Guest artist: Vickie Stokes

Vickie is dear friend of mine and a talented artist.
I met her about 3 years ago in one of Janet Hamilton's workshops and we have painted together many many times.

A woman of many talents, Vickie finds the time for family, business, art and sports and ... she does a very good job in all these fields!

As a person, she is one of the nicest gal's. She is always supportive of the people around her. I can speak to that. I have experienced her nice words of encouragement whenever I feel my art work is not going well. She is always there to cheer you up and give you confidence. It does work for me. Hence, it is very enjoyable to be around her sharing a common activity or just hanging out.

Her paintings are bold and full of color. She can come up with something striking in a very short period of time.

She can paint the landscape (our favorite thing) but has no trouble with figures and nature subjects.

In her pieces you can quickly get a very realistic 3 dimensional feeling as she finds the right colors and values to set the light and shadow in the composition.

Vickie's art work was for display recently at  Gallery North in Edmonds  where she won "First Place" for her pastel painting "Oyster Dome"at their "Beauty of the Northwest" annual exhibition.
Congratulations!

-Oyster Dome-

Another aspect of Vickie's artistic side that I admire very much is that she is not afraid of working big size paintings. She usually goes for 16x20 at minimum. Here she is showing what I mean by size. Crazy!

Vickie loves outdoor activities. She runs marathons, which to me, makes her a full blown athlete. One time she showed up to paint with me at a workshop after running a 20 mile marathon. I could not believe it.

Finally but not even close to finish my list, she owns a restaurant. Yes! she owns an italian restaurant and pizzeria in Marysville called Cristiano's. Which I have to go check out soon.

I could write a book about all the things she does and more of her talents and gifts. But you can just ask her! 

Art Journal

"Hope"

Pastel on Uart 400 paper. 9x12.
Definitely fun to paint.
I first made the drawing and applied an alcohol wash using a dark blue Nupastel stick.

Buy it

Edmonds Art Walk! June 2015

Again, thanks to Michael from Christopher Framing and Gallery my latest work with pastels are on display at his gallery. This time, you can find a series of new brilliant colors and contrast in local landscapes - Bothell area - and some wildlife as well. The work will be on display for a month until the next month's Art Walk (July 16th). Stop by and check it out!
The opening was June 18th and a lot of people showed up. I got a lot of compliments and also some of the landscapes representing familiar areas to the visitors were drawing a lot of attention. I actually had a couple people tell me they remember me from the last art walk when I had my first exhibit. How cool is that!

Holidays

I love the look of this little guy.I used a real Christmas tree ornament as a model. It came in a set of 4 - will I paint the others? - hmmm.The background is darker than it appears in the picture and it makes his serious stand pop out of the painting a lot.Reds and purples contrast with the white of the beard. I was able to apply some gold and silver pastel pigments to give a sparkly look.Enjoy the holidays!

December 10th

It is hard to sit down and write. Especially if you are posting frequent work related stuff.
This is me trying to do something different. Something outside of my comfort zone - the landscape.

It was challenging to decide how to leave the background, yes! the background.
The front poppy has detail and all but I kept going back and forth defining the flowers in the background and then trying to make them go back further.

The effect that we usually see with a camera picture, that fuzziness well, was really hard to do.

What would be the title for this little painting? "red poppies"...dah.

How about "Right here, right now". Yes, its just flowers at first but if you look deeper I saw something different. Concentrate your life around the present, what you have right here in front of you and enjoy it. Put the past and future in the background and take what you have now.

Another Daily Painting

well... I have done it twice in a week, which for me is fantastic!

Daily Painting?

I got literally possessed by the book Daily Painting by Carol Marine. I read a few pages and off I was preparing some surfaces with watercolor paper and ground for pastels. The idea is to have paper available quickly that can be cut in sizes 5x7 or 6x6 or any other small size and use them to make some sort of art every day.

Every day is a lot of commitment. But even twice a week will do. 

Lots of research and work to do. Finding subjects is a big one. If you dont have good subjects to paint from motivation goes away at the speed of light.