I've been getting headaches, burning nose, itchy hands, and runny eyes.  However, I believe I have already come up with a solution:  a diluent/medium/brush cleaner by Gamblin that supposedly has no toxicity.  I'll see how it works for my next painting, which I think may be of some adorable little Oregon juncos that were at our feeder just outside the window during our recent heavy snow storm.  We got some really good photos of them, so I may give one a try for my next painting.  There are many other paintings I should be doing, but one of these little birds will give me a bit of a break from the really heavy paintings.

French Language Studies Progress

I've been seeing pretty good progress in my French language studies, and it's really encouraging.  I'm taking classes at Alliance Francaise and really enjoying those.   Every novel I read - and I am always, always reading, every single evening for at least an hour - is in French.  That helps immensely with my vocabulary.  I might add, also, that except for one two-month beginner class in French, many years ago, I had no knowledge of the language at all.  Even then, after taking the single summer two-month class at the University of Wyoming, I began struggling with reading novels in French.  And it was a struggle, too:  I read with my book in one hand and the dictionary in the other.  I didn't even have any comprehension at all of sentence structure, my vocabulary was in the low hundreds of words -- well, you get the picture.  It was bad.  But I really, really wanted to learn the language, and I could at least get the basic gist of whatever it was I was attempting to read.

When I went to live in France the first time, in the 1990's, that's the level at which I was 'NOT' speaking.  In other words, I was completely helpless and pretty much understood nothing and could only say sentences like "my name is . . .," and "where is. .. ." - but I couldn't understand the answers.  So in the very beginning, the person talking to me and I did a lot of hand gestures.  More than one person speaking, forget it; I understood nothing and found my mind wandering elsewhere.  But I kept struggling, and by the time I left, around a year and a half or so later, I was at least slightly communicating -- getting by, in other words.  While there, I studied a French grammar book every evening, kept flash cards with me at all times, very, very shyly tried to speak with people I worked with, and had to speak with service people in shops, etc.  It was tough, tough.

Over the intervening years, my interest in studying French has waxed and waned -- and is fiery hot now, of course.  And I've finally found one thing that really is seeming to work for me now:  at the suggestion of my Alliance Francaise instructor, I subscribed to the French language TV channel (TV 5 Monde), and I've started doing some paintings in my bedroom - where my TV is located - as I've mentioned before.  While I paint, I have the TV going constantly, where I'm totally immersed in hearing the language, even if I'm not really paying attention.  I find myself later, however, telling my daughter about something interesting I heard on the TV during my painting times.

As anyone who has studied another language knows, the last thing to come is speaking, and that's the case with me.  My vocabulary is very extensive now, I hear and understand most everything, but I'm still very hesitant about speaking.  My Alliance Francaise classes help with that a lot because that's what they emphasize, is speaking.  And with that and with hearing the TV French constantly, I'm beginning to speak more freely now, too.  There is hope, in other words.

Bracco Italiano pup painting in progress

Sorry, this photo is a bit blurred and has some real lighting issues (I'm painting this one in my bedroom instead of in my studio, and the lighting isn't as good in here.)  Why in my bedroom?  Two main reasons:  One, I do mostly acrylic paintings in my studio at this time, and I don't like to have the two media in the same place.)  Two, I like to have a painting nearby sometimes so I can see it even when I'm not actually working on it; I look at it as I do other things during the day and see things that need working on.  I don't do this all the time because it becomes a bit of an obsession.  I study it before going to bed and will actually jump out of bed, turn on the lights, and fix whatever I saw wrong with it.  Not at all good for getting a good night's sleep!   But sometimes I like to do it.

Below this in-progress photo is the photo I'm working from.  Yes, I do get a bit "photographic" in my paintings sometimes, but it's a bit fun to do so from time to time.

I'll try to take a photo at the end of every couple of sessions so you can see the progress (I hope!)

Okay, got it! ... in a way -- Again, "Two Cows Revisited"

Google Chrome is giving me problems again.  I love it, but it really has a lot of bugs, especially in the last few months.  I'm writing this time from Windows Explorer.

Some time ago I painted these two beautiful girls on just an 8x10" panel.  I've always loved the painting, but the original was just too small.  (It has sold, by the way.)  So I decided to do another similar painting, but this time it's a 16x20" on stretched canvas.  It is at this time for sale, along with prints in various sizes.

I'm also working now on a precious Italiano Bracco puppy painting.  I'm working from photos given to me by someone who was showing this particular puppy at the Rose City Classic dog show a few years ago.  If you are that person or know that person, I'm so sorry, but I said I would contact you when the painting was done, and I have lost your name.  I know it's been years, but I do eventually get to most all the paintings I have told people I would paint.  I'll be doing a progress series of shots on the painting, I've decided; but I have already gotten a bit into the painting before I decided to do so, so there won't be a whole of progress to show.  The process is just too beautiful not to share on this particular painting, though.  (Hope I don't jinx myself!)  The pup is beautiful, the photograph is excellent, and for some reason, I'm working well -- that's a bit of a change from the difficulties I've been having on some other paintings lately that aren't ready to see the light of day yet!  I'll post the pics very soon of this little guy.

Two Cows - Revisited

NSomething is wrong with Blogger.  I can't see a word that II'm typing, and there's no way to upload a photo.  I guess I'll have to check with Google.  I need this blog.  I noticed afew ddays ago (sorry if I'm flubbing up; I really can't see a single thing I'm typing)  I noticed, again, a few days ago that when I tried to post, I couldn't.  I thought it was a passing thing.  Now I'm really concerned.  I'll see what I can do; don't know if this is posting or not.