This way of making colour swatches feels purposeful and the completed sketchbook page is captivatingly beautiful.

It's through this process that I've learned to appreciate first hand the beauty of working in a limited palette.

My intention was a simple one: To make yellow paintings. While a single colour painting has its appeal too, for me that just isn’t enough.  I needed other colours to play with yellow, while letting yellow shine in all her glory.  

Making the mini paintings in my collection requires of me a settling down, a concentration and an attention to detail that appeals to my natural inclinations.

This is the story of how one set of these mini paintings were made.

As the year draws to a close, it’s once again time to take stock of my art practice.

It’s all too easy to forget what’s been accomplished over the course of a year if I don’t set aside time for this reflective exercise. So with the help of the notes that I’ve made along the way, I look back on my art year of 2024.

I make plenty of artwork that if not exactly bad, is unresolved, or in other words not good enough to call finished. I can’t make it “good” or, most often, I lose interest in trying to solve the problems with it to make it good.

Sometimes, when a painting just isn't working, there's no point in fighting it. A dramatic shift is required to move things forward.

This is a story about how I did just that.

I found a collection of small pieces of paper that I used in another project that had been languishing on a shelf for years. Imagine a fishbowl, just the right size for one little goldfish, filled almost to the top with scraps of torn paper all about 1” square.  Each square is painted either yellow, orange or red on one side.  Imagine that there are several hundred of these little goldfish coloured squares. 

I started making mini paintings by chance when I was participating in my first art market. Each artist was asked to donate something reflective of their practice to be used as a draw item.  I had some older work on paper that I cut down and mounted on cards, and along with their envelopes, I wrapped up five of these one of a kind greeting cards into a little bundle as my donation.

In Canada, Thanksgiving arrives in October. The second Monday of the month to be exact. It is the day we celebrate the harvest and the changing colours and give thanks for all that we have. The traditional celebratory meal for this holiday is turkey with all of the fixings: potatoes, dressing, cranberry sauce and gravy . When I was a very young girl I made a turkey for Thanksgiving using a potato.

I love the finishing stages of making an acrylic painting, preparing it for a life outside of the studio. There are so many decisions to be made while in the midst of making art. That’s why I enjoy the finishing process so much. It’s a pleasure to switch from decision making to task mode where few decisions are required.

There have been very few times, as an artist, that I can pinpoint when and where inspiration informs my art practice. Usually, when I begin a new series of work, it's the materials that drive the process, the paint and paper and mark making tools. Recently though I was struck by the most ordinary of objects as a source of inspiration...beach stones.

Recently I made a start on cleaning up and sorting out my studio, a task that I undertake a few times a year after the end of a productive period of making.  Cleaning up and sorting through my materials helps me to move from one project to the next and I often find little treasures of material that help to inform the next series of work.  This time I had a lot of scraps of collage paper lying around. 

My 100 Day Sketchbook Project began back on January 31st with the aim of developing a sketchbook practice that would inform my art practice going forward. Now here we are on May 10th, 100 days later, and what I know for sure is that I learned a few things along the way.

I had an art teacher once that disdained painted edges on a painting. I’m not exactly sure why but I suspect it had something to do with the idea that whatever incidental paint or other material was left on the side of the panel or canvas was evidence of the process of making the painting.

While this is true, it just doesn’t work for me.