I have been painting for the past twenty years, and selling my work at our Gallery/Café. My home and Studio are located on the bank of the beautiful Kankakee River; my inspiration and desire to paint come from the influence of my surroundings. The Midwest is a constantly changing scene, and I get motifs from the water, the prairie grasses, the farmers fields, the ditches, the sunrises over the river, and the feeling of being in touch with the earth when I am working in my garden. Painting for me is the song of my life, and I am the happiest when I have just completed a piece that I consider a work of art. Someone once asked how I could bear to sell my work. My first thought was, how could I bear not to? I now have art collectors from all over the United States, and consider my paintings on display in their homes to be an honor. I know what a privilege it has been for me to have a place to show my work. The fact that people who love good food are very likely to be interested in and love art has been a blessing for me, and I am thankful. The paintings are all framed and ready to hang. Please call or e-mail for prices and any other questions. I would like to share with all of you a quote from one of my favorite writers. John Dewey’s “Art as Experience”: “The consummatory phase of experience-which is intervening as well as final-always presents something new. Admiration always includes an element of wonder. As a Renascence writer said: “there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” The unexpected turn, something which the artist himself does not definitely foresee is a condition of the felicitous quality of a work of art; it saves it from being mechanical. It gives the spontaneity of the unpremeditated to what would otherwise be a fruit of calculation. The painter and poet like the scientific inquirer know the delights of discovery. Those who carry on their work as a demonstration of a preconceived thesis may have the joys of egotistic success but not that of fulfillment of an experience for its own sake. In the latter they learn by their work, as they proceed to see and feel what had not been part of their original plan and purpose.”