Paintings As Gifts And Donations

We went to a Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary Party yesterday evening. As we and our friends get older, such affairs are becoming more frequent.

We gave the happy couple one of my older framed watercolors. They had admired it when seeing it hanging in our house (my private gallery).

It is a small plein air painting of a local urban scene - shoppers walking along a sidewalk mall passed a vendor's kiosk and some Mediterranean style buildings (this is pretty common view in the Santa Barbara area). I painted it as a demonstration at an outdoor exhibit over five years ago.



The painting has been shown at many local exhibits and has hung in my gallery for several years. I have been very happy with that scene. One of my better urban scenes of that period. But no one had fallen in love with it enough to buy it.

Over the years I have had mixed feelings about giving away my paintings. As they have accumulated and storage has grown to be a serious problem, I have given away or donated more and more paintings. My feelings today are that it is better that someone else may enjoy a painting than it should sit in my storage rack where nobody sees it!

And who knows, someone may see it and ask about me enough to look me up on my website or at a future show. They might even buy something for themselves!