I was excited to find out today that I have had two pieces of art accepted in a juried show to be held by the Chelmsford Center for the Arts in early April. This is the first time any of my work has been juried into a show. Admittedly this show is quite small, but it's thrilling nevertheless. The accepted pieces are the "Feather light, feather bright" and "White Peonie" which both appear earlier on this blog.

This is from a photo of Hay Bales in a Tennessee field taken by Paula Ford and was part of a challenge on Wet Canvas.com. The challenge being to start with an underpainting prior to putting in details. I chose some pretty vivid colors for my underpainting and mostly they were completely covered by the work I did on top, except in the trees where I allowed some of the red to show through.

We've just had our kitchen remodeled and I painted this picture of pears to go on the wall, alongside the earlier one I did of grapes in a bowl. I have just got a new camera and am still finding my way around all the various controls. I may also enter this in a juried show that is coming up soon in our town.

I painted the picture on the left about a month ago but have only just got round to taking a photograph as I had to cut it to size and mount it for framing. This is not easy when you paint in pastel because there is always the risk of smudging the finished work. It is from a photograph taken by someone on Wet Canvas and I call it Distant Sierras. It's 16 x 20.

This right hand picture is just a little one, 5" x 7" using up a scrap of sanded paper that I had lying around. I don't remember where I got the photograph.

I wanted to try something different and I came across this picture which seemed like it would be a challenge ........ and I was right. I think I'm going to enter it into a juried competition here in Chelmsford, though I don't have any great hopes of it being accepted. Watch this space!