Eagle
by Jane McElvany Coonce

My classes are over for the summer, and therefore, I've been doing so much painting!!!!  I'm getting tons of paintings done because I can stay home and paint all day.  Teaching takes a lot of time.  It's not just the hours that you have class, but it's also the preparation of getting things lined up in order to do proper demos for the classes.  Since I have both oil painters, pastelists and watercolorists in my class, I've got lots of prepartions to do in each of the mediums.

I've had several commissions that have been piling up and slowly being worked on, but this week , I've managed to finish up 3 commissions.  The one above, Eagle, is a painting I did for Nancy and Dave Mulligan.  It's rather large, and I'm thrilled with how it has turned out.  It's going to the framers this week. Rob Plati, my fabulous framer at Underground Industries, helped me pick out a beautiful frame of brown wood with a white linen liner.   Can't wait to see it in the frame.

Nancy and Dave wanted an eagle painting.  I have a great photographer friend, Bob Currie, who is one of the best photographers I know.  I asked him to take some pictures of eagles for me that I could work from.  He took so many beautiful photographs, and I had a hard time picking one.  But this was the final choice of the bird in flight, with its' enormous wing span stretching out across the water.

Can't wait to deliver it to Nancy and Dave.  Hope they enjoy it as much as I enjoyed painting it.