The Joys Found in 2020

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Here are some pictures of the joys found in 2020 ( the year of the Covid pandemic & life in quarantine ) and my painted Christmas gifts that I surprised each of my sons with since both of them got a new puppy this past year. 

In February 2020, my Joey, who loves to spend as many winter weeks as possible in the mountains skiing, got a Bernedoodle he named "Gigi".  - -  And then around Thanksgiving, my Sam, who is loving life living in Chelsea, Manhattan, got his French Bulldog named "Sprout".
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*Gigi* the Bernedoodle:

The real Gigi ~

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*Sprout* the Big City Dog:

{ Sprout's painting background is based on one of Sam's spontaneous texts to me of the wonderful settings found in his neighborhood of Chelsea, Manhattan.  In particular in this case, it was a texted photo of a beautiful garden with tall sunflowers growing right along the side of the road that I remembered and reviewed for inspiration in the painting of Sprout. }
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​The real Sprout ~

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    A picture of Joey & Sam on Christmas morning 2020 after opening their Christmas gift surprise. ( The artwork in the background of this photo is my brother’s acquired painting by my Great-Grandpa, William P. McDonald, of my great aunt. )

A Little Slideshow of Some of the Process Pictures of the Grandpups:

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When my boys were younger, there was an era when I painted dogs all the time. I used to call my home studio space the dog pound because when you walked into the room all you would see were so many dogs… all kinds of dogs each with a different expression staring down from the stacked rows of shelves encircling the room.
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Here are a few images of some of my old dog artwork that I was able to find on my current computer. ( There are many more pictures of my dog paintings, but they are on an old computer file. )

A “Redbone Coonhound”.   (…haha, that is what my photo file’s label says it is.) :

I remember creating all kinds of various background designs, patterns, and abstractions in the paintings...
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​This one I created to donate the artwork to a fundraiser for my sons' high school. ( The school building constructed in 1960 is made with tan colored brinks that are distinctive of that time period. - - I believe that was my inspiration for the layering of the tan rectangular abstractions behind the dog. )

    These hooks… During my “dog period”, as my son once jokingly called it, I crafted stock loads of these wall hooks with many different pictures of my dog art and sold them at art shows, etc. Here are a couple pictures of the wall hooks I was able to find in my photo files.  Similar to my St. X Golden Retriever, one of them is a drawing of a Cincinnati Reds theme dog that I sold with my baseball art when painting baseball players later replaced my subject of dogs.

​This old snapshot of a collection of painted dog tiles in a frame is looking like what we would call a ‘Zoom’ meeting in 2020…

A while back, I painted this guard dog canvas sitting on our fireplace mantel.

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An old painted canvas with a dog subject just created out of my imagination.

​     ....And finally and most memorable to me is a little oil painting of our beloved family dog “Moxie” when he was a puppy. Our family got “Moxie May” as a rescue dog the May Sam turned 9 and Joey turned 6 and he stayed loyally & lovingly by our sides until after both the boys were well off to college. ~ Here is a photo of a wall in our new home with the Moxie puppy painting looking at us through a stream of captured sunlight.

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Another painting of Moxie from a later Christmas of 2022 blog called: 

“Canvas #13 ~ Good Tidings of Comfort and Joy”

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