Painters Tip

By Jan Puckett
I use shower curtains or liners (from the dollar store) cut into 6 to 8 pieces. When I teach at the high school enrichment program I include a piece in each "goody" bag to protect the work surface. Most of my students tell me they continue to use it at home also.
Jan Puckett's Gallery - http://www.picturetrail.com/janlyn



By Arla Albers
Use shiny magazine pages as a palette for your paints. If you find you use enough paints that it's a bit limp, use the magazine covers. Makes a free palette and clean up is just a matter of throwing it away! Everyone usually has a spare magazine lying around. Enjoy!

Featured Artist Patti Williams - Newsletter Gallery Showing

My name is Patti Williams. I live in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Texas area with my husband. We moved here from Ft. Walton Beach, Florida in 1993. I've never had any art lessons but have been drawing all of my life.
In 1966 I was a high school sophomore and decided I wanted to start painting, so I nailed together some 2X4s, stretched some canvas over them and nailed it to the back of the frame, primed it with gesso, and started to work painting my very first work of art with oil paint, linseed oil and turpentine! I was hooked after that and wanted to paint more and more. It wasn't until 1990 that I discovered fast drying acrylic paints and how much easier to work with it was. My husband has always encouraged me to paint the things I love and to think of myself as an artist.
I love painting and my favorite works show life under the sea in the coral reefs and on the beaches as well as waves, beaches, sea shells and sand dunes. I try to paint every day, a variety of subjects, using different mediums such as oil paints, acrylics, watercolors and pastels. I really enjoy a challenge, and learning new things.
My dream is to one day open my own art gallery or to share a co-op gallery with other artists... we could have our artwork for sale in the front with a studio in back of our area and people who come into the gallery could come into the area where we're working to watch us paint. I think that would be such a neat thing to do because people love to watch artists at work.

The story behind these paintings below is kinda funny. A couple of years ago, we were having some work done in our yard. They had torn out some railroad ties that had rotted and were in the construction process of building a stone retaining wall to replace the old one. I had to go to the store in the middle of the night, pitch dark as they had disconnected the landscaping lights and I could not see anything. I walked out to the car and stepped down on the stair but it wasn't there. They had torn the whole staircase out and I fell 5 ft. into a huge hole and onto the driveway. I sprained my ankle very badly and laid there for a while before someone heard my cries for help. A week later, my husband, daughter, and her friend and I drove down to Destin Beach, Florida for a week long vacation at the beach. Of course I couldn't walk and was wearing a big black boot and on crutches so I couldn't get down to the water. My daughter and her friend would carry me down the long stairs in a makeshift sling, get me situated on a blanket and I sat there and painted my beloved ocean, sky and beach. It was gorgeous because the clouds filling the sky were the aftermath of a hurricane down in Mexico. I was able to get in the pool and float around after we would go back to the house, but couldn't get into the surf as I longed to do. When we got home I was so disappointed that I couldn't get in the water and I missed my ocean so much that I painted three big waves and hung them on my bedroom walls so that the last thing I see at night is those waves and I dream of surfing, snorkeling and diving into the waves when I go to sleep!

Approaching Storm, by Patti Williams

My granddaughter was talking to me about how the dorsal fins of whales in captivity droop or collapse. I did a little research and found out that most whales taken from the wild have the dorsal fin collapsed. ALL whales born in captivity have the collapsed fin. Only one percent have the collapse in the wild. Continuing with our conversation about this, my theory was... I, being a land creature who loves being in the ocean, swimming, snorkeling and BEING FREE, find it challenging when I cannot get down to the beach on a regular basis.
Ocean living creatures like whales, dolphins and other sea animals, having free reign of the ocean (since that is their habitat) after having been captured and put in the equivalent of a bathtub, are probably quite depressed. You know they mate for life and travel in families called pods. They're taken away from their mates, their children and the rest of their families, forced to live the rest of their lives in the confines of the "arena" where they are forced to entertain huge crowds of people. Never to swim freely in the huge expanse of ocean again. Their every act under the watchful eye of others. There are countless others that are killed for various products that are harvested from their bodies.
I began working on a series of paintings depicting the destruction that man has brought to our oceans, the coral reefs, fish, whales, dolphins and the whole system. I finished the first one titled, Approaching Storm. The ominous hurricane wall gives the impression that it is all about the natural storm's destructiveness, but this is just the beginning of the story. In the distance you can see the oil rig and tanker approaching the teaming life in the foreground. Compared with the destructiveness of the storm, mankind is like a growing cancer to the sea and all the life therein. Hurricanes may slice away beaches when they're big enough, but eventually everything gets rebuilt, naturally. Reefs are spread to other parts of the ocean and multiplied. Things get re-arranged and washed ashore. The picture is misleading at first, but as I tell the story through the rest of the paintings, the message will be clear.
"God shed his grace on thee,and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea."

This is my painting, Approaching Storm.
by Patti Williams

2009 September Issue 1 Vol.1

September 2009 - Page 2

September 2009 - Page 3 (Pattern Actual Size)

September 2009 - Page 4