The early years...

Starry Night is the first painting I remember. My mom loved this painting...
...and her favorite flower was the iris. I will always associate Van Gogh's Iris paintings with her and her love of the flower and the color purple.
Monet was also beloved in our house, especially the impressionist garden paintings.
The DeYoung had an exhibit of Tiffany glass when I was a kid. It made a huge impression on me...
...especially the nouveau flora.
The DeYoung also got the Tut show. It flabbergasted me, even at the tender age of nine. I was especially fond of the Isis figures.
Judith's I & II by Klimt were my favorite paintings. But until college, I didn't realize...
...that is a severed head at her fingertips!
This painting, 'Die Musik', also by Klimt, was destroyed in a fire many moons before I was born and I am still lamenting its loss.
I discovered the Lady of Shalott through the PBS adaptation of Anne of Green Gables and became obsessed with it. AGG also got me stuck on the poem the Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. PBS feeds the young! Support your local PBS station!
J.W. Waterhouse's Circe. Love him.
My mom was a fan of Gauguin and I spent hours pouring over the books she had of his work.
I discovered John Singer Sargent on my own and this made him feel like he was mine.
Madam X (aka Madam Gautreau) was my favorite. Originally the right strap was off her shoulder - it was scandalous and had to repainted!
When my uncle Jamie found out I liked Sargent he got in the habit of giving me a Sargent calendar for Christmas. He did it for six years. I saved all of them.
I got to see this one when I was 16. I couldn't believe how small it was and it gave me my first lesson in "small but powerful" painting, a style I eventually decided to adopt for myself.
Another of mom's favorites to become one of my favorites was Winslow Homer.
This is my favorite Homer. I always thought the shock of red was stunning against the blue. I still do.
The same trip that I saw Sargent's 'Red Room' we went to the O'Keefe show. This painting was on buses and huge billboards all over Washington D.C. I was stunned to see that the original was teeny tiny! This solidified my understanding of "small but powerful".
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