Fiddling with Acrylic

The piece on the bottom right of the girl blowing away the head of a dandelion was an experiment in simplicity for me.  I was just busting out a painting to go in the staging of my mother-in-law’s first flipped house in Maryland.  The pillow to the bottom left was what I used to create the color scheme.  The painting on the top left is my daughter’s first acrylic painting.  Also used in the staging.

This is Scarlet Gale, my second attempt at a watercolor painting.  This was also a quick one I busted out at my dear friend’s house while on a short visit for her baby shower.  Scarlet Gale is her baby girl.

This was my first attempt at watercolor- a portrait of my Uncle Mike Fronk, chaplain at Stetson University.  I did this painting to help raise funds for him, and also to commemorate him, as he was dying at the time.  He wasn’t given much time, and the doctor asked him if there was anything he wanted to do before he passed.  His response?  “I already do it every day.  I go to a job I love and come home to my wife.”  When I found out he was dying, I prayed that if God would keep him alive I would go to mass every single day and quit drinking.  Well, he lived a lot longer than anyone thought he would (he is still alive!) and I found out a priest can release you from those kinds of promises.

Pilot Portrait

Acrylic on canvas.  This is my father-in-law living his dream!

Bowhead Mural

I spent a couple weeks at the Marks Center in Alexandria, VA up on a scaffold painting this lovely mural.  My favorite part of doing this mural besides getting to know the awesome people at Bowhead, was the story behind the photos I had been supplied as reference.  The Inupiat tribe of Barrow, Alaska, owners of the company, are subsistence hunters of the Bowhead whale.  I read a book written by one of the elders of the tribe, whose expertise in tracking the whales helped environmental scientists in the 90’s to discover their estimation of the population of these whales was far too low, because the whales stay beneath the ice most of the time.  The book was called, The Whales: They Give Themselves.  I should say actually that he didn’t write the book, but rather the book was written from the stories he told.  He told of how connected to the spirit of the whale their tribe is- how a little piece of the hunter dies with the whale when it is killed.  Last year, I ate pickled whale bacon for the first time ever… with a twinge of guilt, I admit it was amazing.