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As I did last year, I entered a few paintings in the Magnolia Festival Art Show held at the Choctaw Events Center in nearby Durant, Oklahoma. It was another well organized event held in a great venue. The hosts even put on a terrific reception for all the artists and guests--great food and company. On top of all that, I managed to win a third-place ribbon and honorable mention ribbon in the oil painting category; and I sold one of my paintings. It doesn't get much better than that. Fun.

In the morning of the workshop's third day, we ventured into the cemetery on the edge of town. A bit strange, but no big deal once we all got started painting. It's 9 x 11 inches. The afternoon session was out at the Blue Ostrich winery north of town. I've been wanting to do a vineyard painting, so I took advantage of the location the best I could. Could have been a bit more interesting if the grapes were ripe, but they were just pea sized and green. This one was the largest of my paintings over the 3-day workshop at 10 x 12.

On the second day of the workshop, we had a bit more variety in subject matter. The first painting is of the old church (built in the early 1900's) where we had some of our instruction and where Donna Howell-Sickles had her studio before she moved it upstairs from her gallery. For the afternoon painting session of the day, we went to Donna's ranch north of town. I've been wanting to try a prickly pear painting for a while, so I did. I'm not all that crazy about it, but here it is anyway.

Sorry, but it appears that "a couple of days" has turned into more than a month. Excuses include moving into the new house, lots of travel and some surgery, but no excuse really. I left off talking about the weekend workshop with Gay Faulkenberry. We did two plein air paintings each of the three days of the workshop. Below are my two painting from the first day. Very similar colors, but that's just how the setup happened--high sun, clear day, lots of green to paint. I touched them up a wee bit after getting them home. The one with more hilly, distant vista was tougher, because the wind was blowing hard. In fact, twice I had to pick my painting up off the grass (landed paint-side down, of course) and brush away the seeds and dirt to start over (almost). Whaaah! Such is life in plein air painting. They're both 8x10 oils.