A Gift of Watercolor

Last summer, my son Bryson got married on the deck of the cottage that we have rented every summer for more than twenty years at Sunset Beach, North Carolina.

The owners keep a guest book which I write in at the end of our beach week.  Of course I mentioned the family wedding at the cottage.

The owners' daughter, Brenda Butka, is an artist whose work is represented at  the Sunset River Marketplace in Calabash, NC.  Apparently she went to the beach cottage in November and read the journal.  Sometime around Thanksgiving I received a package from her in the mail.  It was a watercolor painting of the view from the deck!  It faces the marsh and Bird Island.  I had the picture framed and gave it to Bryson and Melissa for Christmas.

Wasn't that a lovely surprise!  I had a hard time giving this away.

Speaking of gifts of art, Charlie hung his two Christmas presents from me behind his desk at work, along with last year's watercolor.

I have done two more paintings in the past week.  Both are from lessons in a book by my teacher from Art of the Carolinas, Tom Jones.

The first one represents a scene by a mountain lake.

I altered the subject of the second one, which in the lesson had a group of buffalo gathered by a lake.  I did not want to paint buffalo, so I painted in a monster buck instead.

I am having a lot of fun with watercolor painting.  I signed up for a portrait class at Cheap Joe's in Boone with portrait artist Fealing Lin in October.  I  had seen an article about her technique in Watercolor Artist magazine, and fell in love with her loose, translucent portraits such as this one.

Isn't it beautiful?  And October in the North Carolina mountains for a whole week is not too bad, either.  I can stay at our cabin in Laurel Springs and commute back and forth for the classes.

I also looked into local art classes, and saw that the watercolor class that was canceled last year at the Wake Forest Parks and Recreation is being offered again.  So I signed up for it and also a drawing class with Mary Benejam O'Connell.  These will run from February to May on Wednesday afternoons.

When I was registering for the Wake Forest classes, I got re-acquainted with a former school guidance counselor that I had worked with earlier in my teaching career.  She is also a quilter, and invited me to come and speak about art quilts at the Wake Forest Friends quilt bee.  I think I have enough projects that are not packed up that I can bring for show-and-tell.  The Pamela Allen workshop projects alone take up a large Rubbermaid container!  Speaking of which, I am almost finished stitching one of them from several years ago, and it will be ready for machine-quilting soon.