This is a view of my studio. Hope the video works 😎

Finished a new painting, this one was my first attempt at an outdoor painting, started during my workshop in March with Morgan Samuel Price. The scene is a section of the beach at Delnor-Wiggins Pass State Park. During the workshop I started 4 works, all of which needed a lot of help when I returned home. They were all too dark and the drawing on three of them needed help. Hope to work on the other 3 over the next three weeks.

Listening to Rita Coolidge, Vince Gil, Sonny Landreth, and the Ventures long version of Sleepwalk. See you a few.

Art and Business:

And faith, I suppose.

Michael Novak died recently. He wrote on democracy, capitalism, and religion. He started out as a student of the left, worked on the George McGovern campaign. Over time he came to the opinion that "the left was wrong about virtually every big issue of our time". Authored The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. 

I take this from the March 28, 2017 issue of Forbes magazine, Fact and Comment by the Editor-In-Chief, Steve Forbes. I encourage you to read the whole piece, but here goes what I think is the essence of his thought...

Novak had no rose-colored view of the system. "I would not want it to be thought that any system is the Kingdom of God on Earth. Capitalism isn't. Democracy isn't." Despite commerce's lowly, pedestrian status, he recognized that free markets enhance humanity by encouraging, without hardly being aware of it, interacting and working with each other in ways that produced prosperity and the opportunity for the previously oppressed to, as Lincoln put it, improve their lot in life. It gave people the chance to develop their particular talents. It encouraged a creativity that would enhance the lives of everyone. It had people looking to the future rather than to just the narrow here and now. Its end products are the opposite of greed, selfishness and miserliness - misers do not found the Microsofts, WalMarts and Apples of the world. 

Our Founders, Novak perceptively noted, based the new American Republic on free-market commerce because such a system attacked a sin even more deadly than hate: envy. "Hatred...is at least visible and universally recognized as evil. Envy seldom operates under its own name; it chooses a lovelier name to hide behind, and it works like a deadly invisible gas. In previous republics, it has set class against class, sections of cities against other sections."

By contrast, in a commercial society, "when persons see that their material conditions are actually improving from year to year...they stop comparing themselves tie their neighbors."

Think about it. 

Listening to Radio Paradise, Dougie Maclean - Ready for the Storm

Hey, if you are interested in photography go to Swann Galleries and to the Images & Objects show coming up in April; catalogues, click on, and use 3D. Page124, the lower of the two, is neat. Many of the classic photos and photographers.

Also worth your time if you like poster art, in "past" is their show on March 16, 2017, which is what drove me to the site to begin with.

One more sketch from the other day...

Well, I have my web page up and running. Several friends made solid suggestions. You can see it at claudelylesartworks.com

Great article on the creative process in Fortune magazine, at Fortune.com. In the mag it is on page 142 in the March 15 issue.

Unlocking Your Big Ideas. It excerpts from The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking, by Olivia Fox Cabane and Judah Pollack, published on Feb 7, 2017, by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2017 by Cabane and Pollack.

Back to painting now that this computer stuff is updated. I am tweaking the paintings I started during my outdoor workshop with Morgan Samuel Price earlier this month.

It has been a while, lots going on. Last day of bank work Dec 30, 2016. Ready to update this site and web page.

Attended an intensive workshop early in March taught by Morgan Samuel Price, what a great experience, how humbling, jump started my plein air efforts, please visit Morgan's website.

I plan to rework those canvases in my studio (I know, a no-no) but it is the only way for me to salvage those efforts. Right now they look to me like kindergarten works, and that is not good.

I did sell two paintings this year, the beach umbrella scene and my most recent, Fauve Park, which was another experiment in style in this year of experiments.

Fauve Park

I now hope to resume studio work, experiment with plein air, try some acrylic abstract, sketch more, inventory my work, etc.

Don't forget to visit my work on your phone at ArtLoupe.org

Oh yea, forgot, had a little eye surgery but can see a little better now.

Ate' logo.

Just renewed my website, dropped two domains. So:
CLAUDELYLESARTWORKS.COM
CLAUDELYLES.COM
ESTUDIOCIELOAZUL.COM

I will rebuild the website over the next couple of weeks and keep it current. It will have its own email: info@claudelylesartworks.com

Finished one new landscape on canvas pad. Need to find out best way to display. Have 6 or 7 under-paintings in process.

Will be on retreat this weekend at Jesuit White House outside of Saint Louis. Meanwhile, hope hurricane Matthew misses SW Florida...sorry about that SC.