Wrapping up 2018 : Hello 2019

I couldn’t end the year without a thank you.

Thank you for coming along on this ride for another year as I attempt to put into words how I see and paint. Words are an awkward second language for many visual artists. I’m no exception. So I’m especially grateful (and sometimes surprised) that so many of you read through my long-winded and sometimes verbose attempts to explain what I do.

Some highlights of 2018: 
• My show of over 70 sketches of vintage signs in San Jose, and a video on KQED Arts that accompanied it. The website stays up, but the show just ended. Here is the video.

• Teaching at 9th Urban Sketchers Symposium in Porto, Portugal. Here again, is a link to a free downloadable pdf  from that workshop.

• Weekly life-drawing sessions through most of the year. This year I moved from attending life-drawing sessions to hosting a weekly session at my studio. The no-teaching, no-critique, no-judgement format has been super-useful in helping me keep up a practice that is so vital to drawing for me.

• Challenges: Among my favorite ones this year were the 30×30 Direct Watercolor Challenge set up with Marc Holmes. See all my posts about it here.

And a personal challenge I plan to keep working on, Drawing Hands.

And now for 2019?

So many ideas, so many half-plans (some of which I’ll announce soon).

The one bit I’m pretty pleased about is that for once, I’ve got my act together and chalked out the first few workshops of the year. There’s something for everyone here with a short 3-hour introductory workshop, longer ones that meet once a week for 8 weeks, weekend workshops (because you asked) and even one exciting adventure on a boat.

They’re all here on the Workshops page, including this new one in San Francisco that I just added today.

Here’s to a wonderful, creative 2019, and thank you again. I’m not big on the bubbly stuff, but I’ll raise my G and T to that.