"Seeking Solitude"

This painting is finished but what to call it?

Painting titles are important and too often they are chosen without enough thought or because of a hurry to meet a deadline. Not today, for this painting I wanted a name that reflected the nature of mountain goats. Something that addresses how they live and where you see them. They are an incredible beautiful animal that find the most remote and rocky crag to look out over the tree line. They are rock climbers and cloud watchers.

I was stuck, knowing what I wanted to say but not finding the words. So I contacted a good friend who spends months in the mountains seeking out these incredible animals and asked his advice.  With all his experience he was able to come up with the evocative title that I was struggling to find. His suggestion after studying my painting was " Seeking Solitude." 

Yes! thank you Mike, that fits.

Guy Combes at Wildstreak Art Workshop

Hello all, just a quick note to the artists out there. Wild Streak Art and Denise are hosting another workshop this year. It has been a couple of years since the last one. These are just outstanding workshops and not to be missed. This year's workshop will be April 26-30th and will be featuring Guy Combes. He is a wonderful artist and will be sharing his talent for wildlife art. Guy was born in Kenya and will be teaching about how to paint African animals.  It was a pleasure to meet Guy down in Wyoming this fall and to have the opportunity to discuss wildlife art with him while watching him paint.  So for anyone who is interested contact Denise Soule at http://www.wildstreakart.com/

75 year anniversary

Our Salmon Arm Art Gallery, SAGA is housed in a wonderful old heritage building that will be celebrating its 75th year in 2012. So the members art show theme  in January is 75. Now the gallery has allowed us lots of latitude in how we can interpret that 75 theme.

Still at first I was kind of stumped as to what I could or would paint for such a theme. I always like to have a strong nature or animal in my artwork and always try to present the theme in my own style. After thinking through a number of ideas....this is the one I have come up with.

When  building was first built in 1937 it was a post office, then it became a library and finally an art gallery. So my painting has a letter to represent the post office and two large books to represent the library. The title of the top book is "The 75 year Saga" with the dates 1937-2012 on it's spine. The bottom book is simply titled "Art History" to represent the Art Gallery life in this historic building.

On top of these antique books is an orange tabby cat.....our old Stanley cat.  I put in Stanley because....well I loved Stanley and he was a wonderful cat....but also because over the years many cats have been fed out of the back kitchen door at the gallery in the old cedars. Cats are interwoven into the history of the building and had to be my link between this theme and my animal paintings. This was a fun painting to tuck into December between all the busy-ness of the season.