This week was Graduation Day for my first five-week pastel class! Though I’m proud of my wonderfully talented students, I’m sorry our time together had to end. It was a real privilege to work alongside such creative people! We had a lot of fun together throughout the five weeks of the series. We celebrated our final class in style, enjoying beautiful background music from the very talented Ron Bernhardy at the piano. Funny, but it seemed that everyone enjoyed painting even more with the live music, and I think they even painted faster! In my opinion, the music inspired them…

What a busy week this has been! It began with a birthday serenade with lots of people singing “Happy Birthday” to me. Their lovely voices made me smile and got my birthday week off to a wonderful start. Then while Tom attended the Pirates opener with the Bucs and thousands of his closest friends, I actually had a peaceful time painting with my pastels and reading over 200 birthday wishes throughout the day. Partly thanks to Facebook, of course! So if you’re one of my Facebook buddies who wished me a happy birthday, I thank you as well. You made…

I hope you are all well this week and had a great Easter weekend! Ours was full of life and activity this year as we celebrated by hosting the entire family for our first Easter dinner in our new home. In fact, this year for the first time, we actually had to extend our table into the living room in order for everyone to fit! Speaking of a full house… my storeroom is full to bursting with inventory! Prints of Pittsburgh, prints of amusement parks, prints of sports scenes and schools in the Pittsburgh area. But it’s not just paintings…

This week the new art collector in my life asked me how I got to where I am as an artist. How did it all start? Without hesitation, I told him it’s always been about wanting to make people happy. I always knew instinctively that painting was my gift. Once before I was married, I was painting a portrait in the living room, and my grandfather looked on and said, “You know you’re going to get married and never paint again.” I looked at him in shock and said, “You don’t understand! I will always paint, I can’t stop! It’s…

This week was the first meeting of my new pastels class. What a pleasure to have such motivated and dedicated students! The class consists of aspiring painters of all ages, and everyone showed up excited to get started. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of students… Everyone encouraged and helped each other. I felt like there was a powerful creative energy at work in the studio. There were actually moments when everyone was concentrating so hard you could hear a pin drop. We all had a wonderful time and did great things. I can’t wait until next Monday…