September 2026

October 01, 2026

September 2026

Stonington Borough, Connecticut

There’s a hint of crispness in the air and I’m ecstatic. There are plenty of warm days left, but the end is near!

The month was good and bad. Let’s get the bad out of the way - my car’s air conditioning went out on one of the hottest days of the year. I cannot even begin to describe the sheer misery of driving a black car up and down the black asphalt of I-75 at a snail’s pace, windows down with truckers and motorcycles on a day that felt like 102 degrees. I did my very best to not complain, but it was almost more than I could handle. And it took a week to fix it. You don’t want to know how many f bombs I’ve dropped over this car. Anyway …

The highlight of the month was Connecticut! LOVE! We flew into Hartford, had lunch and then went to the Wadsworth Atheneum, a beautiful museum. Van Gogh, Alice Neel, Franz Kline, de Kooning, Vigee Le Brun, Frans Hals and more.

Then we made our way over to Stonington to check into our hotel. The “borough” as it is known, is so cute, very quiet, on the water, no crowds, no chain stores, just simple easy living. That night we went over to Mystic for dinner and it was nuts over there. Still really cute, but tons and tons of people.

The next day we drove over to New Haven to visit the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery (it’s a museum). Wow, wow, wow. What a treat to see so much incredible art. Constable cloud studies, horse paintings by George Stubbs, a massive Van Dyck portrait and so much more. Then across the street at the Yale University Gallery we saw Kokoschka, Barkley Hendricks, Reubens, more Franz Kline, more Van Gogh, more Frans Hals, more, more, more. Phenomenal. This has been on my museum bucket list for years and I was in heaven.

You know I cannot pass up a docent tour!

Connecticut has an art trail, so we did our research to make sure we saw the major hits. That meant a trip to New Britain and Old Lyme. Honestly, I was blown away by the art. And I learned about artists I’d never heard of before. I learned that American Impressionism was essentially started in Old Lyme by Childe Hassam, and I learned that I’d been pronouncing his name wrong.

If you go to Connecticut and you want to see Impressionism, go to the Florence Griswold Museum, or as it is known in that area … Flo Griz. The museum is fine, but you absolutely must go inside the yellow house which was the boarding house for all of the artists who lived there during the late 1800s, early 1900s. I could *feel* the energy and got teary upstairs in that house. It hit different, it really did. Matilda Browne blew my socks off. Have you ever heard of her? Neither had I. Absolute badass.

The other main event for September was a wedding in Chattanooga. One of Scott’s law school buddies invited us to his daughter’s wedding. Despite the fact that it was hot as hell (an outdoor wedding … oof!) we had a great time. Of course, I had to visit the Hunter Museum of American Art, and ummmm … what a great museum!! Who knew?? There I fell in love with an abstract artist named George Cress. But there was a ton of amazing art. Can’t believe it took this long for me to realize there is great art in Chattanooga!

In addition to those trips, I gave six tours of Amy Sherald’s exhibition at The High, taught a ton of classes and delivered two paintings to the Downtown Gallery in Cartersville.

It looked like my acrylic class in Decatur might not fill, but somehow at the last minute, all of the spaces got snapped up. So we began with painting in black and white to emphasize value. This past Saturday we ventured into color but only used 3: purple, orange and green.

The last week of September was the VH plein air group paint out at the park. I led a flower painting workshop for 20 people, the majority had never painted or drawn before, so it was a concentrated effort to keep everyone on the right path. They were understandably nervous, but everyone was so happy when they left! It’s very difficult to paint a decent painting in 2 hours, especially difficult if you’ve never painted before!

I also spent time setting up a bunch of still lifes for future class assignments, shipped more work to Palmetto Bluff and finished a few new pieces for the bookstore. I need to continue to work on paintings for PB, especially pastels. Who would have thought that pastels would sell so well at PB? I’m grateful, that’s all I can say.

OCTOBER

October is going to be very busy with teaching, docent work, and painting for PB. We also have to go to Baton Rouge to check on Scott’s parents.

OTIS, WINSTON and LOUIS

We recently discovered that Winnie is terrified of the ceiling fan in the sunroom. Earlier this month I saw him crouch down in the den, facing the sunroom and GROWL. What??? I thought what in the world could be back there that would make him growl? Squirrels? No. Plus, he looks at squirrels all day in the front window. Then when we put out some Churu for them, we noticed Winnie would not go in the room for Churu. And he will do anything for Churu. So we turned off the fan (that’s been circulating ever since we got him a year and a half ago!) and now he will get closer to the room but he pretty much stays out of that space unless he is hungry or thirsty. Go figure.

I see ceiling fans!

Lou-Lou has calmed down a little, but he’s still pretty high strung. And sweet ol Otis is just maintaining. He spends more time downstairs and has been snuggling more and more with me, but you can tell he gets irritated when Lou acts a fool. I can understand :)