New Year's Day Ritual

I have a New Year’s Day Ritual. I got it from Roz Stendahl, a fellow artist. The ritual is that on New Year’s Day I try to do a little bit of everything I’d like to do in the coming year. So I do a little painting, I tend my houseplants (a stand in for gardening), I read a fun book, I write in my journal, I meditate, and I try to go for a walk even if it is just to the mailbox.

Travel is taken care of by looking at trip photos or sketchbooks or perhaps my book is some “armchair traveling”.

I bake or cook something delicious and I talk to a friend whether that is on the phone or text. I might knit or sew a little bit, representing both crafting and time spent with creative hobbies that don’t have to do with my business.

It sounds like quite the list now that I’m typing it out to you, but it isn’t supposed to be a chore or a big to-do list, I don’t spend a lot of time on any one task. Instead, the day is like a tasting course that lays out how I’d like the year to go and reminds me of all the things I enjoy and that I need to make time to do them in the coming year. For me New Year’s Day is a self-indulgent, cozy day meant to start 2022 off on the right foot and in the right mindset. Maybe you might want to try it?

Wishing you all the best in 2022!

My New Studio!

I have such exciting news guys! My studio, which we have been working on since April 2020, is finally done! We bought a prebuilt shed and had it dropped on a gravel pad (which we graded and packed) at the far side of our driveway from the garage. We struggled the whole summer of 2020 getting the building insulated with various products-there were problems with the spray insulation and, of course, finding materials what with Covid. Finally we got the place insulated, had electrical run to the building, and then attached the vapor barrier and began dry walling.

I had never done a construction project before and I am completely in awe of how much work it takes!

Slowly working on fitting dry wall around the building.

The ceiling was terrifying even with the drywall lift. My husband and his brother were holding drywall boards over their heads, trying to slot them around the rafters because I wanted to attach my lights to them.

Dry wall is up and now we’re working on the mudding and sanding, which was very tedious and took forever.

Got a closet door at Habitat for Humanity!

We finished mudding and sanding the drywall (or more accurately gave up) and primed the walls.

Our first attempt at paint was WAY too dark (though this photo is darker than it was in real life) and the solid color made it clear that our mudding and sanding was very subpar.

Faux texture to the rescue! We experimented with sponges and rollers and generally made a big mess. The gray paint color was picked to be a neutral background color to help with setting up still life and photographing, but I might end up painting a wall or two white later. We’ll see how I do this winter.

Window sills in, lights installed, and most of the floor is done!

We just have a couple gaps to fill around the edge of the floor in the closet and by the front door, but I am moving in! Absolutely thrilled! Now to figure out how to set everything up so I can paint happily away in here this winter and I hope to have an open house this spring or summer. I’d love to see you all!

Painting & Sweating!

I’ve been busy the past month and a half. Sweating in the heat wave as I draw, working on drywall in my new studio, keeping the garden watered, and family things.

My husband’s grandfather passed away at the end of May and Grandmom followed him a month later so I painted a portrait of the two of them together. It was nice to get to “spend time” with them again.

I painted this to accompany Mark Anderson’s poem in the June issue of Spokane Coeur D’Alene Magazine. It has been a fun challenge to try to illustrate poetry!

A quick sketch while picking strawberries in Green Bluff before the 100 degree + heat wave. It was only 87 degrees when I painted this at 10 am.

I sketched the Monroe Street Bridge between meetings from the new plaza near the downtown library and City Hall. I’ll definitely be coming back to paint here when the weather cools down.

I enjoy car shows. I’m always so impressed by the creativity and style on display in the form of cars-this Metropolitan 4 x 4 has an eagle from a flagpole as its hood ornament.

A very GREEN commission of a house and pets that was a present from children to parents commemorating their home.

A demo for my Zoom watercolor class at the Spokane Art School of a path in Hamblen Park.

Another demo for class of a field of blooming vetch.

This is a recently completed commission of a historic restaurant painted for the family who used to own it. The building is still standing in Hillyard, but it is a a very different business now and has had buildings added on to the left side (which hold a VR studio!).

Hope that you are all doing well and staying cool!

