One of my passions is to read biographies especially about great artists. Learning about the attitudes, approaches and ideas of artists who created influential art, both past and present, is always insightful and inspiring.

I recently finished reading the 650 page Pulitzer Prize winning “de Kooning - An American Master” by Mark Stevens.  Brilliantly written, this book is a must-read for anyone who is interested in how an artist thinks. It’s one of those books I want to read again.

De Kooning was indeed a tortured soul who lived a long twisted life of struggle and pain. But he managed to transmute that pain into beautifully powerful works of art by persistently facing the canvas every single day no matter what others thought of him or his work. That dedicated discipline eventually made him one of the masters of 20th century art. Truly inspiring.

To be honest, there really aren’t many great artist biographies out there. How can anyone really know and write about what goes on in the mind of an artist. Most of the work is done alone. The conversation takes place with the canvas or other materials. The energy of the artist’s thoughts are transferred to the artwork. And it’s the artwork itself most books focus on.

The de Kooning book left me hungry for more. I just started reading “Matisse - The Life” by Hilary Spurling which was the winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2005. It’s a good book also, but not one of those you “just can’t put down” as the de Kooning book was.

Here’s a quote I found striking from Matisse’s writings of about 1902, which is just as relevant today. It’s about the role of the artist and what it means to have truly original ideas.

“What you have to do is look at what you wish to express long enough and with enough attention to discover an aspect of it that has never been seen or described by anyone before. There is something unexplored in everything, because we have grown used to letting our eyes be conditioned by the memory of what others have thought before us about whatever we are looking at……………..  That is the way in which you will become original.“

It struck me this idea could be applied to any endeavor really - artist, architect, scientist, teacher, parent, blog writer etc …….. What would happen if everyone tried to approach everything with fresh, inquisitive eyes that didn’t feed into other people’s expectations? If nothing else, new ways of seeing would fundamentally renew and alter our approach to being and doing.

A radical idea perhaps ……………….. After all how many true “originals” can the world absorb? Food for thought……………….

On Friday, I decided to take the afternoon off and go get inspired by great art. A friend of mine met me at my studio at 2:30 pm and we drove all the way to another country……….

My Canadian studio to the Detroit Institute of Art = about 5 miles

Detroit - Windsor Border

One of the greatest advantages of living in a border city is being close to world class art, music and culture without all the congestion and expense of living in a big city. The Windsor / Detroit border crossing is the busiest in North America. There are 2 crossings in Windsor, the Ambassador Bridge and the Windsor / Detroit Tunnel which runs under the Detroit River. Timing is always tricky. It can take 10 minutes or 2 hours depending on time of day and level of US security alerts. Since 9/11 everything has tightened up considerably. Everyone leaves themselves lots of extra time to get across now.

Ambassador Bridge

On Friday, we crossed through the Tunnel in a jiffy and were at the Detroit Institute of Arts by 3:00 pm.

We primarily went to see the new exhibition “Monet to Dali” - “Modern Masters from the Cleveland Museum of Art. What a gorgeous mix of paintings by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cassatt, Seurat, Gaugin, Matisse, Pissarro, Dali, Picasso, Bazille and Tissot to name only a few.

Two of my favorites were by Van Gogh and Monet, neither of which I was familiar with. Both were fairly small landscapes. The confidence in each brushstroke combined with lush, luminous color were breathtaking. These paintings looked so fresh it was hard to believe they’d been painted 100 years ago.

On Saturday, my husband and I drove to Toronto again for my step-daughter’s wedding shower. At the same time, I had to stop by Leonardo Gallery on Monday to drop off 2 large canvases for a potential client to approve.

On the 4 hour drive to Toronto and back to Windsor, I was lucky enough to be a passenger. This gave me the perfect opportunity to “rubber neck” the gorgeous fall colors and take few blurry shots as we whizzed by.

We had the most incredible assortment of clouds later in the evening as a cold rainy front was moving in. Here are a few of the shots I took as the sun was setting.

I keep a folder of digital images as reference material. These are photos of my observations and they serve as memory joggers for my paintings whenever I want to be inspired. It’s always my intention with my art to capture the essense of landscape or nature without being literal.

Today is the first official day of fall. Where did the summer go ???

We’ve been blessed with absolutely gorgeous weather this month - sunny and 74°F almost every day. But summer always comes to an end, just as surely as Solo Art Exhibitions come to an end…………… Pretty good lead-in, huh?

My show ended on Saturday and I drove the 250 miles to Toronto yesterday to pick up some of the unsold paintings. Thankfully, several did sell and quite a few people are still trying to decide. Leonardo Gallery is keeping 9 of the larger pieces and will be including those paintings still available in a Group Exhibition in December.

My drive home today was a visual feast. Looking at the colors of the landscape was so inspiring it was all I could do to keep my eyes on the road. The leaves are just beginning to turn red and the sun created shimmering ripples of gold in the trees. On either side of the highway the fields were breathtaking combinations of the most beautiful deep purples, rusts, mustards and olive greens you could imagine. Can’t wait to get back to the studio tomorrow !

After all the excitement of the past month, my brain feels full of cobwebs. It’s sometimes hard to shift from my public mode to the solitude of the studio again.

In addition to doing some studio cleaning, I also like to look at my photo  reference file to get re-inspired.

During my recent vacation, I took a whole bunch of photos of the wake at the bow of the ferry from Prince Edward Island. This is just one of them.

Just got back from a 2 week vacation, visiting my family in New Brunswick, Canada. They live in a little Cape Cod style town called Shediac on the shores of the Northumberland Strait. Shediac calls itself the “Lobster Capital of the World”, so you can guess what I was eating lots of.

My husband and I also spent hours walking along the shore. Much of my creative inspiration comes from gazing endlessly at horizon lines. After 2 weeks of soaking up the gorgeous views, I’m loaded with ideas and eager to get back in the studio

I’m not a sketcher, but I do take reference photos.  Although my work isn’t literally landscape, you can probably see how the photos linger in my subconscious when I paint.