Suddenly I cannot do a collage to save my life. I keep trying to make the piece into something I have predetermined instead of letting it be what it wants to be. I have switched to watercolor for awhile in order to gain some more control over my images. Maisy couldn't care less.

Last weekend I went down to the local art museum and checked out a show of paintings by Maud Gatewood. Her work is uniquely abstracted, a style of painting like no other work I have seen before. She seems to have developed a technique of masking off sections and building up multiple layers of texture, rendering surfaces such as straw, trees, rock, even cows and people. It was not always easy to see how she executed some of the surfaces. I had never heard of Gatewood before going to this show and even now when I look up her work online the images I find do not come close to doing justice to seeing them in person.

I've sent the work off to Charlotte and started a new painting. The small collage called Train Bridge is going to be in the show. I made a copy so I could use it as a reference to make a 4ft oil painting using the same design. I am going to try painting the whole thing using very thin layers like one would use water color, then I will paint over the top getting progressively thicker.

This is a large painting I just finished last week. It is going into a show in Charlotte called Structures. The piece took three months to complete and started as a small collage. The painting is 4ft square which is a size I am going to continue working with for awhile. I am very happy with the way this one turned out. I think I am going to continue with the bridge design for my next few paintings.

Check out some of my paintings at Palm Beach 3.