My niece, Alison Neustrom, passed away last week after battling pancreatic cancer for eleven months.  In an interview made a few months before she died, she revealed that she loves sunshine, sunflowers and all things orange.  This beautiful photo, displayed during her send-off, captures her perfectly.

Alison decorating her wedding chapel

Her obituary, the eulogy delivered at her funeral, and a memory about her graveside service give you a good sense of this extraordinary young woman.

There is no way to compete with the wordsmithing of my brother Joe, who wrote the obituary, or our new friend Jeff, who wrote and delivered the eulogy, or the insightful family friend who penned her reflections on Alison’s interment.

So I’ll simply say, Alison, thank you for being you.  We’ll take good care of your husband Dave and your little Ceci.  Love love love.

I had fun painting color and value studies during a recent workshop with Maggie Siner, one of my favorite artists.  None is a finished work but each represents a lesson learned or knowledge deepened — the whole point of workshops.

Red Kettle. oil. 2014.

The first exercise, above, demonstrated that an effective image can be made with a few simple shapes, painted in colors and values that show how the planes change within the composition.  We also practiced how to mix yummy, true colors, testing their accuracy with a palette knife extended toward the target area of the still life set-up.  And then, most fun of all, we got to slather our thick, juicy, correctly mixed paint all over our simple shapes with our palette knives, as if we were icing a cake.  Yum.

Here’s an iPad painting of the Carousel at Glen Echo Park — a well tended Dentzel creation from 1921.  I worked to photograph it in some motion a couple of years ago and tried to preserve that feeling in this digital version.