Painting is something I need to do. I pick a color palette, gather my brushes, choose a canvas, and let my imagination be itself. Being an artist is relatively new for me. It never seemed to be something I was supposed to do. I couldn’t draw, I had no materials. The only art class I took in school was all about cutting out letters. It was tedious and painful, painful because the scissors were not contoured for southpaws like me.  

Once I had children, though, I found myself dabbling in the craft world. When my extended family would arrive for Thanksgiving, I always had a craft prepared. We started small, using markers to decorate glass or wooden ornaments, and added more sophisticated crafts as the years wore on. Once we got a round of plywood and made a three-foot diameter mosaic table. A couple of years later, I spread out sticks, leaves, nuts, and berries that I had gathered from around the neighborhood, gave everyone a small canvas and some Elmer’s glue, and let my guests create to their hearts’ content. It was a lot of fun.

Soon thereafter, I bought more canvases, some of those little tubes of acrylic paint, an assortment of brushes, and started painting. What you see in my store is what happened next.