Palouse Fields and Belated Christmas

I’m continuing to enjoy painting with gouache. It allows me to do things that watercolors do not and creates a different mood. I’ve been keeping an eye out for inspiration-mostly pictures taken by local photographers as I’m not leaving the house much. I’m so looking forward to warmer weather and getting to paint outside!

This gouache painting of the Palouse was inspired by a photo taken by John Clement photography. We have so many talented and adventurous photographers in here in the Inland Northwest. It was featured in the Spokane Coeur D’Alene Living Magazine.

Having seen John (and other’s) inspiration, I decided to do a couple small gouache paintings of Palouse landscapes-focusing the the ability of snow to highlight the rows of wheat stubble.

Moonrise.

More gouache, this time to capture the Duncan Gardens in the snow, which I feel makes this formal garden magical even without the abundance of flowers for which it is famous. This was also featured in my Artist’s Eye on Spokane column with Spokane Coeur D’Alene Living Magazine.

This time of year, I like to work on Christmas related projects. It is still cold and there’s frequently snow (though not much this year) so that helps me get in the mood. I find it really hard to work on Christmas stuff when the weather is warm but when the weather cools in fall and things start ramping up toward the holiday season it gets so crazy for me it is hard to find the time to be in the Christmas spirit, never mind paint Christmas scenes, so doing it now works really well for my schedule and simultaneously helps me feel a bit festive about the weather when I might otherwise be frustrated that it is still cold and dark.

Final version of this painting, sketch in the photo above. This image is based on a photo taken by Paige Gullickson. I love how she caught the Pavilion in the background and the snow was so much fun to paint. This will be a Christmas card for next year.

Every year I buy an amaryllis bulb so I have the flowers to watch in the dead of winter. They are dramatic as they unfurl and stay in bloom for quite some time, bringing cheer to my studio.

They are even quite pretty when they are fading!

How are you all coping these days? Buying flowers? Reading good books or going for walks? I’m doing all of those things (Plus painting the living room wall and selling the couch and other home improvement flurries!) and looking forward to the slowly returning light!

View From Someone Else's Window

I’ve been really feeling the limits on travel and frankly even the ability to be somewhere other than my house now that has been too cold and snowy for outdoor painting for a couple months. So, I have been diving into WindowSwap, a website where people submit short videos of the view from their window. It has been an absolute delight! Not only because there are some really awesome views, but also because I am nosy and I love to see how other people live. There’s a great mix of mundane (view of blocky highrisers) and dramatic (snowy mountain, Brooklyn Bridge, etc). Another thing I love is that because these are videos rather than photos, you get the extra fun of sometimes hearing the environment elements, such as when a tropical rainstorm started during the video of a window in South East Asia or the surprise of birds sweeping into and around the frame of the picture. An absolute delight!

I do wish that there was a back button so I could return to previous views, but alas that doesn’t seem possible, so I just have to take what I can get. Oh well.

Pontassieve, Italy on what looks like a gorgeous fall day.

Vizag, India

Cambridge, UK

Glasgow, Scotland

Mineralnyvody, Russia

San Francisco, CA

Happy Holidays!

Hello again everyone! I hope you are doing well. I write this on the shortest day of the year as a constant rain slowly washes the snow off our lawn, but by the time you receive this, we’ll be on the other side, heading toward lengthening daylight. I wanted to wish you all well and thank you for coming along with me on my adventures. While it has been a wild ride out in the world, in my little sphere, I’ve gotten along quite well with lots of time spent in the garden and out painting on location and learning to use gouache. Loss of income due to the cancellation of art festivals and store and school closures was offset by people reaching out for private commissions so I feel very fortunate. My studio-to-be arrived in its raw state in late April and is still a mess inside, but I have hopes of getting in there before its 1 year anniversary-ah, home improvement projects. I’ve been talking with the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture and the Spokane Art School and we have plans to teach online via Zoom starting around March and I hope to also do Zoom classes out of my studio once it is finished. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what kind of classes you’d like to take from me on Zoom-a Paint & Sip class? Painting skies? Color theory?

