The Margery Soroka Memorial Award

The American Watercolor Society has awarded "Detour" the Margery Soroka memorial award. The awards ceremony is April 24th at the Salmagundi Club in NYC, but we'll be celebrating a bit earlier at home in Columbia!

Portrait workshop

My portrait workshop at Maryville university in st louis this weekend was a fast paced, hard fought good time. It is very difficult to do good portraits in watercolor, probably the toughest subject for the medium, especially given only three days to do it. This crew tackled it with some trepidation but came out with great sense of how to get it done well. Every one of them produced a decent portrait. Some even produced awesome results. My demo lacks a few hours from being complete, but I was pretty happy with it as well. Next time we'll make it a five day workshop so we don't have to race through the toughest of tasks. I couldn't be prouder of this group for their efforts!

Travel sketches workshop demo

My workshop demo turned out quite nicely. I took a quick watercolor
sketch from Piazza San Marco in Venice, along with some bad photo references, and created an idealized scene that summed up my romantic impression of the place. There is only so much demo you can do in a three day workshop while helping others create their own. This one took the whole weekend, but the participants work turned out incredibly well also.

Painting from your travel sketches workshop

As a follow-up to our sketching tour in Italy, I put together this workshop to show how to take basic sketches and dull photos to make magical paintings. imagination was the key component and this crowd brought plenty. There never seems to be enough time to unleash it all, but we squeezed a bunch into three days. It has been an exhausting but thoroughly enjoyable weekend.

Art'n for autism

Tonight I brought out my new work for a benefit for the Thompson Center for Autism. I find it difficult to believe all this work came out of my studio and the walls are still full! It was great to see my favorite Columbia friends, especially Mary & Roger, Mark & Elaine, Ed & Kathy, Dan & Sam, Adele & David and my Mom! I can't believe I have day 2 of a workshop to present in the morning! Y'all are way too much fun to take all at once!

Pensacola workshop

This weekend's workshop was a strange brew of hysterical old friends
and talented new ones. Our time in the sun and sand was punctuated by two of the best workshops I've been a part of, but our presence is required back in Columbia asap. We'll be driving through the night and magically appear at home in the morning. Our van, "the no stress express", is ill with alternator issues and can't be turned off until she's home in the driveway. She made it up the Al-Can highway and coast to coast many times since then, but seems to be acting like a finicky 8 year old. She really didn't want to leave the beach and we don't blame her one bit!