exists to create art which reflects the beauty and the glory of God, to use art to comfort and encourage people, and to inspire others to pursue the arts.
In my last post, I showed several photos of my roses which were in bloom at the time. I hope you saw them. I am obsessed with roses right now, so I had to do a picture of one in my new abstract style. Rose obsession: who’s with me?
And she was fair as is the rose in May. — Geoffrey Chaucer
I didn’t know what to call this, but she looks like she is in a cage and is not happy with that, so I will call her “Girl in a Cage”. LOL! I actually started this as a study sketch for an oil painting, but got distracted by my recent obsession with this kind of drawing. This is oil-based colored pencils, alcohol markers, and sharpie on smooth white bristol board.
I have been reading, of course. I have read the first six books in Louis L’amour’s Sacket Series: Sackett’s Land; To The Farm Blue Mountains; The Warrior’s Path; Jubal Sackett; Ride The River; and The Daybreakers. I am taking a break from The Sacketts to read Victoria: The Young Queen. So far, it is fascinating. It starts well before she is born and I am now to the point where she has just become Queen at 18 years old.
So far, this year, I have also read (among many others) The Happy Life of Isadora Bentley, The Mudlark, The Burning Hills, Riders of the Purple Sage, The Anne of Green Gables Series (again), and some Janette Oke books. I am in the process of reading The Sackett Companion, also. It gives some insights into characters and places in the Sackett Series books. Fascinating… Do any of you love Louis L’amour as much as I do? Or have you read any of his books? If not, you must read at least one so that you can know. I recommend Sackett’s Land. It is a wonderful book taking place around the year 1600 in England and with a voyage to the New World. It is a swashbuckling account of sword fighting, intrigue, exploration, greed, love, hate, cities, wilderness, all the good things of an adventure tale. Do it. You know you want to. Oh, and his books are always free of details of things we don’t need to know, if you know what I mean…
How is the cicada situation where you live? They are a little overwhelming here in Alabama. I have never seen so many of them and LOUD! They can be deafening sometimes. This is a photo of our baby maple tree covered in cicadas. They fly in and out of that tree in clouds. It is amazing!
And, OH! The Roses! We have planted four more rose bushes this year in addition to the ones that my beloved planted last year. The new ones are climbers on two beautiful arbors that we put up in the front of the house.
This is a Don Juan climbing rose, which is deep red. We have one on each side of this arbor on the garage window. We have two pink ones, Zephirine Douphin (I think that is how it is spelled) on either side of the arbor on the studio window. There is a small bud on one of the Don Juans right now. I can’t wait until the arbor are covered with roses!
Speaking of roses, here are some photos of the rose bushes which were planted last autumn. The white one is Madame Annisette and the deep purply red one is Ebb Tide. We get all our roses from Heirloom Roses online.
This is the spider plant in my studio, blooming. These photos were a few days ago. It is covered in blooms right now. It likes that window, I guess.
And, finally, a photo of me, taken by Dad, during my last immunotherapy session this past Thursday. It was four weeks between treatments, because I was waiting on the results from another blood test to check for cancer cells. It came back at zero, but we decided to continue with the immunotherapy until we get a cat scan to make doubly (triply?) sure. So, I had a pet scan which showed no cancer; this blood test; and now a cat scan. We are making sure! LOL!
One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today. — Dale Carnegie
“The wind blows wherever it wants. Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.” — John 3:8 NLT
Mr. Beloved asked me what significance the orange balls have. Nothing. I just think they are nifty. I thought I would share that, because I imagined that there may be people out there thinking the same thing and wondering why they couldn’t figure it out. Well, it is because there is nothing to figure out. LOL! I just like the shapes, colors, wildness, weirdness, etc. Don’t you?
Colored pencils, alcohol markers, and sharpie on 9×12 white drawing paper.
This paper is thinner than most that I use and I thought the back looked rather nifty, too.
A light wind swept over the corn, and all nature laughed in the sunshine. — Anne Bronte
of the sun unto the going down of the same the Lord’s name is to be praised. — Psalm 113:3
Colored pencils and sharpie on 11×14 sand-textured grey paper.
Truly the light is sweet,
and a pleasant thing it is
for the eyes to behold the sun:
— Ecclesiastes 11:7
Well, a while back Sandy asked me to do a portrait of her beloved husband, Paul. Now, Paul has asked me to do a portrait of his beloved Sandy. I enjoyed working on her. It has been a while since I did a portrait. (January!) But, I was able to pick it right up and go for it. I am happy with it and Paul appears to be happy with it, also.
This is 10×13.5 pastel pencils on toned pastel paper.
Paul’s portrait was done in January 2023, while we were still in Florida.
I am enjoying imagining these portraits framed and on the wall in their lovely home.
