in 2004 i decided to give my daughters, one of my sisters and all my friends a small painting of their houses for christmas, without them knowing about it. i secretly went to everyone's house and took a photo and then made a 5x7 painting for each of them.

since both my sisters live in b.c. and i only had a photo of my older sister's house, my younger sister had to wait a year or two until i got out west to take a photo of her apartment building for her to get hers! she did send me photos of her balcony, but in the end i decided that that would be quite a boring painting and i decided to do the painting of the entrance since it had such a lovely garden in front, but you will have to wait to see it, because i lost the photo that i had taken of it when i lost a whole year's worth of photos on my computer, grrr...!

i painted these three little guys for my sister and her husband in 2003, since there rec room had a wild animal theme to it.

me, an artist ?

when i was young my favorite subject in school was art, but it was only once a week and i had to wait til friday afternoon last period. i used to sketch everything and anything and tried my hand with charcoal, pastels and tole painting when i was doing ceramics back in the 80's.

i only started painting on canvas about 6 years ago, after i was encouraged to do them instead of my painted animal rocks by another artist at an exhibition i participated in. being a self taught artist, i make many mistakes, but i love the process of seeing a blank canvas turn into a painting with a few brush strokes. i never thought of myself as an artist until i painted canvases for my friends and they liked my work and that was encouragement enough to continue.

so this blog will be a collection of my paintings, so that i may keep track of them, since most belong to someone else now. i painted this calico cat for my american cat loving friend back in 2005.