Susan Kennedy Art

This one was a bit impulsive, an "end of the day" painting inspired by nothing more than the great gobs of paint that were going to get wasted. Here it is on etsy: Bird in a Stained Glass Garden It's nice when the colors themselves can carry you away and prompt the painting to go in different directions. the birds, however, usually impose themselves from my head, but that's ok: I think they usually work. It ended up reminding me of fiery colors at sunset, together with brights and mysterious deep places in a tended garden....hence the name "Bird in a Stained Glass Garden." I hope you enjoy looking! It's on etsy now and is a 16" x 20" alkyd on stretched canvas, with painted black edges. Quite a personality. Here's hoping today brings inspiration and illuminating shafts of light. It's all beginning again, and I hope we're up to the challenge. check out the ebook page on my website for watercolor demos and crochet patterns! www.susank

This one has been bothering me for weeks; we were driving down Tribble Road in North Georgia and as we rounded a curve the rising moon took our breaths away. Shannon called it a Harvest Moon, and it was gorgeously lit up by the sun setting on the opposite horizon, as were the trees. Love love love it when the sunset lights up a rising moon and its visual surrounding, it's always surreal and magical. Check that listing later to see the finished piece... hopefully will be done in a few days! Check out my store at susankennedy.etsy.com or at susankennedy.com to see more about my work. Thanks!

This little simple wash type of painting is what I've been doing for warm-ups this week, to get inspired. They have a Chinese Watercolor kind of a feel to them, but I love watercolor for its bleedy, flowing color-into-color character, and sure enough, it made its own mark on the effort. Two simple washes, with time to dry in between, and a fanciful cutout kind of a drawing that it started with. It was an imaginary bird, which ended up being a rainbow-colored little guy. Can't say I've seen one like him, but he's good for a little watercolor reverie. You might try a simple wash of a simple line drawing to get inspired just by transparent color and crisp paper. Invigorating! Best wishes for an arty day, Susan susankennedy.com

I feel passionately about fair trade and artisan issues, I suppose, because I’m an artist. We have a very cool business here in town called Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee. Their vision is to create a market for their gourmet coffee because it is paving the way for a community in Rwanda to have coffee washing facilities which promote tribal reconciliation and give the village a way to participate in a larger economy; hopefully this will be a way out of poverty and strife. I think that, in a way, we Americans have to not only support these types of goods, but recognize that they way that they have to compete is the way that we artists, musicians, craftsmen, even manufacturers have to compete. The efficiency of our market has made huge cargo containers of cheap, anonymous, inefficiently transported goods the norm. We have to fight that shopping ethic, as it were, and show our customers that it feels good to buy directly from the producer, the craftsman, the artist. It’s greener, it’s mor

Wow, these commissions feel like children by the time it's all done...this is the biggest one I've done in a while, at least in watercolor; it's a full sheet, 22 x 30. Here it is partway done, I'm about to finish and wrap it up! Show me your work and have a super artsy day! If you want to see lots of the things I've been working on you can check out this ebay spot, or see my instructional art ebooks and a painting demonstration video at this page. Thanks for visiting!

I've put a watercolor demo on my site, and am sticking my toe in the water of painting demonstrations. This is a 29-minute video of me painting this floral still life, and it's only in 640-pixel format, which is why it's so nice and cheap! But you can get it and download it (just please don't share it!), it's great for viewing on your computer to get a view of how another watercolor artist works. You can see a preview of it on youtube but to get the actual download you'll need to see my instructional videos and ebooklets at my website .... getting inspired, baby!! Go you crazy artists!!!! Woooo hooooooooo

This is an abstract I don't think I've mentioned before in my blog, it was, for me, a prototype, a way to get a bunch of ideas in my head onto canvas, coming together into a coherent whole. It sort of evolved into a question about heaven, more a question than a statement, anyway. I'm not even sure what the question is, either! I called it "Elijah's Door" because I think it was Elijah in the Old Testament who was taken up to heaven without passing through death. Anyway, I hope you enjoy looking, this sort of art is new to me and dear to me. My site, susankennedy.com has evolved into a blend of portfolio of original paintings (both oil paintings on canvas and watercolor originals) as well as a way for me to offer fine art instruction (oil painting lessons on youtube, watercolor painting instrucion and watercolor demonstration) as well as crochet patterns which reflect my hobby. I hope you'll visit and trade links with me, all of it is fun and a source of c

I've been working like crazy on my website. I'd love to have it all cool and inspirational, and there are lots of my goofy but dear-to-my-heart youtube videos on that left bar... but it's still in need of a lot of work. I hope to put together lots of video on painting, both mine and the work of others. I've found it to be such a source of personal fulfillment and have seen what it can do for others. The next book I'm working on is a short ebook on how to get inspired from your lackluster reference photos (NOT from photos on the internet!), and each of the sections is preceded by thoughts and stories from my own day-to-day life and how it intersects with art. Share your thoughts with me! Blessings, Susan you can see my items at my website!

