 Still Life with Sunflowers graphite on paper 2016  Waiting at the Gate watercolor on Arches paper 2016 April was a busy, stormy month, full of setbacks, sadness, and some happy conversations and outings, and it has taken me some time to add my most recent watercolor and drawing to the website, but they are there now. My dear rat Whitman passed away, and it has been lonely and quiet without him. My husband took me and Gia (our dog) camping for the first time, and she was like a puppy again in the wildflowers. I have been reading about Paula Modersohn Becker and fairy-tales, and thinking about the lives of women. We planted seven trees, mostly flowering dogwoods, in a cemetery last week to shade the lonely white houses of the dead.
This next month will be busy, too, with a trip home planned, a rather large painting I have been working on for several months that I hope I will finish, and some new drawings and paintings I am starting now. The sun has come back, and the wind, and the trees are green when I walk under them. It is spring. . . It is almost summer. . . To Barbara: I apologize for not responding to your comment sooner. I don't have internet access at my apartment, so I go out and borrow some once a month or so to update this website. I am also not quite certain how to respond to comments using this website platform, and don't have your e-mail, so I thought I would write a note to you here in case you come back to read again. Thank you for your interest, and for your kindness. I apologize on the gallery's behalf; they should have been polite enough to e-mail you back and let you know I haven't shown with them since before I moved north last year. If you do need anything, feel free to e-mail me at thegiftofasher@yahoo.com.
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JSW Turner The Blue Rigi, Sunrise watercolor on paper 1842 My husband and I were lucky enough to go to the opening of the new Getty exhibition: 'Turner: Painting Set Free.' It was more lovely than I had expected, given I have only seen his two paintings at the Huntington Gardens previously. To see his work, row upon row, showed his strength in repetition and variation upon a theme: the watery, steamy, moist atmosphere carried from painting to painting, some calm, some tumultuous, some finished, some barely started. His paint was simultaneously remarkably transparent and remarkably thick. He seems to have been a precursor to Bonnard in his practice of placing an empty space or a void at the center of the canvas. The paintings glowed. But it was his watercolors that were most revelatory to me. I have never seen watercolor used so deftly, not even by Sargent or Winslow Homer. His watercolors were fresh and light and luminous. Some were as detailed as his oil paintings, but with even greater transparency and movingly delicate brushwork. But the quickest and lightest of his watercolors on display, a set of paintings made on the spot of the tower of London burning at night, were also among the most vivid. They felt so immediate still, as though you were watching the flames reflected across the water across more than a hundred years of time. The sparks still falling, the colors still bright. 
JMW Turner Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London watercolor on paper 1841
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