Painting Classes

I gave up on New Year's resolutions a long, long time ago. But for 2009 I was serious about finally taking up painting again. Since planning time for myself is so difficult in our family, a painting class seemed the answer. This would force me to go out, away from all the other distractions at home.
The class I joined, was a group of women who had been painting together for years, but they made me feel very welcome right from the beginning. The teacher, Alexandra Steen, is also very well known around here.

Since it had been quite some time since I painted, I decided to take up an old painting that I never finished. That did not work out very well, there was a very good reason that I never finished that painting!
Still unsure about myself I thought that painting an abstract would be easy. Abstracts don't have to look like anything, don't they? Just throw some paint in strange shapes on a canvas and you have an abstract, right? Well, it seems that it is not the case, painting an interesting abstract is quite difficult actually!

So the next try was painting one of my own photographs in a different scene. A painting that I wanted to do for a long time and could not get out of my head.
It took 2 lessons and some encouragement of my art teacher to paint the little girl lost on an empty beach on the canvas.
At last a painting I felt good about! I am still looking for a good way to handle my brushstrokes and painting styles, so I am sure that I will experiment in the next few paintings. In a few years time I might paint a completely different version of this scene, but for now, I am quite happy about it.
In the meantime I started painted a fish, but am still working on that one!