I haven’t touched the oil paints for almost a decade, but the unseasonal slowdown in my work schedule, paired with the wait for several upcoming projects to get started, inspired me to pick up the brushes again. I haven’t ever been this prolific with the paintings, even when I did a series of small works for my family in 2008. I’m still not very good at taking good photos of these (the colors look much better in person), but here’s a sampling of what I’ve been up to the past month, in the ‘physical art materials’ world. The first three I’m planning on entering in our Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts in a few weeks (this is something I have only tried once before in the forty years we have lived here), and are my favorites of the pieces I’ve done so far.

These paintings are all based on old snapshots that I’ve found on the internet, some were in black and white and some are grainy old polaroids. Below are a few more along the same lines.

The next few are still ‘in progress’, with a little more work yet to be done. The one of the two girls embracing, was a recycling of the canvas of the ‘purple sunrise’ painting that I included in my last ‘painting’ post (I was quite unhappy with that one).

I’ve also been doing some of the more traditional landscapes and still life paintings, and reworking others that I previous posted.

A tiny 9×3 horizontal of the Killarney National Forest in Ireland.

The Little Sable Lighthouse on Lake Michigan.

A shoreline St. Croix landscape (reworked from previous version).

And finally, a still life from a ‘painting party’ we threw several weeks ago with some ‘artistic’ friends of ours. Possibly more of this stuff to come, as continue to mark time waiting for the various book projects I have scheduled to get the green light.

For some reason, I found myself digging the oil paints out of mothballs (after a ten year hiatus) and have picked up a pile of new blank canvases and have started oil painting again. The one above is of the coast of Ireland from a trip we took there a few years ago, and below is one of a sunrise on St. Croix.

I still haven’t quite figured out how to take decent photos of the art, to best capture the colors and eliminate the glare from lighting sources, but I’d say those two on top of are the ones I’ve been the most happy with so far. Below are several other paintings that I’m still working on, adding various tweaks every couple of days.

Whatever the reason for my sudden interest in painting again, I’m grateful, as it has certainly been fun, and lifted my spirits tremendously in the past few weeks. Once the ‘big project’ shows up, I’ll probably end up putting all this on a back burner, but for now, we’re painting again…