Sketching is like dancing. It’s process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that. — Molly Crabapple
This is a larger painting of one of my little abstract tree colored pencil drawings. It was a little more difficult to get it, but I haven’t used acrylic paints in a while and it ended up being fun and relaxing. I worked on it whenever I could get some time or energy and it took me about a week to get it done. I chose this Bible verse to go with it:
“Then the trees of the forest shall rejoice before the Lord, for He is coming to judge the earth.” — 1 Chronicles 16:33
I think that little tree looks joyful.
She is done on 20×24 stretched canvas with acrylic paints and sharpie marker. I will be varnishing her once I get the edges done. The canvas edges will be painted black so that it does not necessarily need a frame. It can be hung as is. I could not get a good straight photo of the canvas. I tried and tried, but I just could never get it straight. I even have levels on my tripod! LOL! I tried to straighten it out in my photo software. Nothing doing. So, I trimmed it with black. That is not how the canvas looks in real life. Below is what it looked like before I put that black around it in the photo.
It was too busy to appreciate the painting, so I decided to put the black around it. What do ya’ll think? I wish I didn’t have such a shaky hand and didn’t make it so sloppy, but I think it works. I like to surround paintings with black, because I think it shows up the colors much better than white. That is why I use black matting and black frames. But, what do you do? Do you like white? Do you like black? Or do you use colors for matting and/or framing?
Give fools their gold, and knaves their power;
let fortune’s bubbles rise and fall;
who sows a field, or trains a flower,
or plants a tree, is more than all.
— John Greenleaf Whittier
Well, on August 22, 2023, I was diagnosed with metastatic ovarian/endometrial cancer which had spread to the bone, lymph nodes, and lung. I recently finished my first cycle of chemo (six treatments) and had another PET scan. On Thursday, March 7, the doctor told me that the cancer in the bone, lymph nodes, and lung was completely gone. The cancer around the uterus and ovaries was significantly smaller and inactive. I am done with chemo for this time and I will be on immuno-therapy, every three weeks, for two years. Praise the Lord! I am very grateful to him for his faithful people who have been praying for me through the whole thing and for his healing which he has bestowed upon a very unworthy child through the doctors and nurses. I am still very weak, tired, and sick, but I can look forward to getting better as the chemo works it way out of my system, instead of sinking down more with another treatment. Plus, it is SPRING! The sun is shining. The flowers are bursting out. Yay! Yippee! The roses that my beloved planted in the fall are bursting forth into leaves. The pansies who are keeping company with the roses are blooming to beat the band. I have been sitting out on the back porch with my crocheting and absorbing that sunshine. It feels good.
These are a couple of pictures that I made a little while back. I feel like it is appropriate to show them now. I call them Beauty from Ashes. The cancer and the treatments are the fire and ashes. The healing is the beauty. I hope you like them.
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion — to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor. — Isaiah 61:1-3 (NIV)
My latest commission is a 9×12 pastel pencil landscape on Canson toned sand-grain paper of the view from a house on the river in Virginia. It was certainly a lovely sunset. Aren’t they all? LOL! I love me a good sunset.
Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. — Jack Kerouac, On The Road
Greetings, All. It has been a very difficult couple of months. It seems like things get worse as chemo goes on. But, it is probably because the chemicals are building up with each treatment. My last one is coming up on the 15th. I am looking forward to getting this done. For a while, anyway…
So, this is an artwork I did a few weeks ago. I haven’t been able to do anything this last week, so I thought I would post this. I call it “Regeneration”, because I feel like chemo is the ashes from which I hope the beauty comes. The Lord has faithfully carried me through thus far and I know that he will carry me to the end. He has also used many wonderful people in my life, like my long-suffering, patient, and loving husband and my patient, hard-working parents, among most of my other family and friends and prayer warriors. Praise God! How do people do it without the Lord and without other people? I see people alone in the chemo room all too often…
This is approximately 9×12 on toned paper with oil-based colored pencils, alcohol markers, and sharpie.
I tried to make the bottom of the picture to be flames, ashes, and new growth. The woman is me and the tree top is the beautiful fruit springing from my new life. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Sanctification is the outcome and inseparable consequence of regeneration. He who is born again and made a new creature receives a new nature and a new principle and always lives a new life. — J. C. Ryle
I love this style of art. It is called neurographic art. Or at least it is my interpretation of it. I think it is relaxing to do and relaxing to look at. Colorful, too.
This is oil-based colored pencils, wax-based colored pencils, alcohol markers, and sharpie on 9×12 toned sketch paper.
This, below, is a pen and ink sketch that I did a while back of our house not long after we moved in. It has been sitting around waiting for me to do something with it. So, I got some watercolor pencils and decided to sacrifice this drawing to the experiment. I like it, but I decided to play with the digital image and think it turned out a little Van Gogh-y. I like that, too. LOL!
Which one do you like?
With an apple I will astonish Paris. — Paul Cezanne
Virginia C. McCoy Fine Art 
You must be logged in to post a comment.