I’m celebrating our first day of not-90-degree-weather in forever by finishing up some paintings and preparing for the annual White Rock Studio Tour. I’d forgotten what 60 degrees felt like!

Fall cleaning is a thing, right?

At the studio, we got a new roof… which meant a lot of deep cleaning before and after, and not much time to accomplish everything with the tour coming up this weekend. If you are in the Dallas area, come out after the TX/OU game on Saturday and see my space. It might never be this clean again! I even mopped.

Autumn also means building up inventory for winter shows, so I have been working hard both at home and at the studio to finish my many in-progress projects. I finished the messy task of plastering and sanding panels, and I am ready to paint! My favorite subjects for fall are Aspen trees, but I am still on my cactus kick from Big Bend and New Mexico.

See the photos below for studio map and info on the tour! We are stop #35, and there are many of us (although our beloved Lynn Rushton is the artist named on the flyer), so you get to see LOTS of artists at one, convenient location. PSA, we are located close to White Rock Coffee and it will be perfect pumpkin scone weather this weekend… so come down! We’d love to meet you.

I suppose it is human nature to long for spring in midwinter. Grey days abound, in Dallas. I began working on a series of work in oil on Venetian plaster last year, and I find myself obsessing over color. These works are still largely experimental, but I love working with plaster and oil. There is something calming in the rhythm and method of plastering thin coats on panel, scraping and re-scraping, then burnishing the layers to see what sorts of patterns emerge. And then, there is something about Texas herself: the sky, the land, the hospitable people and damn, inhospitable heat. So here I am, playing with contradictions. Blossoms in winter, oil and plaster, the sweet, natural gifts of the Texas landscape for those who are willing to sweat their way through Texas summer.

Magnolias are among my favorite trees. They are a symbol of summer in the South. I began painting magnolias last spring, taking walks with my daughter after the heat of the day had (somewhat) passed, and photographing the blossoms before they turned brown and curled in on themselves. Magnolia petals contain beautiful shadows, and make for great color studies. My newest is on crimson and turquoise plaster, a palette that reminds me of everything I love about the southwest.

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