For the last about 15 years I have been enjoying the creative pastime of painting and drawing. Over the years I have sold many pieces and with the exception of a doctor’s office, where I helped install the work I seldom get to see it in it’s new environment.
The second photo is of a piece I sold at Interiors of Edmonds and the new owner was kind enough to share a photo of it hanging in her lovely home. All artists should be so lucky to see where their work finds a home.
Thank you for sharing.
Everyday in my home I wake up to a variation of this view. It took a long time in life to get to the place where I wake up and can’t wait to see the view of the morning. I kept buying and selling and then building and selling to make a profit on each so I could move to somewhere with a better view. I am in the smallest home, other than my first in Del Mar, California and I love the view the best!
Many do not understand this obsession, but living in the Pacific Northwest we have this incredible opportunity to live our lives with amazing views or using a word I heard for the first time “Fablioso” views. If you don’t live where you love the view you wake up to, then perhaps it is time to think about moving?
That is where I came in to help you find just the right view. As an artist and a professional (ASID & IIDA) interior designer (Yes I passed the two day test) and having worked to earn a PhD in Business Marketing, I can do a great job for you!
Think of me when you think of Real Estate. Join me on one of my Facebook pages:
https://www.facebook.com/dianakingsley1
https://www.facebook.com/D-zine
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Picked up my paint brushes for the first time in six months. It felt glorious. This painting has been sitting on the canvas half done for over six months. Life got in the way, and that should never happen to an artist. I truly enjoy selling real estate, but was with a team that wanted you to work 7/24 and cold call people whenever they signed online to look at houses. It made me feel like I was “Big Brother” watching what people were doing. I don’t like it when I get email for months when I was interested for a short amount of time, or now on Facebook anything that you have viewed online or in Amazon shows up on the side bar, till your next choice of searches.
When I finished this painting tonight and photographed it, I could not decide which I liked it best. Horizontal or Vertical. That is when I started thinking we all have choices to make every day of our life. Today I chose to paint after having a wonderful lunch with my beautiful God daughter. She inspired me to get back to what I love doing.
Not that I am not going to help people buy and sell houses, I am just going to take some time for me to do the things I love.
So you choose, which way do you like it better? Vertical or Horizontal? Life is so full of wonderful choices, just take one and get on with it.
How many Hair Salons have a Chicken Coup, a School House from the 1800’s and nice modern salon built on the property. Don Edward’s in Kingston is Gene Juarez trained and actually listens to what you say. Pretty remarkable combination.
Back in time to Port Gamble with its Post Office. Port Gamble represents one of the few remaining examples of company towns, thousands of which were built in the nineteenth century by industrialists to house employees. Founders Josiah Keller, William Talbot, and Andrew Pope planned the town to reflect the character of their hometown, East Machias, Maine, where many of the early employees originated. For 142 years, the community existed to support sawmills that produced lumber for the world market. The mill closed in 1995, but as a National Historic Site, the townsite has been preserved to reflect an authentic company mill town.
The first known residents of Port Gamble were members of the Nooksclime, Clallam, or S’Kallam tribe who fished and gathered food along Hood Canal. The S’Klallams belonged to the linguistic group, South Coast Salish, which populated Puget Sound. Tribes traded and intermarried and generally experienced little conflict except for raids from outside the region. In 1841, a U.S. Navy expedition led by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes (1798-1877) named the two-mile-long bay at the mouth of Hood Canal after Navy Lieutenant Robert Gamble, who was wounded in the War of 1812.
In the summer of 1853, San Francisco lumber merchant and sea captain William Talbot (1816-1881) spotted the sand spit at the mouth of the bay as a likely place for a lumber mill. Talbot was a partner of Josiah Keller (d. 1862), Andrew Pope (1820-1878), and Charles Foster in the Puget Mill Company. They planned to cut the abundant trees of Oregon Territory into lumber for sale in California and across the Pacific. The sand spit sheltered ships and was close to stands of timber.
