Updated Gallery of Paintings

Please contact me at boomerpotofgold@gmail.com if you are interested in more information about a painting. You can also access my paintings on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Painting-Pot-by-Eileen-187544924960278/  or at https://fineartamerica.com/artists/eileen+hopkins/paintings.  Hope to hear from you!

Peachy Spring

Winter Vienyard

Italian Dreamscape

Backyard Gang: Who's the New Guy   SOLD

Vineyard by the Lake 1

Transitions

Muslim Market in Xien

Hope

Exotic Hummingbird

Afternoon Escape

Urban Family of Man

SOLD

Golden Timbre SOLD

Golden Afternoon in Gyro Park

Peach Blossom Journey

Plumiscious

Starburst

Surely Today

Frosted 2

Here Comes the Sun

Vineyard by the Lake 2      Sold

A Tulameen River Afternoon

Hope

Rustico Ramblings

Cycling on Lakeshore Drive

Sold

SOLD

Cycling on Cottonwood Drive

My First Sale and Some Musings on Art for Money

Having taken the plunge in October to show my pictures, I have now endured one show without a sale. Happily I jumped into the next one - Christmas Artisans Market - and, I was so excited to hear one painting sold last week!

My Frosted II painting (smaller than Frosted I) sold last week and is on its way to Penticton.

Many of my hand-painted cards have also sold - especially the bicycle ones:

 and my quail ones:

So, you might ask, is this now about the money and not so much about the art? A sale ripples through our little pod of artists like nothing else. We support, critique and promote each others paintings with little held back and - hoping this is true for all - we also celebrate each others' successes. That is much easier when I attribute all the good and bad points of my own paintings to my creative ego - Imp (see previous blog) - and shoo away the accolades from my own easily-bruised one!! Still, the question about this being about the money does come up often in our little community. Some artists claim that they aren't doing it for the money - and, that is true for us. However, we sell our paintings for many reasons so the money does play into it.

1. Cost - beyond the hours of painting there are costs that many in the public would not figure in. Paint can run up to $20/tube; paper to $20/sheet. There are finishing products that also add up over time and consignment fees at the galleries showing your work.
2. Framing - not cheap! Period!
3. Market - it is difficult to read the market and still let your creativity run loose. Once you have invested the time and money into the materials. it is a certainty that not all pieces will sell - ever! So, spreading the costs over the few that do sell is the trick. To boil that down, a card priced at $5 is barely recouping the cost of production plus the inevitable non-sales that end up in the bottom of your painting box.
4. More market - letting the market dictate your creation is a downer. Every artist needs to find that balance - create freely but create with the idea of the market you will be selling within (sometimes). The expanded online interconnection is an artist's dream come true! The market is only limited by the time and expertise to project your images out there. So, those pieces that might appeal to an urban dweller with eclectic tastes can be reached even if your local gallery is frequented by potential clients looking for more realism or just a souvenir to take home from their vacation.
5. Storage - after awhile, I am told (as I have not arrived at this particular place!) - becomes a problem, We all have limitations to how much art can reside in our home studio or even in an offsite studio. Eventually something has to give - and if your family and friends are getting sick of your "giving", selling does make more sense.

So, is it about the money? No - and yes. You decide. Me? Well, I am going to slide my desk chair two feet to the right and get back to creating my new painting - a surrealistic forest that is definitely driven by Imp with little consideration for money - yet. See, it is a mystery like the 'chicken and the egg' - but, either way - worth the fun!

So, get out there, find your creative ego 

where ever she or he is hiding and get creating!! 

It can't hurt and it just might fill you with JOY!

Pre-Show Jitters

Well, as of yesterday, I decided I was going to take the plunge - yep, up to the elbows in Ultramarine Blue and Quinacridone Magenta! I am going to show some of my paintings in an upcoming show at our local gallery.  No big deal. A tiny step. Going public in my home town in front of people who know me .... YIKES!