Here’s a painting of the Gaiser Conservatory from two years ago, all aglow. This year there is a drive through holiday display that seems to be very popular.

Last year I visited the display and then walked the Duncan gardens in the dark so I could look back and really feel the impact of the light in the dark (a lesson in contrasts and perhaps a metaphor?).

A gouache painting of the Duncan Gardens in the daylight with a light coating of snow. The garden is most popular in the summer but I think winter is an underrated time to visit!

A gouache painting of a light dusting of snow on wheat fields.

This painting is from 2 years ago when I took a ride on the Wheatland Bank Carriage Rides. You can tell because the sky walk across main is still the vintage yellow one in this painting rather than the modern glass one that is there today. I think I need to retackle this subject. Maybe my Christmas card for next year?

Wishing you well in 2021. I hope I’ll be able to invite you all to visit my new studio in the coming year. Fingers Crossed!

Summer Dreaming

We’re hanging out just under 100 degrees right now here at my house and I’m planning on popsicles for dinner. Despite the discomfort, I’m glad that summer isn’t over yet. I’ll hold onto the warmth and daylight and plein air painting for as long as possible. I mean, my tomatoes are just starting to ripen!

Painted sitting under a pine tree on our 10 acre property, looking out over our neighbors’s fields toward the distant hills. Done EARLY in the morning.

It is sunflower season up here north of Spokane, which means that swarms of people are parked all along the roads and highways, trying to get selfies with the flowers. Sunflowers are one of my favorite flowers (They were my wedding flowers, in fact), but I find all this sunflower mania frustrating because people are not respecting private property and are trampling and damaging the flowers-even if they don’t break any flowers getting into the field, sunflowers have a very shallow root system and the repeated trampling is not good for them. If the fields get to be too much of a hassle to maintain or the farmers can’t make a profit with the damaged plants, then there won’t be any sunflower fields at all and that would make me SO SAD.

This particular field is not far from my in-laws so I was able to spot it pretty early on. It was easy to set up along the dirt road (outside the field) to paint.

There is a saying the sunflower faces follow the movement of the sun across the sky and that is true to some extent in wild and garden varieties, but the commercial variety has a thick neck and frequently gets stuck simply pointing east, which means that in many of the fields I’ve been seeing, the sunflowers have their backs to you. Still, there’s always a couple that break the mold!

My Canna Lily is blooming its heart out and I’ve been spending time in the early morning admiring the way the light falls through the leaves.

I’m working on a large painting of a wedding bouquet for a commission. The key flowers are red Gerberas so I bought myself a bouquet and did some studies-first a quick sketch in the case of this painting and a more involved painting, as in below.

Couldn’t resist doing a purple shadow!

This is a painting of the Aer O Toaster, a large neon sculpture that hangs in the Spokane International Airport in Baggage Claim. After I did a quick sketch of it, early this year, the artist Ken Yuhasz commissioned me to do a painting for him. It was an utter delight.

Hope that you are all doing well and getting to enjoy the beautiful place we live in in whatever capacity you can.

#the100dayproject2020 DONE!

I made it guys! I completed #the100dayproject2020! 100 days of painting in gouache and watercolor since April 7th. I’m so pleased because this is the longest challenge I’ve ever done and I wasn’t sure I could manage it. Things got really tough around Day 75, but switching to working almost entirely from life either plein air (painting outside) or painting still life, rather than doing master copies really helped bring new life to the project.

I’ve wanted to go out and paint the fields near our house for years, but this time of year was always busy for me with classes and art festivals so it got put off. Well, this is finally the year for it!

This distinctive clump of trees is at the end of our road and looked stunning in the light of sunset.

View down the road with winnows of alfalfa drying, painted while listening to birds chirp and the breeze trying to rifle my sketchbook pages.

A study of cut alfalfa in various stages of drying and another sketch of the view down the road. The sketch in the lower right hand corner is watercolor, the rest is gouache.

A little less than a week after the first cutting, they started baling. The round bales are hay and the rectangles are alfalfa. The blue dots are cornflowers that grow in the ditches along around road. I love them. Each of these are done quickly so I can get out and back home before it gets too hot that I risk sunburn or heat stress. There’s no shade out there, so early morning and evening sessions are the goal and the lighting at those times is the best anyway.

