​Late 2017 and early 2018 also saw two new pilot programs launch with Waterbury Magnet Schools thru the Mattatuck Museum.

And the Valley Arts Council's "E Street Gallery" will be celebrating our 10 year Anniversary this year with a spring members exhibit and reception. Several new pieces are being prepared for exhibit here, as well as other possible area venues.

​An extremely busy year so far... looking forward to continued highlights to what began as a questionable year.  Stay tuned!

The first fiscal quarter has begun and the push to gear up new business for the coming year is under way. The studio has also been busy preparing new pieces for sale and for future exhibitions. This point also marks the launch of my new online newsletter, which will inform and keep my subscribers up-to-date on items for sale, classes and upcoming events.

We are also 5 weeks into the new school year and my students have been working hard. Grade 5 recently completed a value study in acrylics, based on Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (1818).

months allow me to increase my client work and add additional teaching programs to my schedule. The break also gives me more time to paint and increase my inventory, take on new commissions, gallery representation, enter shows and plan for summer events, as well as getting around to those long overdue personal projects, such as the creation of this new website.

So the day has finally come to push this new website over to a testing platform and give it a dry run in a focus group environment, just to make sure it reads well, is cohesive and gets the message across without confusing or irritating the end user. This is an important step because (and I've said this time and time again to younger designers) as artists, we are our own worst critic and its very difficult to pick up on our own errors. Relax, its normal, our own work is never quite good enough and in our strive for perfection, we can go on tweaking forever.

Having said that, with experience and a sense of maturity as we navigate the industry, we do reach a point where we are confident in our skills and automatically know when its right... and finished. I believe I have reached that stage with this project. I am satisfied with the results, but still need a few other eyeballs on it to get the end-users' point of view. After all, I have been staring at it for the better part of the summer.