Celtic Majic

This was inspired by my grandmother's birth place in Tourmakeady. Ireland. It is a high horizon with a focal point to the right of the main house.   The design is purposely diagonal in its structure. Tourmakeady is in County Mayo. The cottage sits at the edge of the beautiful Lake Mask.

Blue Vase

This is Blue Vase.... My latest Mixed Media Piece.  if you are one of my students you should be able to figure out how I did the vase????

Faeries and Fuchsias in Bunratty, Ireland

This is a close up of my latest Irish Collage. The paper is so important in achieving the right effect.  Go down to the final picture to see the finished painting.

This is the left side of the picture. The house is composed of very thick paper  that looks like white stucco. A picture can not do it justice.

The unusual  Japanese paper comes in spirals and i used many of them in this piece.

This is the final picture. It took me about 8-10 hours to produce.  the process starts with a sketch.  I did four sketches to try a few different designs.    put my pencil drawing on tracing paper and on a heavy 300 lb piece of watercolor paper.   The papers are selected and painted. Then the papers are glued to the design. the final step is painting over the entire piece to add all the details including shadows, windows, and other touch ups.

Mixed media is very comfortable for me having come from a textile background. I love the textured papers and in some ways they remind me of wool.

Another fun watercolor and collage of Ireland

I am finding that working with watercolor and collage is fun and challenging.  I am a fiber artist also and there is something about the assembly of textured papers,color and design that remind me of creating a wall hanging from all the bits and pieces of wool. It takes quite a bit of time. In this one you'll see I  used quite a few diagonal shapes.  The yellow in the front and the off-white stones lead you toward the white cottage.  This is based on a photograph of  the village of Tully Cross in  Galway. the most difficult part were the windows. The paper was a multi-colored blue tissue paper and I painted in the shadows and white curtains.  The dark shapes in front are piles of peat. many Irish folks still heat their homes with peat that is cut from the bogs. Can you see the sheep on the hills????

This is watercolor and collage. The church was on a high ridge on Achill Island in Ireland. I love the island. It was hit hard by the Irish famine. Many of the deserted and ruined cottages are still there. Only sheep are present in many areas.  If you look carefully you can see the trenches in the land where the potatoes were planted.

 My family was hit hard by the famine. My great grandfather Paddy came to America and worked for awhile. Eventually he returned to Ireland. In 1912 my grandmother bought a ticket on the Titanic but traded it in for one on the Ivernia that sailed a month earlier. An Irish gypsy told her she didn't feel good about the Titanic.  Needless to say we are all happy that she made the decision to take the other boat!!!

Wet on Wet Paintings

This proves that it  doesn't take days to have fun painting. I did this small painting in about 20  minutes working wet in wet.  I caught the essence of a snow scene but certainly not the details. Timing is everything. The more you work in this manner the easier it gets. If the paper is too wet the tree shapes will melt into the background. If the paper is too dry you won't have the lost edges that make this technique so lovely.

This is a painting done in an intuitive style. The paint was applied wet on wet. I had no concept beforehand  --only shapes and a color plan.

I call the painting Two Worlds  to bring attention to the fact that we live in two worlds. There is the world we see every day, and it seems to be real but it is really only an illusion created by us in the inner world.   The Course in Miracles says in Lesson #31 " I am not the Victim of the World I see."