In June 2009, I showed my work at the La Jolla Festival of the Arts for the first time. The festival organizers (the Torrey Pines Kiwanis) seemed to like my work. A few months later, they invited me to submit a concept for the 2010 festival poster. I was thrilled!
To find inspiration, I flew down for the day and had lunch at the La Valencia Hotel with Ronn Rohe, the festival chairman, and Chris Palmquist, a lovely friend I’d met at Sausalito. It was the perfect setting—lobster salad on the balcony, ocean views, and the kindest staff accommodating my every photo shoot whim.
The theme needed to say “La Jolla” yet still feel like my work— intimate. After rounds of composition changes with the festival committee, including swapping in my brother Matt’s pinot noir label on the wine bottle, I got to painting.
That painting put me through it: three drawings, nearly two full paintings, countless Photoshop tweaks. The original was auctioned for charity, with no prints made—only posters. My hope is that it reminds people of vacation days, and the joy of slowing down to enjoy life’s richness.
February 2010 – 22″x30″ – Watercolor on paper
More from the Places Gallery
Bella Serata
Joe and I stayed in the room with this window on two trips to Pomino in Tuscany: 2017, my dad’s last trip to Italy, and in 2022. A few weeks after we came home in 2017, Pop and I were sitting at their kitchen table. “Let me ask you something, have you left Pomino?”...
Home
Several years before painting this, I was hiking when the memory surfaced: I needed to paint that photo of myself—nearly 35, lying on a wall at my mother’s cousin Jacinta’s house in Croatia. No one remembers who took it, and I don’t remember lying down like that....
Lunch on the Terrace
I had lunch with my parents on the back terrace in the place we stayed in Quarante, in Langedoc in France - the same village where Blue Door is. I love the colors in the salad and wine and was intrigued to paint the reflections and shadows in the glasses and plates....
Blue Door
I found this blue door while strolling through a tiny village called Quarante in Languedoc, in southwest France. I was on vacation with my parents. Those 12 days in France continue to be some of the best days I've ever spent on vacation, and I love being reminded of...
More Vineyards
AmaZin
The spirit of this painting has been patient and faithful. The grapes are Zinfandel, from my friend Sue's ranch in Cloverdale. After Zintopia, it's my second painting from there. The way this patch of grapes is postioned on the hill, the sunlight shows off their...
Napa
It was late autumn, the day I drove home after a lunch at Greystone in St. Helena. On the side of Highway 29, the main route through the Napa Valley, lies vinyard after vinyard. The afternoon sun was low in the sky and as it shone through the reds and yellows of the...
Sonoma
The path to a painting is rarely direct—especially this one. It began with a photo I took in early fall 2008, just a year after I started showing my art. I was driving back from an errand at the North Bay Gallery in Sonoma when I spotted white grapes along Highway 12....
Zintopia
Zinfandel grapes from a new vineyard! When my brother Mike and his wife Julie sold their house I lost my source of Zinfandel grapes to paint. Where I was going to find them when I could no longer pop by to see my brother and sister-in-law. I forgot that we live in...
Juicyfruit
On a sunny Sunday morning, driving home from an overnight at a campout my husband goes on every August, in my peripheral vision on the side of River Road, were these grapes. Their orange color stood out - orange grapes? I pulled over on the lumpy-grass shoulder and...
Rest
I was up in the wine country - the Valley of the Moon in Sonoma late in the year. My sweetie suggested I check out the Christmas tree farm on Moon Mountain. Driving back down the road I saw along the way – someone’s home, not a big vineyard – grapes near the fence....
Zinoasis
These grapes grew in a tiny vineyard (29 plants) on a red-dirt hillside in my brother Mike's backyard in San Anselmo, where he and his wife Julie created a lovely idyll - table and chairs under a bright red umbrella and the canopy of a walnut tree. They had tomatoes...
Summer Zinfandel
There's nothing like a deadline to light a fire under my butt. I really wanted to submit a painting to the California State Fair Art of Wine exhibit the summer of 2011. A painting of mine had been accepted in that category the previous three years in a row and I...
Late Summer Zin
Late in the summer of 2009 I visited Mike's yard to see what his zinfandel grapes were like when they were nearly ripe. BJ and I climbed all over his hill in the evening light, having to climb under the netting draped over them - more sugar in the grapes and the birds...
Zin of Many Colors
Here's my first attempt to go big. It is my second painting of my brother Mike's zinfandel grapes . Mid-Summer Zin, my first, was a hard act to follow. At the time I painted this, it was a huge stretch And I worked on it fiercely to get it done in time to be framed...