My artwork is located above the fireplace mantel and consists of nine oil paintings and two linocut print.
I live on an eleven acre tract which at one time was part of a dairy farm. It has a large gambrel-roof barn with a milk room where they used to separate the cream from the milk. That's where my painting studio is. Before refrigeration was common, there were small cheese factories about every five or six miles along highway 101 delivered to a close-by factory for processing. Now, there are still dairy farms all along this stretch, but once a day a tanker truck and trailer picks up the milk from each farm and take it to the Tillamook Cheese factory.
On my property, I at one time tried growing some rose, but the deer quickly decimated them. So, I decided to grow rhododendrons and some magnolias which deer do not like to eat and which thrive in the climate here. Most of the best species rhododendrons come from parts of China, Bhutan, and Japan where there wasn't a glacial ice-age. I started collecting seeds from the American Rhododendron Society seed exchange and over a five or so year period had developed a specimen garden of 300 plants or so. These became subjects for oil paintings were made when I was developing a new impressionist style painting style, and magnolia blossoms are simpler to paint than rhododendron blossoms but still maddeningly hard to not overwork.