the art of happiness: Happy September and Montage the First

Part of me can't believe it's already September, but then again part of me isn't surprised since time seems to fly by these days! I have so much to blog about this week...birthday stuff, swap surprises...but, alas, the camera battery is dead and I can't get the pictures onto my computer. Hopefully, I'll get to that tomorrow. Today I was thinking about how one of my intentions in beginning the blog was accountability and consistency, a goal if you will. I told myself I would have something worth posting at least every other day, in an effort to keep myself and others motivated, inspired and challenged and also to ensure I was someone fellow bloggers could count on to be consistant and dependable and to have something at least halfway interesting here to read/view regularly. Turns out that's hard...and it hasn't always happened- take the last five days for example. Something I've determined in my "research" during the last few weeks I've spent in blogland is that people like pictures. I like pictures...they're my favorite part about blog-perusing, and more often than not they're inspiring in some form or fashion no matter what they're of. It could be the colors or the shapes or the subject or just the way a photograph or artwork makes me feel. Since I didn't have any new pictures to post today, I decided to go through my old ones and I found some that, for some reason or another, reminded me of September. I selected a few at random and I think I may do this from time to time. I'll just select some sample pictures so in your blog-perusing you can skim them...and hopefully they'll spark something. An inspiration, a feeling, a thought.
So here it is...Montage the First:
These are a couple of crabapples I photographed on the way to lunch with a friend (I insisted we pull over so I could get out and take pictures of them...fortunately they were right on the edge of a parking lot!) I thought the colors were wonderfully fresh and warm. I've always said I was going to paint them...

Here's a painting that was commissioned specifically for a couple's beautiful new familyroom. I literally matched the colors to their sofa, tile, and wall paint so it fit the space perfectly!

This, obviously, is an orange-iced doughnut with sprinkles and nonpareils. Yum.

When I first graduated from college and finally had the free time to do so, I began attempting to hone my art skills. I'm primarily self-taught so they left (and still leave) much to be desired, but the journey's been nothing but fun. I used to gather random items from my kitchen and spend hours translating them to paint on canvas. I called them pantryscapes. Looking back at them makes me want to raid the pantry and paint some more! Here are a couple:

And, finally, here's one of my earliest photographs...it was one I took back before I used any digital and I had to tint the actual photograph. So this is an old scan of the print I hand-painted.