For me, painting "on the spot" has been a great joy and totally absorbing thing to do, ever since I was four and would go along with my mother (also an artist) on watercolor landscape jaunts. I vividly remember sitting in the grass and doing a painting from the ground-view perspective of two cows, where the udders were the dominant feature.
In college, I majored in fine art, and created oil paintings, etchings, and monotypes. But it was after all six of my children finished college that my love of using watercolors (gouache) finally blossomed!
We moved to New Mexico in 1981 and I instantly knew why it was called the "Land of Enchantment". To this day, I particularly love the small villages and their churches and hilltop shrines, the old junked cars and trucks, the sheep grazing in the cemeteries, the cottonwoods, the hills with their dark green dots of pi?on and juniper, drying chilies, the fences made of bedsprings(!), Indian dances, adobe kivas, plazas with sleeping dogs, and smells of pinon smoke all which make endless painting subjects for me. I never tire of heading out for a back road or place off the beaten track and discovering a way of life which reminds me of my early years on a small Ohio farm.
Those years were very happy ones where my sister and I would put on plays for my mother, father, and baby brother. We used a tool shed for our theater. The most successful play was titled "Sands of Zanzibar". My sister was nine and I was seven and we had no idea where Zanzibar was, but it sounded exotic. We had planned to use grass skirts that our uncle had given us when he returned from a trip to Hawaii. When the part in the play came where we had to dash into the tool shed to don our grass skirts, we found our pet goats "Tosie" and "Tuffy" had eaten most of the long grass! We collapsed in laughter and our parents started laughing too, so we were certain we had created a great successful bit of entertainment! Today, my little homemade studio (lovingly transformed by family and friends from an old horse stall on our property) is named "Sands of Zanzibar". Thus, too, when we moved here I felt I'd found another Zanzibar totally enchanting.
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