Six oil paintings by Mac (that's me)

For your amusement:

I have been trying, at one mile an hour, to learn how to paint - it is frustrating, made worse by my general laziness which prevents me from practicing enough -- practice being the critical element to improvement in painting just as it is in, say, playing musical instruments.

This is what I've done this year (and a couple of previous years). 

First is a watercolor of a flower in a glass - did this a few years ago at a class; I'm quite proud of it.

Next up is a small landscape in oils; the photo is very bad but i can't get a good photo of this no matter what I do. But that's ok because it's not that good of a paint

ing....

I like the little tree on the left, and the rise of land it sits on, and the hills in the background. The tree itself is awful. This view is from Alameda island looking out over the San Francisco Bay.

Here is a watercolor of an 

orange tree, which I also did in class a couple of years ago. I like the roundness and sense of depth and brushwork on the oranges.... 

I like this recent oil painting, taken from a photo in a magazine, of a bench against a garish red wall....

And here is a recent oil landscape, also from a photo.

I have a few other paintings, mainly from a recent Art Camp I went to in ther Sierras, but I haven't framed them yet. I discover that canvas panels come in sizes that do not match frame sizes at art/frame shops like Aaron Brothers -- whose frames are almost all sized for photographs, not paintings. Sigh....!