My bug house from Costco. Nobody has moved in yet, but I love the red roof in all the greens of the landscape.

A single ripe plum.

A strawberry picked from Siemer’s Farm.

Probably the last pear until fall and they are in season again.

I went shopping at Art Salvage a week back (You can shop online and do curbside pick up!) and bought shells. I grew up next to the ocean and collecting shells is something I’ve done my whole life. It is something I miss a lot now that I’ve moved inland.

A whelk shell painting, already sold! By the way, almost all of my paintings from the 100 Day Project are available for sale and priced $35-70 and range in size from 3” x 5” to 5” x 7”. A great opportunity to grab a bit of original art!

Sketching at Home

Hi everybody! We’re still doing well here. Friday was my first time leaving the house to go anywhere in two weeks (grocery store run). I’m grateful to be able to get out for a walk or poke around the garden even though the weather has been less than welcoming lately.

Since we’ve been getting snow in the morning pretty regularly I’ve been exploring around the house. This is my reading nook! The colorful throw on the armchair is a kantha quilt made from silk sari scraps that I bought when I was in Kolkata last year.

This is a vignette of part of the house, looking back toward the front door from my spot at the kitchen table. I picked up the bust at an estate sale and she gets decorated pretty regularly. The rainbow colored fabric was purchased back in 2008 when I went to Ecuador.

I’m starting seeds inside for the garden and they are rapidly outgrowing their space in our living room so I’m very excited for the warmer weather predicted for this week!

This is a recently finished commission of Bozarth mansion, known to old school Zag alums as Waikiki. My cousin got married there two years ago and I was utterly obsessed with their walled garden.

This is a fun and silly self portrait of the artist in her studio, creative juices swirling. Yes, when it is cold, I put my bathrobe over all my other clothes. Blankets just fall off and I’m not willing to accept a snuggy yet. Have I mentioned that I’m looking forward to warmer weather?

Best wishes and health to you all!

Snowed in and loving it

We’ve been snowed in to the point where the pantry is starting to get a bit bare, but I’ve been loving the excuse to hole up and paint in the studio. It’s pretty funny to me that I’m surrounded by white and the theme for this post is definitely GREEN, especially since I’m not sick of the snow yet. I still have a whole bunch of snow paintings to do!

This is a recently finished house portrait that will be a Valentine’s Day gift to a husband who loves fall.

This house portrait was commissioned by a loving daughter as a Christmas present to her parents!

My version of the Madonna and Child Stain Glass Christmas Display that used to hang on the Macy’s Building. I’m glad they managed to get it out of storage this year, but wish that it was a bit more centrally displayed. It ended up on an apartment building near our Lady of Lourdes. I initially tried to capture the color of the brick wall it is hung on, but I didn’t like how it came out (too dark and muddy for these brilliant colors!), so I cut out the stain glass design and I was so amused by the arch shape, I nearly left it like this.

But, a small arch shape is a bit odd and difficult to display (though perhaps I could think about mounting it on a custom wood panel!), so I glued it down onto a sheet that I painted lime green, drawn from the stain glass itself and to emphasis the brilliant and glowing colors of the stain glass.

This month my column in the Spokane Coeur D’Alene Living Magazine is focused on a painting of the Coeur D’Alene Resort on a beautiful summer day.

How are you all doing? Enjoying the snow or bemoaning it? My goal this winter is to go snow shoeing in my yard (We’ve got about 10 acres.) and try painting plein air without freezing my fingers off. We’ll see if I manage to achieve it!

Snowy Scenes & Holiday Shows!

My painting of the Woman’s Club was the feature of my column in the Spokane Coeur D’Alene Living Magazine this month. These columns are always such a great excuse to go digging around on the internet for the history of my favorite places and buildings around town.

Snow and historic buildings are still on my mind. This is the Fort Sherman Chapel, also known as “The Little Red Church”. It is the oldest still standing structure in Coeur D’Alene! It has been a church, a school house, and meeting area, and now seems to be a popular wedding venue!

