Postcard of the West Village Dandelions Painting

May is my birthday month. This March, I'd sent my daughter, Jenkins, and two of her roommates to quarantine at a friend's lake house in S.C. (thank you Anne Bauknight - who makes the most amazing tasting, beautiful cookies at SodaCitySweets...message me if you'd like to buy some!) My husband, Mark, was still stuck in D.C., getting the house ready to sell or rent. So I was stuck in NYC for my birthday all alone, with only the four quarantine cats to talk to (I'd taken Jenkins' cat and all of her roommates' cats under wing, adding to our already 2-cat house). The worst part of the first wave of the pandemic had eased up a wee bit - enough for me to feel okay about going for a long walk. My father, Thomas Franklin Gilbert, is considered to be the founder of the field of Human Performance Technology (he coined the term Performance Engineering). He used to work in the West Village, so I decided I'd make my destination his old office. Of course, when I arrived, all I saw was an old building that looked like all the other old building on the same block. But nearby was the Jefferson Market Garden, so I went to sit on a bench and admire the red geraniums and sketch out my next painting. The garden is so well maintained, but over in a corner were some brave dandelions poking their sweet little yellow heads out. After walking back the 4 miles to the Upper West Side, I went up to my terrace and painted them. My process: My go-to paint brands are predominately Golden and Liquitex. Sometimes Utrecht, Blick and Sennelier creep in there, too. The brushes used are whatever is hanging around not covered in paint. I also use a lot of cotton cloths to blend the paint around. Oh, yes, and my trusty spatula knife. Almost all of my paintings are finished off with my own painting-framing technique, which allows the paintings to be hung without frames. The process is organic, with me putting a lot of Payne's gray in the palm of my hands, and then palming the color around the sides of the painting - bleeding over the edge a bit - so the sides of the painting are black. Payne's gray was the first paint I used to do this, and it's sort of a good luck thing. I like to think that the luck is passed onto whomever is looking at the paintings. The buyers who have decided to have my work frame, tend to use floating frames. I'm a published novelist. I've written 4 novels (translated into 14 languages). But I love painting more. My novels were deemed funny and people wrote that my stories brought them great pleasure and happiness. I hope that my paintings will do the same. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Sarah

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:30 W x 40 H x 1.5 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.