Thank you to my Gertrude Steins

portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso

I am lucky to have a few Gertrude Steins in my art life.  They are the people who keep buying your work, even when it morphs into something else.  They support your endeavors and surprise you when they buy one or more of the same series.  You go to their homes and they have a wall full of your work.   They come to my open studios almost every year and stay and chat.  They are so supportive that I wonder if they think I have incriminating photos of them.  I am one very lucky painter.

For Open Studios 2015, I showed mostly larger pieces because I focussed on color fields.   They look so wonderful when the canvases are large as if you are falling into the two dimensional space and being engulfed in color.  However, not many people can hang such large pieces so I knew that sales would be minimal.  And, frankly, not many people like color fields.  It is certainly an acquired taste and probably more attractive to the introverts of the world.   Enter my Gertrude Steins...who know my work and asked to see things I wasn't showing.  While I didn't sell any color fields, I did sell smaller works.