Every year I enjoy sending out Christmas cards, though most years they are more “Happy New Year cards” than Christmas because things get so hectic during the holidays. I love to get snail mail and I know I’m not alone in the burst of excitement when I see an envelope in the mailbox that isn’t a bill or ad. This year I am doing a special postcard for people who have helped my art career along the way so, if you have taken a class with me, backed the Kickstarter, commissioned me, helped me show my work or bought over $100 in prints, cards, calendars, etc, reply to this email with your address and I’ll send you a postcard!

This guy is my most recent finished commission-the Liberty Building! The original is 30” x 22” and getting framed right now to be hung on location, but you can get 11” x 14” prints at my next show-CUSTER’S CHRISTMAS ART AND CRAFT SHOW. It is Nov 22-24th down at the Spokane County Fairgrounds. It is $10 to get in but I know there are some $1 off entrance fee coupons still down at the front desk of Pottery Place Plus if you want to grab one. It’s my first year at this show and I’m hopeful that it will go great.

Fall Love & Art Shows

Siemer’s Farm up at Greenbluff! This was drawn on location, sitting on the ground in the pumpkin field.

The Golden Hour!

Teeny Autumnal Road scene (3” x 5”). I’m loving playing around in this smaller format becuase it lets me experiment with colors and compositions quickly and have a lot of fun.

Another 3” x 5”, this time inspired by sunset on a wet road seen this last year on my drive. This guy will be for sale at the Spokane Art School Holiday Small Works and Ornament show November-December!

I’ll be at the Woman’s Club Holiday show on the second weekend of November. I always look forward to spending time with all the other cool artists. I’ll have a bunch of my calendars! Come get your Christmas presents!

I will also be the Custer Christmas Arts & Crafts Show at the Spokane County Fair Grounds November 22-24th. It is $7 at the door for the whole weekend. This is my first time doing this show and I’m excited to see how it goes!

Spokane Summer Heyday!

We’re in the heyday of summer here at the Perkins’s household! I’m trying to make the most of it.

Strawberry picking up at Green Bluff. I picked a total of around 36 lbs in June to eat fresh and to make fruit leather that I treasure in the winter (if it makes it that long!).

Doing some house cleaning and assessing things found in the back of the closet.

Enjoying a rainy summer day, painting some salmon berry leaves photographed in Priest Lake in a sketchbook.

Plenty of Plein Air sketching with my Garland Sketchcrawl classes at the Spokane Art School.

Demonstrating how trick it is to draw the Garland Theater sign at last week’s class, haha!

Playing with a colored pencil with a multi-colored lead (orange, blue, green, yellow) and drawing an interesting intersection of buildings downtown by the Parkade.

Completed this painting last night ask the sun went down behind the trees to the west of a volunteer sunflower in the rocks by the edge of the deck. Did this sitting on my deck, barefoot, listening to cricket buzzing and the sound of the neighbor’s goat. Peak summer joy! What have you been up to this summer?

Slice of Life

Here’s a look at what’s been in my sketchbook and on my table recently.

We went on a trip to visit my husband’s aunt at her guest ranch-Eden Valley Ranch up in the Okanagan back around Easter. They are at a higher elevation and nearly to the Canadian border so it was interesting to see how much further behind the plants were here than back in Spokane.

I accidentally used a watersoluble pen on this sketch, but the bleeding ink creates a really great effect, capturing the sort of greyed tans and greens of the land just barely coming out of winter (this was back in April).

I’m doing spring cleaning around the house and trying to clear space both physically and mentally!

This door on Howard Street is a favorite of mine. I see it whenever I head to the group of galleries over on Adams Street for First Friday. It’s just so dramatic! I’ve never been inside. To be honest, I think the interior will disappoint me after the door!

The Parkade, captured at sunset with some dramatic clouds. I think of the Parkade as an enormous animate sculpture, a head with broad shoulders looking over downtown and Riverfront Park. I love to watch the way the light moves on and across it.

I’ll be at Art on Blacktop up at 29th Ave Artworks in my fancy new white tent June 21st-23rd! I’d love to see you!

And thanks to everyone who came out to see me at Artfest this past week. I really appreciate it!