My New Studio

It's official, Sky Ranch Studio is open.  We had a party in September to celebrate its completion and I started teaching classes there in October.  This has been crazy wonderful year!

Up until October, I had two studios.  One I used as a show studio in Sebastopol.  It was a room I rented for eleven years and it was in a beautiful Victorian home almost in the center of Sebastopol. I had done so because my other studio was a working one on my families ranch.  It was a partial basement with cinder block walls and old cabinets.  There were amazing views outside but no wall space to display .

Then in January I was given a gift or as I like to call it, "I won the studio lottery".  My father offered to turn the shop next to my home into a new studio.  He is a Studebaker man with an large car collection. The shop housed up to 9 cars at that time.

And then it happened.  Over the next seven months the once bat filled Studebaker shop transformed into a fabulous studio with gallery rooms.

I have always been a joyful person and feel blessed and sometimes even a little guilty that such an amazing place like that is mine.  Why "Sky Ranch Studio"?  When I was three, my mother and father purchased this piece of land from my grandparents and built a cabin on it.  My grandfather named it "Sky Ranch"

               

31 Paintings in 31 Days

 On New Years day I committed myself to painting a painting a day from life for 31 days. This was a challenge that I had always wanted to try but had never gotten myself to do.  Then a fellow artist and Strada Easel designer set up a challenge where we checked in every day on Facebook. I was game.

This challenge was one amazing adventure as January turned out to be a stormy month full of flooding and falling trees. To make it more complicated, I house/dog sat for three of the weeks in addition to my teaching painting classes several days a week.

Armed with bullheaded stubbornness, I persevered through the month of January. Sometimes I painted in the rain or icy cold wind while other nights I would burn the midnight oil after teaching all day.

This experience was very validating.  I rediscovered why I first became a plein air painter and fell in love with it.  I found that in extreme conditions, I am still able to paint a decent painting and it forced me out of my comfort zone.  I explored areas I would have never done so without this challenge and made new friends who were also participating.

Below is the accumulation of those 31 days.