January Art Walk

Each month a group of artists of all types gets together virtually to put on an art walk. What I mean by that is we each write an article about our art and then we all visit each other’s site and outline our thoughts in a new blog post. This one is mine for January.

My article, by the way, is the latest of my series about aspects of Kauai – Waimea canyon, the Grand Canyon of the Pacific! But what did my fellow artists show this month?

First up is Dorothy Berry-Lound. Dorothy lives halfway up a mountain in Umbria in Italy which I must admit sounds delightful. However, her subject of her painting this month is much more somber – a visit to an old friend who was dying from brain cancer and had little time left. In her telling, he was leaning almost impossibly on a chair with no signs of support and she immediately had a vision of a guardian angel supporting him to avoid a fall. As soon as she got home, she put this vision onto paper in this painting called Ben’s Angel. The image of the painting is below but the whole article behind the creation of it is well worth reading.

My fellow artist, Katrina Gunn is struggling with an issue that we all face. How to help people decide to subscribe to a mailing list (or whatever a better word would be) so that they can be the first to know of new posts and articles. Her idea is to offer a free gift to all new subscribers, and the gift is a drawing of hers that you can color at home. Intriguing! Here is the article which is illustrated not only by the line drawing but also with this beautiful charcoal drawing of a rose that inspired her offering.

Further along the street in our virtual art walk is the painter and artist, Jo Wortman, whose website is known as Sienna Blue, her favorite colors I believe. Jo writes about painting winter scenes and illustrates it with multiple examples of her older and more recent work to show how things have developed. Always interesting to see how an artist has improved with practice and training. This is her most recent work in this winter genre with lovely sienna and blue hues:

The photographers are not around much on this art walk – obviously out taking snow and ice photos somewhere! But Jim Hughes has written a great story about how he captured this image of a Pileated woodpecker:

Jim rightly ignored my suggestion that a drone could get up to eye level with this bird and instead built a photo studio complete with tree trunk bark hiding food in its interior so that woodpeckers would be attracted to the “tree” and dig through to get to the food. Jim then was able to capture the image reasonably close to his home. It was a very interesting story on how to capture magnificent images of woodpeckers as large and spectacular like these.

Well, that is all for another month. I hope you enjoy this chance to experience what other artists are up to as much as I do!