"DOUBT" ACCEPTED INTO CWA NATIONAL SHOW!

This is the portrait I did of Preston Metcalf, the assistant curator at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, California. He was gracious enough to give me permission to do anything I wanted with the photos I took of him. It may be a case of "be careful what you wish for". Many times I take pictures of strangers and keep on going. This time I made sure I had permission before I did anything other than for my own amusement. This image is so tightly cropped that I think I will attempt to float it instead of putting it under a mat. This painting is watercolor and acrylic on YUPO.

My son finally diagnosed my computer problem! I am lucky to have my techno saavy kids around to help me out. First he thought I didn't have enough space on the hard drive, so I spent hours sorting and moving hundreds and hundreds of photos to an auxillary hard drive to free up space. I get very nervous when I delete photos but I did it anyway. Then he had to update all the programs. I couldn't do that before because I didn't have enough space. Well, after all that, I still had the problem of losing my internet connection. My son is a scientist, so he has the patience of Job to do research and he found a website where this very problem was being experienced by other Mac users and they all had broken antennas!!! Since it is built in to the computer, I have to take it somewhere and get it fixed. Bill thinks it is a design flaw in the computer and Apple should pay for the fix. Yeah! Like that's going to happen. Anyway, I am working on my old computer which I kept because it has OS9 as well as OSX and my accounting program only runs on OS9. I refused to pay $300 to get a new accounting program for the new computer that would work for OS X. I only use it once a year for my tax records. I think I can plug in my auxillary hard drive to this computer and access my photos. Otherwise, I think I can transfer them to one of those portable stick thingies and transfer it that way. I don't know all the words, but I am getting pretty knowledgeable with the tools. Keeping up with technology is a full time job!

DEBATE: COLOR VS. VALUE

One of the things I keep hearing is that if one is a realist painter then representing 3 dimensions requires value as the dominant element. The modern painters flattened space. Colorists fall into the last group. One needs to choose either color or value, but as Topher Schink described it, if one uses both it sets one's teeth on edge. I refuse to choose. I like both color and value. I resist flattening out the shapes and eliminating the detail. I find the detail interesting to work with. Here is my latest effort to combine color and value. Since color has value, if you get the value right, you can use any hue you desire and achieve three- dimentionality.

This painting is on Yupo. It started with random color intermingling. When dry, I sprayed it with an acrylic spray so it would't lift. The rest was painted with acrylic.