S’Klallams already lived on the spit and on the bluff above. Keller induced the natives to move across the bay to Point Julia in exchange for free lumber, firewood, and Christmas gifts. The S’Kallams called the site Teekalet, “brightness of the noonday sun,” for the way the water and sand reflected light on sunny days. Talbot borrowed that name for the mill.
Here is the oldest photo of the building I could find.
Poulsbo, Washington is one of our local “Go To” places in Kitsap County, picturesque with great restaurants and shops galore. Sheila’s offers great breakfast delights with friendly local servers and The Loft restaurant offers great views of the bay, if you sit out on the deck. Be prepared to wait a bit, as I find the service a little slow, but the food is local and good.
In this drawing, I think I actually like the black and white better than the colored version.
Since I just started selling Real Estate again with John L. Scott and Penny’s Team in Poulsbo, and will be showing from Bainbridge to Kingston I decided the perfect house-warming gift would be a drawing of the house my client buys. Let me know if you know of anyone looking to buy a new home in our area.
Out and about buying fabric to make Easter Dresses for my three Granddaughters, with camera in hand, Port Gamble is such a lovely piece of our local history. Originally built as a sawmill town, there are rows of houses built for employees and managers of the Port. the Walker Ames House, which I drew last week was the owners original home.
In the next week or so, I will be drawing the General Store, owned by friends of mine with some of the best food in the area. The fabric store Quilted Strait is often one of my favorite stops, as they have a lovely and varied selection of cotton, more designed for quilts, but work great for “Granddaughter” dresses.
Once in a while you find some sort of Art that makes your heart sing. I think I have found my medium, as this is so very relaxing to me. After years of teaching hand drafting, I get to use the fun sketchy part of drawing, combine it with a little color and have a finished piece that makes me smile. Hope you find what makes you happy.
This last weekend I had the pleasure of taking a pen & ink & watercolor class with a well known artist. Pen & ink has always captured my attention, especially after writing my book “Hand Drafting for Interior Design”
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Working on the drawings for many days, I found pleasure in the hand drawn line and taking this class I got to put to use all the drawings and techniques I shared in my book.
The group of people that came together for the class were talented, funny and made the weekend such a pleasure. But the drawing was just pure delight, and learning a new way to add a tad or splash of color to the drawings, made me want to draw, draw, draw and water color a little.
For many years I took classes with a wonderful impressionist artist and enjoyed the time and progress that I made in the class and the other artists that came to paint and learn. I live on the beach and love my morning, evening and anytime of the day view out my back window to the beach beyond. Over the years I have photographed it and shared the photos here and on Facebook.
Taking the class I wanted to paint the scene in different moods and shades and colors, as it was always changing. I painted it about three times and our teacher decided for me that I could no longer paint it in class. I went along with it because she was the pro. I left that class about three years ago due to political differences. If we disagreed with her political beliefs we were yelled at, put down and not allowed to say anything in response as it was her home (garage) where we painted.
Time has passed and I do know I learned a lot about colors and how to mix them from her and from watching fellow artists; but I also have since thought about how many times Monet painted haystacks or a cathedral at Rouen in France. No one told him he could not paint a subject he was fascinated by. Kevin McPherson, a contemporary artist produced a book called “Reflection on a Pond”, where he painted his own pond 365 days in a row.
Yesterday having passed the real estate broker’s exam, and not being in my studio other than to sew I spent the afternoon painting my interpretation of my view. I just repainted my master bedroom in gray and have the desire to do a series of paintings in black, white & gray, with maybe one accent color. Here is the first of this series. I was inspired by another painting I did earlier called Airstream, that my youngest son loved, so I gave it to him.
Now I am finally inspired to paint again for the sheer joy of it with no intention of running all over trying to sell it or put up another show. I will post on my website: www.dianakingsley.net, but that is as much as I will do going forward.