My husband of twenty-five years and I were off for the weekend celebrating our anniversary and decided to hike the trails of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. We were headed back down from the top of Clingman's Dome when we saw this black bear twenty or thirty feet away from us and another couple, off the trail. He was browsing in the blackberries and stopped to stare at us. When he started coming toward the trail I dropped the camera and started backing away and noticing that I was the only one in flip flops... fortunately he was pretty young and didn't want to get in to a thing with a bunch of tender pink people. Yaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

It's always a delight and a shock, somehow, to get back to watercolor and remember its power. The paper is such an element in this medium, almost a character in the plot of the painting. Layer too much, fiddle just once, use the wrong colors, scrub too much, and you can watch your beloved floral breathe its last right under your very eyes. That's why one gets so crazy about the medium: it's a cruel master, but a very beautiful, challenging, demanding and fascinating one. I love love love it! You can see my items at my website!

This is awesome!

My new diet! Make a pot of soup and eat it all day instead of marshmallows!!Gonna lose those ugly 15 pounds. My version of making soup is putting a can of this and a can of that in a pot with dried onion and leftovers. How good the soup is depends on the leftovers. Now off to paint... you can see my items at my website!

What a strange day. Everything's changing and the kids are getting old. I am too. : ) Susan you can see my items at my website!

Another treasured family photo: we were in a rowboat in the Okefenokee a few years ago, and as we rounded a bend, this amazing hollow tree greeted us... it looked like a monster face to us. Made me feel for Snow White, who thought trees were scary too. susankennedy.com

I LOVE this photo. I never even noticed it at the time, I was just happily snapping photos at Yellowstone National Park many years ago, and LO AND BEHOLD, when flipping through boxes of photos from that trip -- decades later -- what should appear before my shocked eyes but this snapshot of BIGFOOT crossing the road. Way too late to launch a search party, research team, or anything else. I laughed my head off. Can you tell what the subject of the photo really is? Its feet are really too small to actually be Bigfoot. But it is indeed a living creature. susankennedy.com

I love this friend's ideas. Not only is she building a business which promotes the integration of gratitude and appreciation into corporate culture, the items she uses in her baskets and gifts are always hand-made artisan items. It makes me so happy! I feel like sounding bells of alarm that American culture has got to not only embrace core values which will build up and not tear down BUT ALSO that we have got to support businesses and arts which have some intrinsic craftsmanship and value. If we keep buying the cheapest goods made at the cheapest factories, we will not only do ourselves out of jobs and markets, we will be supporting huge corporations which use their power in the market to pay the smallest wages and destroy local small businesses. If I sound like I'm preaching, I guess I am. I have the point of view of an artist who is competing with mass produced art. It's why I'm so excited about Fair Trade businesses, The Arts and Crafts Movement, Art, and businesses

You don't see something like this every day... I actually snapped this shot as we were barrelling down the interstate in West Virginia. That tree on the left looks so solitary, the fog so mysterious and somber. Makes me want to paint a painting, or make a jigsaw puzzle out of it, I'm not sure which! By which I mean, it's so dramatic, it almost crosses over into the category of trite. Can't put my finger on why.

Thought I'd put a link to this extremely cool online gallery. Lori is very inspiring, and her watercolors and drawings bridge the gaps between fantasy art, illustration, and realism. Her sense of color is surprising and invigorating, and I hope you enjoy checking it all out. Incidentally, you click on the title of this post to get to her site. Sorry to have grabbed your image, Lori, but I do love it so much.... click here, too

Wow, they never stop...maybe in the morning it's some other gargantuan bug besides a cicada. I should know this. The grass is dead, the kids are leaving. I truly hate August. Check out my art which is usually much more uplifting that this post: susankennedy.com

This little photo never fails to make me laugh. When I was a teenager and was waiting on tables, some regular customer who used to pay me to do his mending (I'm too busy to mend these days : ) proudly brought me this masterpiece. I don't remember his name, wish I did...if you're out there, you with the holey shirts, send me a note, I'd like to give credit for one of the more bizarre landscape shot I've ever run across. I'll let you guys supply the imaginary events leading up to this remarkable scene. And yes, that is a pig charging the viewer with a pile of burning tires in the background. He escaped just in time, according to him (the photographer, not the pig). My brother-in-law Steve, also a photographer, titled this image "Apocalypse Sow."

This little doodle is the sort of thing which has been on my mind lately...more fanciful things which speak of heaven and show the bits of heaven in earth and (I hope) earth in heaven. My littlest and I have been collaborating on some multiple part linocut prints, hopefully will put something on about our process. Who would have thought Middle School style printing projects would be so compelling? The second picture shows some of our tools. This particular print is up for auction now on my ebay store, and I hope to finish up lots more pieces which take it in a different direction.

And here is a sort of an artist's bio, if a fridge reflects a bit of who you are. I'm particularly happy when I look at the handmade pinwheel that sits in a vase on the top.

This is one of my favorite photos of all time; maybe you've gotten it in your inbox, but it makes me laugh every time. Best wishes to all and send me your photos about art!

Been a long time since I updated this, obviously. A lot of things going on, a lot of turmoil as well as creative growth...don't they usually go hand in hand? My latest thoughts are of God and heaven, fear and courage, and I'm often taking a break from my beloved realism to follow those themes in abstraction. I hope you'll indulge me and enjoy my more recent work, which is dear to my heart. These pieces tend to be ethereal abstracts. They often end up reminding one of earth from space, or of geological strata, or of distant mountains and the passes through them. They often remind me of places from books, like Rivendell or The Woods Between the Worlds, and the image I attached grew to be my idea of what Lewis' Land of Bism might seem like. Check back for more, I hope to continue! Yours artfully, Susan