Pines and Lavender Hillsides

5"x7" oil on gessoed masonite archival panel

“Inward calm cannot be maintained unless physical strength is constantly and intelligently replenished.” -Buddha

I really loved getting to paint out at Keys Creek, it was such a beautiful, calm place - just a real balm to the senses. Funny how painting plein air just locks in those good memories to draw from & be able to paint it again in the studio from the wonderful views all over that place. (I keep thinking of the warm sun, the fragrance wafting over the blossoms, and the 'drunken' bees just humming around, oblivious to anyone else.) Then when you're quiet & standing painting, you notice hummingbirds nearby in the bouganvillia arch, hawks flying over the distant hills, songbirds in the trees edging the property. The magic just comes together...makes you feel lucky to be a painter! I know my fellow painters know that feeling! and yes, as Buddha says, that inward calm comes from replenishing and nurturing our physical selves. (Did Buddha ever walk through lavender?)

While it's wet:

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Nurturer

8"x8" oil on gessoed masonite archival panel


“Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.” -Lao Tzu

And who or what doesn't need nurturing? From plants and animals, and people....and ourselves, we all need tending to...with loving care.

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Lavender Lovelies

5"x7" oil on gessoed masonite archival panel


"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul." ~John Muir

John Muir sums up my thoughts so well. My visit to Keys Creek Lavender Farm is certainly one of those beautiful, natural places where nature heals and gives strength to body and soul. I'm sure that's why I've enjoyed painting from memory as much as I did painting out on location there. I'm hoping for a return visit some time this summer!

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Lavender To the Foothills

5"x7" oil on gessoed masonite archival panel

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.... People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back." ~Alice Walker, The Color Purple, 1982

This is one of my favorite quotes, and I do remember back to that movie oh so many decades ago. And how could we not notice such beauty, and know it was created just for us to enjoy, and be nurtured by?

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Seasoned By The Sea

6"x8" oil on Belgian linen mounted on archival panel

"The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea." ~Isak Dinesen

Today was incredibly warm for February in New England, upper 40s. So of course I was determined to go out first thing to the shore line. Moody skies are always an attraction at this time of year, but it's certainly nice to not be knee deep in snow! Lots of things still going on in the home-front, so I've been keeping most of my paintings small lately. I carried my tiny little pochade box just to keep things easy, in case it was colder than I thought. So I worked with brushes. This box has an edge that holds the panel in, and it's not very conducive to painting with a knife (no free edges on the panel). So, I'm a firm believer in using the best tools for the circumstances. This provided a "quick-sketch" to consider color, etc. for a larger painting. Outdoor sketches done with this sort of speed, are good for the equivalent of "note-taking" to be developed further.

Lavender Valley

5"x7" oil on gessoed masonite archival panel

"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Emerson really knows what I need to hear all winter....patience, summer warmth will come back again. Slow, steady....live in the moment....and day-dreaming is optional!

Lavender thoughts are sustaining me lately - not that this winter has been as harsh as last year. But I do crave those long days of sunshine with flowers tossing their blossoms to and fro. Wafting fragrance and the hum of flower-drunken honey bees.

Keys Creek Lavender Farm (Valley Center, CA) is one of those magical places that will forever have an effect on my painterly life. Being able to spend a few days painting on location locks these wonderful sensory elements into my brain. mmmm, can you feel the sunshine and smell that lofty fragrance???

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Luscious Lavender Rows

5"x7" oil on gessoed archival panel

"With immediacy and intensity, smell activates the memory, allowing our minds to travel freely in time." -Tom Robbins

Along with plein air works, I had brought home some 'souvenirs' of my visit to Keys Creek Lavender Farm (in Valley Center, CA). It's true, the fragrance will bring back such wonderful memories. Rows of lavender, sweeping and waving in the soft breeze bring such delight. I was so attracted to the 'abstractness' of this view, I now have a larger painting in the works with this view!

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My website: www.roxannesteed.com

Lavender Harvest

8"x6" oil on Belgian linen mounted on archival panel

I've been craving some winter escapism, but other realities & duties prevent me from taking off to indulge the travels for right now. Isn't it wonderful to have some terrific memories to draw from when we need to 'fill our well'. There's a particular journey to a lavender farm in southern California that fills some of my daydreams! Keys Creek Lavender Farm to be exact- a what a wonderful multi-sensory experience. Bees buzzing happily over rows and rows of purple lushness, and these lush flower stalks waving in the gentle breeze. The rows make a wonderful visual effect of being lost in a 'maze of color', what a delight. If you get there early in the morning, before the sun is too high in the morning sky, the fog burnoff is a wonderful hazy dream-like effect. That's when the cutting was being done, harvesting these long stalks of flowers - to be sold as bouquets. These large bundles of flowers are gathered and hoisted up over one shoulder of the gatherer, almost looking like a small bale of hay (though purple). The days that I went out there to paint are forever etched in my brain, for every painting I'll ever do of the place from that time onward. Plein air work just has a way of locking all those sensations into memory.

For more information regarding this painting, please contact me here.

Baby Kiss

10"x8" oil on Belgian linen mounted on archival board

"When a child is born, so is a mother." - anonymous

Ahh- so much fun painting faces! I threw caution to the wind and decided to use both palette knife and brush on this one. I wanted the lushness of what a knife can bring to the paint, yet a bit more detail where necessary with a brush, without getting too tied to detail.

Glad to be back from a weekend trip to Baltimore to begin settling some family 'stuff'. I'll just leave it at that. It's cutting into my painting time, so I'm having to really concentrate my efforts this week! Got 2 more small landscapes painted today, I'll be posting those soon!
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Sunshine and Happiness Floral

10"x8" oil on Belgian linen mounted on archival panel

“Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” -Robert Heinlein

The last painting from the Valentine's Vault! A bit larger than the last few I posted.

Just so you know I haven't been simply goofing around this week, after I finished the rest of my 2011 accounting for my business and paid my CT sales tax on Tuesday, I have been going through lots of reference photos I had stashed away during the holidays, and decided to make a quick charcoal sketch of this young friend of ours....a friend of our daughers. Now she is grown with a little one of her own! The painting I (think) I've finished today I'm calling 'Baby Kiss'- I'll post it tomorrow!

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A Budding Romance

8"x6" oil on linen mounted on archival panel

“Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.” -Bruce Lee


Yes, the quote IS from that Bruce Lee! Yet another painting from my 'Valentine's Vault'. It is dry and ready to ship at 2009 prices, and free shipping as well. The only way you can go wrong is if you are unprepared!

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