Winter

As usual going into a New Year, I plan my goals for the following year. This year it's much harder for some reason, maybe the general apathy I feel after my Dad's death this year has made me less driven. Anyway, I have decided to paint animals this year, Herefords in honor of my Dad. He loved his Herefords and he picked them for their "conformation", something I never quite got the feeling of. So, this year I am going to study our cattle from old photos and paint some of them grazing and at their winter feeding station.
Feeding them in Southwestern North Dakota in the winter was a challenge that most people will never know. Lucky them! Sometimes it took us as long to get dressed to go out to feed the cattle as it did to feed them. I can remember my Mom and I getting dressed up in our "storm coats" as she called them. My arms would barely bend with all the layers. The scarf around your mouth would immediately freeze at 30 to 38 below zero. It was a real scary time, the water in the tank had to be heated and broken through for the cows and the calves. We had to haul out the bales, some of which were pretty tightly frozen and packed together. The great life of a farmer/rancher in North Dakota! Wow.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

It's very cold here in Colorado, but the sun is peeking out. I am working on reorganizing my studio. Today my friend Nancy helped me out putting pastels in a new cabinet I bought at the flea market for $95.00. It has eleven drawers in it and they are lined with red velvet! It is a new cabinet made by a local handyman for jewelery but it works great for pastels. It is extremely heavy and now it is probably close to 80 pounds with my pastels in it. Pastels are so expensive I wanted a case for them where they would get so dusty and messed up.

Liesl and Lilli, Christmas 2008

North Dakota grandparents house in winter.

Photo taken by Rev. Roger of my
grandparents house, built in 1914, a
Sears and Roebuck house. Now
owned by Doug Tarpo.

http://nordic-arts.com/





Rolling into the holidays, as usual I am trying to do a thousand things at once and lately that has given me some black and blue marks as well as pain! Hopefully, once Christmas craziness wanes we will be able to attain some serenity in our lives. Having spent the last few days in Minnesota, I have become much more excited about Christmas. Minnesota has to be one of the most Christmasy of all the states in the Union. Everyone seems to collect everything to do with Christmas!! My eight Santas pale in significance to everyone's "villages, snowmen, American dolls, ornaments, etc". Anyway, now I am digging out all our stuff to see if I can make a statement celebrating a Colorado Christmas!

Feeding the Kitties

Last fall after my Dad passed on I painted this from a photo I had taken several years ago. My Dad loved his cats and wanted to keep them around to keep the rodents down around the farm. In order to do that it was important to keep them fed, also. So every morning he would fill up a little ice cream pail with table scraps and some cat food and take it down to the barn.

Here you can see the little black kitties rushing out to greet him. He would call "kitty, kitty, kitty" and they would come in a blur. They were all wild, feral cats and you couldn't get very close to them. Now I guess they are all at someone else's farm because there's no one left to feed them at Flagstaff Farms! Time and life move on somehow!

Small Paintings Show

Happy almost Thanksgiving everyone!

We are having a new Small Paintings Show in Fort Collins at the Readers Cove, a nice bookstore on Harmony Road and Lemay. Our opening is Friday, Nov. 21 at 6 pm so be sure and come.

I am putting in the corn stalk one below as well as this painting I did of bales in a fall field. One of my favorites...I love those round bales and due to their size never had to haul them anywhere, unlike those little rectangular nasty ones!

We are off to Texas for Thanksgiving. I'm sure the weather down there will be just ideal, the one time of the year that it is almost perfect in Austin. Have a great one!

Painting at Grant's Farm in Loveland.

A few weeks ago some of my friends and I went out to a farm near Loveland where they grow pumpkins and painted the area and buildings. There were bunches of little kids there with their Moms picking out pumpkins and gourds for Halloween. Cute.

I really liked this doorway and the huge stalks of the corn nearby. It was very, very cold. Probably 40 degrees with a wind about the same speed. Not the easiest kind of atmosphere to paint outdoors! I would have to say that painting outdoors is just the greatest thing that an artist can do, however. You just seem to see articles, atmosphere, color and distance in entirely different ways once you start painting outdoors.

I started my love affair with painting out when I was in college and I trundled my junior high, high school and college students out all my teaching career. They actually liked it the best of all drawing projects that they ever did. It is just so invigorating to experience all the outdoors has to offer. The more you do it, the more your painting improves.

I painted some great views of Long's Peak from this property also, it's a wonderful farm with a great barn and a lake.