If you are signed up for my New Art Alerts, you have been seeing a lot of snowflakes going by lately.  (If you haven’t, but want to see every new painting that I post, click on the tiny “Get New Art Alerts” on the very bottom of my website.)  

I grew up with snow, way too much snow, in Wisconsin.  
After I married a native Texan and followed him back home to the Hill Country, I could not understand why the people here go nuts over snow.  They run outside and photograph the barely white landscape with frolicking children or animals.  They build tiny little snowmen to post on social media.
Then one day I looked at a single snowflake on my dark sleeve.  Wow.  I was careful to keep my breath from melting it as I studied its delicate symmetry and the crystals reflecting and refracting the colors around them.  I was hooked on the uniqueness and magic of snowflakes. 
Fast forward 20+ years: in recent weeks, I have created a combination of soft abstract watercolor and detailed black inking that satisfies both my memory of snowflakes and my artist’s eye. 
So I have been bingeing on painting snowflakes.  Though not traditionally a Hill Country art topic, I choose to put them on my Christmas card and in a temporary collection called “An Avalanche of Snowflakes” on my website.  
I had to look up the collective noun for snowflakes.  It really is ‘avalanche’ even for just a handful.  While looking up snowflake collective nouns I stumbled across several that made me smile: a clutter of cats, a kindle of kittens and a scurry of chipmunks.  I have all three out by the barn right now!  
Nan

Last Christmas I gave away five pieces of art in a drawing.  Not pieces that I chose; I turned five people loose in my current inventory (of hundreds of unframed watercolors 8x10 or smaller) to pick their favorite. It was such fun that I decided to make it an annual event.

Since this was the year that I finally took the time to create my website and start the habit of posting art plus writing about my art-life, I decided to tie the drawing to signing up for my newsletter and/or New Art Alert emails.  If someone signs up for both, their name goes in the hat twice (but they can only win once per year.)

That left me with a problem: what about my faithful friends who have already signed up?  I think that they deserve to be rewarded for supporting me through the early days of mistakes and constant changes. So, I am putting their names in TWICE for the newsletter and TWICE more for the New Art Alerts (if they have signed up for one or both by Thanksgiving.)

This art giveaway is not just for people who already know me or my art.  You can share this message with anyone who you think would enjoy my art enough to want to win a painting.  If they sign up before Thanksgiving, their entry will be doubled.

The deadline for entries is Wednesday December 10.  I will draw names, contact winners and announce the winners on the website on 12/11/20.

Good luck!  I hope that you win!

Nan

I teach watercolor workshops once a month for most of the year (taking November and December off every year for reasons of sanity.) Many of my students are beginners who often start by claiming they have NO artistic ability.  Some are repeat students or experienced in other mediums but hesitant about watercolor. I have such fun leading these sessions: my favorite thing is seeing people’s artistic confidence grow! Some students also bring their current art project to my free, monthly Open Studio hours for encouragement and discussion (the next one is Friday 11/13 noon to 4:00 at The Fredericksburg Art Guild.)

In 2020 we painted pineapples, strawberries, cacti, pumpkins, fish, jellyfish, valentines, bluebonnets, fall leaves and lemons. And that is after a lot of workshops were cancelled due to Covid!  But we re-started (with masks and social distancing) in September.

Every February The Fredericksburg Art Guild sponsors a show for all of our adult students.  It is a chance for these beginning artists to learn how to prepare for and enter a (free) juried show, then to experience a reception in their honor and maybe win a cash award. Talk about seeing a student’s artistic confidence grow!

This year, for the first time, I am in charge of running that show.  People who have participated in the past may be in for a few surprises because my view of the purpose of the show is all about (you guessed it!) increasing the students’ artistic confidence.  My working show title is ‘The Story Behind the Art’ and I plan to encourage students to write a phrase or two about each art piece they enter, or about their unique journey as an artist...  

We have been learning that people buy art because they connect with a story about either the topic of the piece of art, something in the process of making the art, or the artist themself.  The piece of art becomes a symbol that reminds them of that story. I want my students to be confident in both creating art and in selling it, or at least sharing it with the world.

Some of you own pieces of my art.  Do you agree with the statement above about why people buy art? If you have a story about my art or something that you purchased from another artist that demonstrates the rightness or wrongness of this theory, I would love to hear it.
thanks,
Nan

And hey, if you will be in the Fredericksburg, Texas area on 1/9/21, why not contact me to reserve a spot in the valentine themed watercolor workshop? $40 covers all tools and materials for this 2 hour workshop and you will qualify to enter the February show.