Picking Art for People's Choice Show

This is a painting I started awhile ago from a photo I took at the River Walk in San Antonio. It's a famous location for paintings...I've seen quite a few in art magazines and at shows. If you walked along this lovely spot you will instantly remember it. In the evening it is strung with tiny lights. Rental boats (like Venice) quietly motor up and down the river (at all times of day). They look more like pontoons than gondolas, however, but they are painted in bright colors and have interesting guides that chat as you go. Music from the restaurants and night clubs along the river float out onto the quiet evening. There are many bridges crossing the river (you can barely see one in the distance).

But this scene is early in the morning, as we walked along looking for a place for breakfast. No one was out yet, but the waiters were putting up the umbrellas and and it was filled with the sounds of birds. The boats hadn't started up again yet. I loved the reflections in the water and the early shadows and light.

It is a watercolor (not large)...about 11 x 14 on Arches 140#. I painted it mostly wet into wet hoping to get that "misty morning" feel to it.

On a totally different theme...this multi-media (collage/acrylic) is a strange little "moody" piece contrasting a bright clown with a dark and somber background. I call it "The Train Left Without Me". The clown, though probably sad and lost, still has his smile painted on. The numbers in the painting infer lost time. It was an attempt at "story telling" within a painting.

Also fairly small, 11 x 14 on canvas board. I painted this shortly after I took Bob Burridge's class last summer. He was on a clown theme at the time and I must have picked up on that.

Bob paints in a series all the time...which is something I had hoped to start but I seem to jump around a lot in subject matter. With Bob it's fruit, or ballet dancers, or floral, etc. He paints and paints on that theme for awhile until he exhausts it and then on to something else. I wonder how many of you out there do that too?

I have picked 3 other paintings for the show. More on that later. The show starts on August 6th at the Arbor Vitae Community Center on 70 east. There will be signs up that weekend.