New Artwork

I’ve been busy painting, exploring a peculiar new twist on watercolors… I am using whiskey in place of water! I call these artworks whiskey-colors. This is not my unique idea; it is a technique heralded and practiced by an art group called the Whiskey Painters of America. More about that organization below – let’s get onto the fun part. Shown here are my series of six whiskey-color paintings. I painted each to represent the name of a popular cocktail made … Read More

My newest scratchboard is an alpaca, from photos I took several years ago of the three alpaca pets a friend was raising. Not long after my photo shoot I did my first alpaca painting, a colorful watercolor on Aquabord™ titled “Happy Harley.” For this newest art, I selected one of the alpacas named Charlie – I was inspired to create a scratchboard painting of him. The hair kept grabbing my attention!

I’ve been having a terrific time creating small scratchboard artwork, while also exploring subjects new to me. Each of these four new scratchboards is just 3”x5”, the size of an index card. The beauty of scratchboards, and one of the reasons I love creating art on them, is the ability to render very fine details – even at a small size. This characteristic is what draws viewers to my scratchboard paintings, always curious how such precision and exactness is achieved … Read More

I’ve been using all my art time recently to paint, finally taking a breather to show you what I’ve been up to. My concentration for the past couple of years has been on scratchboarding, which I love. But it was time to change gears and get back to watercolors. As a longtime member of the Tennessee Watercolor Society, I wanted to have at least two new show-worthy watercolor paintings to enter the 2024 biannual exhition, to be held in Knoxville … Read More

Have you ever noticed a background in a photograph which has blurry circles of light against darker areas? This is a “Bokeh” effect, and is comes from a Japanese word meaning “blur quality.” Evidently it means than just the blur, it’s the overall effect of the soft out-of-focus background, from an aesthetic viewpoint. I have used this effect in watercolor paintings in the past, and recently saw other scratchboard artists apply bokeh nicely to their backgrounds. So I decided to … Read More

I’ve just added a rabbit to my list of scratchboard subjects. The soft and mottled fur screamed to be scratched and creating this 7” x 5” panel was great fun. Ampersand Art’s Scratchbord™ is an ideal surface for realistic artwork of animals and birds, allowing textures and details to be beautifully rendered. My very talented artist friend Laurie asked me to create a scratchboard painting for her from a photo she took while visiting Australia. Laurie is an award-winning painter, … Read More

“I Will Twine” is a 7″ x 5″ black Scratchbord™ panel. I used the same ball of twine in an earlier painting called “Curious,” with a cat as the focal point. The textures of the twine and the wood in the background were so fun to depict on a scratchboard that I returned to the subject, this time making the twine itself the focal point. I adopted the title for this artwork from the first words of the Carter family … Read More

After working in watercolors for recent months I’ve been anxious to switch over to scratchboarding again. I was inspired to create an image with various stages of the wild thistle plant, so full of a variety of textures. Using Photoshop, I combined a couple of photos I had taken of wild thistle growing near my house. Thistle is a plant which often has several stages of growth showing at once, including spiny flower pods, fully opened flowers, and the delicate … Read More

Over the past 2 years, Covid-19 has changed life as we knew it. Artists throughout history have recorded historical events – in paintings, poems, songs, photography, and other means of creative expression. “Awaiting A Cure” is my Covid-19 painting. I was driven to create this painting by an incident I experienced early in the pandemic, which, in a simple way, showed how people were suddenly readjusting even their most mundane activities… like buying a pound of bacon. The scene which … Read More

“Baby Boomer” is my newest painting, finished and framed just in time to include it with my 17 other original paintings on their way to my Solo Exhibition in Clarksville TN, which opens on October 5th, 2021. Time is eating away at this old vehicle and I was inspired to feature it in a painting since I first spotted it parked behind a commercial building near where I live in SE Tennessee. I knew that the fabulous colors and textures … Read More