Truly, I am a little nervous about hanging my "babies" up on public display where all kinds of hurtful words could be hurled their direction. And yet, ego, according to Elizabeth Gilbert in her book, Big Magic, is like a separate little genius popping on to my "creating table" once in a while and snapping ideas into the painterly quadrant of my brain - or not. It is not my genius or ability or lack there of - it is hers! I should try to catch a glimpse of her one of these days, hovering over my right shoulder, whispering blue or red or lemon yellow into my ear as the paint brushes jump into my fingers. But alas, every time I turn around to catch her in the act, she giggles and disappears. So, I have decided to give my creative ego - I am naming her Imp - full accolades and 100% of all the downside comments as well! I am an innocent bystander just willing to get my hands dirty all for the sake of creating something that is mine - I mean, hers!

I am in a bit of a quandary as to what to hang next month. I dropped a big bundle of moo-la yesterday buying gallery-standard frames and mats and framing tape. If I hear one more person walking through our gallery poo-pooing the cost of a card or painting I may just pull out my latest cash register receipt and ask them to sign a Declaration of Understanding of the True Cost of Art. Outside of the workshops even the most amateurish of us take!

I have been picking the brains of several of my experienced artist friends and they have been so helpful. Ideas about less expensive framing, pricing and choosing have taken just a question by email to source. Thank you - each one of you!

Here are some of the pictures I am considering. I only get to choose three. Which ones would you suggest?

Winter Reflections at Vaseux Lake

Plum Delicious

Backyard Gang

Frozen Transition

Frosty Fillagree

Surely Today

Vino Rouge

Collaboration

My writing area and my painting area are literally arranged along one long desk setup that can be navigated by a roll of my desk chair wheels. It is the perfect creation centre for me: author and painter.

I have been on a bit of an adventure in both mediums trying to discover what my preferred writing genre just might be AND also that place in my painting where I can say, "Yes, that is me." So often I have painted pictures because they are lovely scenes of what I enjoy most. My bicycle series (can one call 3 pictures a series?) opened up a window of thought for me as I considered how my creative self is evolving and spilling out onto my computer screen or flowing onto watercolour paper. 

As the emotions from my writing boil over I find myself wanting to capture them on paper - not as a scene from a happenstance discovery of reality along a path or beach but as an emotion, ready to break free from conceptual brain activity comprised of words colliding with brain matter, struggling to find a place to become. In the writing genres this could be many kinds of fiction or even poetry. But oh to capture this beyond a camera's perspective or a writer's story and find the colour or the subject to convey it to - well, I guess it doesn't matter to whom! For me, I suppose - to live on my wall for a short time and then, hopefully, to be shared with those who connect to it. 

I have forayed into this before with the following pictures:

Mountain on Fire

Autumn Joy

Winter Moonlight

Reaching for the Stars

All filled with the beauty and destruction somehow as it formed in my mind. That came out of close encounters of the flame and smoke kind as well as being mesmerized by the visual of moonlight streaming down through a winter forest, golden mixed with purple and blue shadows. I splashed some paint around to see how that might "happen." Winter Moonlight did not garner much response from others but there is something there, simmering under the surface, that may emerge as it sits in my "box of possibilities" (right on top of other three!), that I keep tucked under my desk 

So, now I have a new one. I have been struck over and over again with pictures of people - women most specifically. Bright or dark, quiet or loud (mostly quiet!); pensive or active - I want to paint them with colours instead of words. I want to see the essence creep out not in a perfect rendition of a photo or image but rather, in an impression of the emotion surrounding it. It has come, to my surprise, through a recent exercise I embraced to literally try to make sense of my many little doodlings I have started and tossed into my "box of possibilities". In a rush to get some moved to an "odds & sods" box in our garage sale this Saturday, I gathered all together and proceeded to force them into dollar store mats. I cut some pictures into pieces, framing them separately into tiny fragments of a scene - more perfect by being isolated. Some were merely practice backgrounds for bigger projects or even technique mastery. I grabbed one yesterday like that - a technique for watercolour washes: wet on wet; graduated; dry. I had experimented with these to emulate the sea or the lake, capturing wave movement or sun sparkles with technique rather than tiny brush strokes. The following painting evolved. 

I have a love affair with the sea or large bodies of water in general - big enough to get wavy and dramatic as well as mirror-like and calm. Water draws me into it and fills me with peace and gratitude for life. Even the drama of storms hypnotizes me into a place of contemplation rather than terror or excitement (as long as I am beside the water and not on it or in it!). This picture came together from that place. It is a simple design. There are only two actual colours in it. The Sea and Me, where I am invisible; where I become as one with the water, full of the yearnings and sighs of the deep.