I worked so hard on this the coffee started to evaporate and leave a yellowish ring so I painted it. Also, coffee can be purple at times.

I made this painting for a friend and gave it to her for her birthday. But I kept the original.

For some reason there was a pear painting rage going on that I never bought into. I painted these in a class where everyone had to paint pears.... Why?

My cat, Mango, was never happy. She was a loner, but she never defected so it wasn't all that bad. We liked her anyway.

This is the underpainting and sketch for 'Lester on his Horse'

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I asked a neighbor if I could borrow this shell he had in his garden because I wanted to paint it. He said, 'What color are you going to paint it?" LOL

I call this painting "Dark Horse" because I don't know who it is! It's done partly from a photo and partly from memory. I have a thing for eyes and this horse gave me some practice time on horse eyes. It was fun to do and I'm happy with the outcome. I gave it to my friend Jo Anderson who owns Anderson-O'Brien Art Gallery in Omaha's Old Town. Jo and I go back years and we had many wild experiences with our horses and dogs.

This is lesson number II of painting glass, water and air with Laurel Daniel at AMOA Laguna Gloria School of Art in Austin, Texas. At first I wasn't sure I could do it, but with a little practice, things are looking up.

Lester Stiles on his ranch in Thrall, Texas getting ready to go out and move some cattle.

When I paint in acrylic my style completely changes and I'm not sure why. It might be that the colors are "edgier", I have trouble mixing them, and they dry a shade or two darker. I paint faster because they dry fast, and by that I mean they get kind of sticky, but they don't dry completely until the next day so you have to wait to see if you like it. Frans has such distinct, chiseled features that they just begged to be painted and I did, albeit, from a photograph. And the eyes were fun to pain

In 1933, the year they were married, my dad took this picture of my mother one afternoon when she was waiting for the street car to go shopping in downtown Minneapolis. He was an amateur photographer and always took pictures in black and white with his Voigtlander camera—I inherited all of his negatives—what a treasure trove! My mom was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, as you can see here, so I embellished the photo a bit and made it look like she might have been standing in her garden.