Montana Artworking by Cindy Betka

Who writes handwritten letters anymore? It was the rage before the internet and cell phones. It was an art in itself. Some people have beautiful penmanship. Besides that, some letters are historic. Keeping with Memorial Day I found this movie that was produced, “Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam”. I have not seen it and I am sure it would break my heart to see it. It is a documentary featuring letters written by U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines during the Viet Nam War to their families and friends back home. Archive footage of the war and news coverage thereof augment the first-person 'narrative' by men and women who were in the war, some of whom did not survive it. To lighten my heart I am putting up some illustrated letters of Charles M. Russell. “Create in me a clean heart…and renew a right spirit within me.” Psalm 51

Just received notice that: My project Autumn Streaming has been featured on ArtCenter Gallery . "Our curatorial team features a small number of projects to appear on the front of our gallery each day. We only pick the best work that effectively promotes the ArtCenter Gallery community." Autumn Stream, oil, Triptych, 20" X 60" Screen captured image of their page. How nice!

In the good days when I am painting, I get in the groove and live in the moment. It is all about problem solving. Back in another incarnation someone once told me that designing curves in a composition is one of the more difficult problems to solve. So I have set myself up for the challenge in this painting. The photos show the progress, start to finish. The shapes are full of indentations and projections. Each shape is different and they play off of one another.

More Snow, keeping me in studio My palette is mainly made up with Cobra water-mixable oil paints. In the 2 current paintings I am working on, I have been experimenting with really pushing the water mix. The effects are similar to water colors, but more forgiving. I like the play of transparent with the opaque. Here are some close ups of the beginnings of the paintings. We shall see how far I take them.    

Sometimes you just have to shift gears to get out of a rut. We did just that to travel a bit to visit relatives and old friends. We were motivated by the changes and projects they were accomplishing so much that when we arrived back home we had all of these ideas for projects here. After we calmed down and thought about some of those ideas in depth we canned a few of them, but we still changed our routine mainly because of the season change. The planting and gardening is now slated as the morning chores. Thus leaving the afternoon as time in the studio. I will do a few updates on the gardening projects in later blogs to mix things up a bit. I am just starting to get back to my water series paintings.   Red Branches,  Oil, 16" X 20"