the Casual Artist this weekend

Owyhee Picture Jaspar, Plume Agate (I think), and another type of Jaspar

I picked up some fun new agates and jaspar pieces at a little rock shop next to Hubby's Pizza in downtown Kennewick. He's looking for more visitors, so pop on over there if you love rocks. He has mostly slabs and cuts of agates, jaspars and petrified woods. Not a lot of crystals. I'll get his phone and address for you if you're interested. I just love the picture jaspars. If you look closely, you can find little mountains and landscapes in the color striations. I also think these patterns will show up in my artwork in some form, maybe in a background of a painting or part of an abstract. The shimmery periwinkle blues in the plume agate are stunning. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do them justice.

~

My upstairs home studio has been the clutter station for awhile, so I've begun excavating.  It's going to take awhile, but it's also exciting to carve out a space to create here. In the meantime, I brought some paints from the downtown studio, but they started to dry out and this is the meager attempt I made to salvage what I could. There's a lesson in there, of course. How can you get vibrant art if your paint is dried out? Being stingy and creating dynamic art don't exactly go together. It was a fun exercise in lifting and keying the painting. I wanted predominant blue tones, but there seems to be a lot of red in this photo.

quick oil study of still life