Just saying

We came across Mary Whyte's new painting book " Working South " with sketches, at Barnes and Nobel the other day and decided to buy it.  The book is so good.  She talks about her time while working on these paintings and the people she met and where she lived.  Her heart was totally involved in these paintings.  Bob still drools over the one of the man by the wheat machine.  I just have a very hard time understanding that she is using watercolor's.  Anyway it turns out from the book that she basically taught herself, since her professors didn't know much about watercolor.  I was surprised  and delighted to learn that she gives class' at Greenville museum all the time.  I'll have to watch closer for them.  I would love to see her work that medium.
When you look at the photo on the back of the book of herself, you just know she is honest and open and where her heart is.  She wanted to paint so many more people than she ended up painting.  And she wanted just regular people, not famous ones.  And her regret that some of the jobs she wanted to paint had already gone away.   I think she set the goal of  finishing 50 paintings.  Kind of like Anne Spoon and her  100  portrait paintings of the area she lives in.  Mary shows her art iat her husband, Smith Coleman's gallery in Charlotte.  He hand makes her frames.  I want to visit there and see what she has for sale.  She said sometimes the frame took longer to make than the painting.  And many times she worked 12 hours straight.  I could tell you everything she wrote about, but that would spoil the book.  Buy it and enjoy a true artist of our time.
She said it takes a lot of thought to make a painting.  I guess that is why I am so slow.  I do think about it a lot and usually it is in the early morning hours that I try and hash out what I need to do.  And right now I have two pears in the fridge I need to do and then eat!!