Hot off the “Press”

                  Here are the newly finished paintings of Wyatt and Ajax, the Amur Leopard couple I met at the Santa Barbara Zoo last year. Ajax (the female on the right) had just arrived from a zoo in the U.K. because the AZA had determined that a mating […]

Seven Wonders of the World

I may have forgotten to mention that I’ve chosen SEVEN of my endangered species paintings for limited edition prints, in two sizes: 14″ x 14″ or 20″x 20″ (plus an inch all around for the white border).     No prints are larger than their original painting, so my 16″ paintings (such as Indah on the left […]

Revisiting

Last month, for the first time ever, I revisited animals I’d met in 2014, some of whom I’d already painted. “Things change” is one lesson learned. These animals live in communities. Things are dynamic. Life happens for them too. Michael was my favorite gorilla in 2014. Belonging to the bachelor troop of three at the Houston Zoo, […]

choosing the next

shipped 20 paintings out of the studio. empty walls. Working on a 48×48 portrait of Sango, a beautiful lion and first-time dad I met almost a year ago at the Denver Zoo. Usually, as I get involved in a painting, I have some sense of my subject coming forward and entering the painting. If their presence is weak, […]

meeting my subjects…

Last week I finished painting a Malayan tiger I’d met in Houston in May 2015. While painting, I didn’t know the tiger’s name or age or gender. I only knew that two of the more than twenty times I came to visit, the tiger would be awake, sitting up in the grass, surveying their world […]

Heading Home

The timing of my visit to the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita was just about perfect. Their six new African elephants who came over from Swaziland in March were finally all comfy with each other and with Stephanie, the resident 45-year-old, and all could share their five-acre yard together. Here are five of seven, new matriarch Stephanie […]

one step follows another

It all feels experimental these days. I begin each painting with the scary but exciting sensation that I have no idea what I’m doing. This is clearly not completely true, but there is a kernel of truth in it that I think is vital because that’s where play and experimentation live. Since each day’s work […]