Hill Country Woods

All,

I am feeling most accomplished today. I spent all morning in the studio working away at a group of paintings from my "To Be Fixed" pile. This is one of them. I painted this 8'x10" oil on location several years ago but was never satisfied with it as a finished painting. I wasn't exactly sure of what was wrong with it, but after letting it sit all this time, I showed it to one of my cohorts at the studio and he went right to the problem. I had never finished the tree tops! Oooh. Why didn't I see that? Because I was so focused on the distance in the thing I never looked above that central blue. Now you know why I go to the studio downtown when I have a perfectly good one to paint in at home. I need those extra eyes now and then.

Anyway, this is typical of the cedar woodlands of the Texas Hill Country and was actually painted not far from my house.

Jay

Guiniviere and Julia

Folks,

We are laying the cow paintings to rest. This is the other of the two portrait cows. I was gratified to get many suggestions on naming the first one and am declaring the winning name to be GUINIVIERE. Yep. I think that suits her just fine. Elegant and feminine and just what she looks like. So thanks to Anne for that suggestion!

And since I now have a list of other good suggestions, I can go ahead and name this one. And she is a JULIA. Thanks to Sandy for that one!

So Julia and Guiniviere are a pair, I think. I will eventually frame them similarly and offer them as a twosome. I see them going to a rancher somewhere maybe.

Are you watching the Olympic equestrian events? I plan to do that as much as possible. For a change, the TV people have recognised how popular those events are and are airing most of them. I had friends who went to the Atlanta games and they told me that the attendance numbers for the equestrian events were extremely large and eclipsed a lot of the track and field events. Yet the TV people still didn't cover it. One had to buy tapes if one wanted to see how it all went. So I'm excited to see the events are scheduled to show for this Olympics.

Think I'll put a horse painting on the blog next, in honor of the Olympics. See you tomorrow!
Jay

A few animals

Well, I promised animals, but I didn't get any of the dog, cat, and horse portraits on the computer yet. I thought they were there but they are not. Must have been on my old computer.

Anyway, these two pieces were done in the last couple of years. The gulls are California seagulls who were sitting on a dock at a shipyard in Monterrey. I loved the sun on them.

The cows were part of a group who were watching my friend Peggy and me as we painted landscapes plein air on a ranch north of here. The entire herd came to see what we were doing. That included a very large bull. It made us a little nervous to have these large beasts looking over our shoulders, so we shooed them through a gate to the other side of a fence. They seemed content to go but this cow and a few of her friends kept watching us. The calves got tired of the whole thing and lay down to take a nap. I could not resist the photo. The painting is entitled " The Babysitter", which is something I learned that cows do. I had not known that before this experience.

Anyway, since the calves were not laying in a good composition for me ( animals are so uncooperative) I took liberties with the composition and moved them around some. I thought it came out rather well. Well, at least it made me laugh every time I looked at it. Several other people laughed too, and sure enough, someone was so amused, he bought it for his new house in the hill country. I have a couple other paintings of cows from this same day so now I'll have to get those on this blog.

I am delighted to have received many many positive responses to my email and plea for your attention yesterday. One even came from folks in Florida I don't know! My aunt Jacqui referred them to the site. Welcome to Jay Lauver's Art Blog everyone! I hope you'll put the http address on your favorites list so it's easy to find me.

Plainly the next project for me is to get more paintings photographed. And a better job of cropping them so you don't see the frames. I'm working on it.

Jay