Spring Break-Sunday Dinner

Painting my way through Spring Break.  One more about Ukiah!  What’s spring break like for you?  Do you have a favorite place or people you visit?  I’d love to hear your stories/traditions.  We seem to have a spring break routine we follow & this year I took  more pictures than usual so I can paint pictures of the main events.

After driving from Idaho to Squaw Valley, CA. we went on to my parents house in Ukiah.  Northern California this time of year is stunning, with green rolling hills and new life everywhere.  Spring comes about a month later in Idaho.  I have 2 more day trips I’ll paint/blog about.

Sunday dinner at moms house is legendary.  She is a locavore and grows a lot of her own food.  If she still lived in Southern California I think she would grow ALL of her food, especially avocados.  She raises all of her own meat and so many beautiful fruits and vegetables.  You will often find her out in the garden or in her greenhouse before dinner collecting beautiful little lettuce leaves and edible flowers for a salad.  Sunday dinners usually accommodate the vegans, carnivores, and all the picky eaters.

Ukiah in July is the best, with the peaches, berries, and everything else in season.

I LOVE vegetables and all of my moms cooking so we made sure to make it to Ukiah for dinner.  This year she made this salad in a hand carved mahogany bowl that she bought at a farmers market in Sonoma.  When everyone came together for dinner I saw how amazing her salad looked, always a work of art itself, and asked everyone to wait a minute to eat it so I could take a picture.  I ran off and got my camera and took this shot.  There is one more little clear dish of butter or something that I am going to paint in still.

I’ve been working on mixing colors that are rich in chroma.  I’ve learned that if I lighten a color with another light color, like zinc yellow I can get a beautiful light spring green without killing all the chroma.   Of course sometimes you want to kill the chroma.  For the pretty spring green of the lettuce I used ultramarine blue, zinc yellow, and probably a tiny tiny bit of titanium white.