Nancy Goldman and Geri Medway

I had the pleasure today of meeting two fine California artists. One is a fellow blogger, Nancy Goldman.  She was volunteering at the Guggenheim Galley for the Orange Art Association's 14th Orange Open Juried Exhibition.  The show is great - including three of Nancy's excellent watercolors! Check out her blog http://nancygoldmanart.blogspot.com/.

Nancy told me about a demo in San Clemente which I attended this evening featuring NWS signature artist, Geri Medway.  I was so impressed with her work and her ambitious paintings of such varied subjects. http://www.gerimedway.com/geri.medway/Welcome.html

Meeting new artists around the country - and world - is part of the fun of being an artist!

Geri Medway's demo at San Clemente Art Supply was GREAT! She showed a slide show of fifty or more paintings. She was super generous with information about techniques she used to accomplish each scene. It was like a quick-fire class of painting after painting. It was a wealth of information for anyone with even minimal painting experience. She’d answer endless questions about each painting and tell the brush, the colors, etc. She had several unique combinations of colors that result in different qualities for each application. On each painting, she would point to a particularly challenging or unique area and say, “I did this and this by doing…” I took notes until my fingers cramped, so I’ll have to go sort it all out. What I particularly loved were her candid comments about mistakes. On two different slides she said something along the lines of, “Now this is, unfortunately, not what this painting looks like now. I 'ruined' it later by glazing this or that over it…” How refreshing and encouraging for an expert painter to be so transparent (pardon the w/c pun)! The biggest “take-away” I got from her demo is that she is willing to tackle anything. Her subject matters were extremely varied (eucalyptus trees, koi, creek beds, desert rock formations, geese, comic strips, marbles, Christmas ornaments, complicated palm fronds, sunlit barns, rusty gas pumps). Each were ambitiously difficult and excellently rendered with the attitude, “Can I do it?!” I loved her tenacity.