@Gary McNeill you should do more landscapes, to me they are your best. I have worked in many medias, but paint I have only just begun to understand the complexities of blending them. I look forward tp your next showing.
I painted animals for 10 years. Actually I'm better at the animals in those pictures then the landscape around them. It's just in the last year that I've been able to actually make landscapes much better than I used to and I hope to continue doing a lot of them as long as there's something I can do out there.
Drawing and painting are something that I have always enjoyed doing also, @Gary McNeill . While I have never been an artist with actual paintings like you and @Ina I. Wonder , I have enjoyed the the relaxation of creating the picture. When I was in school, I was one of those kids who "doodled" on the sides of my paperwork all of the time, some of it even got handed in that way occasionally. In the evenings, I would draw or paint and listen to music, and I had a nice little collection of pictures eventually. After I grew up and got married, then raising kids kept me too busy to do much drawing, and interrupted me the times that I did attempt it. About the best I did back then was painting pictures of horses on the kids jeans, and things like that. I had a set of those Artex paints, and enjoyed decorating things with those. Now, I mostly just play with pictures on my iPad, but I do have a set of acrylic paints, and plan on trying my luck with them again this winter.
@Gary McNeill , I admire your ability to work from your imagination. I can't take my thoughts and put them on canvas. I MUST have a picture I can work from. That's probably why I see you as an artist. I just replicate what I can see. I've never had an art class, I taught myself out of the need to save the likeness of some photos that were fading so badly that I was afraid of loosing them. This is a picture of some of my earliest work.
Gosh @Ina I. Wonder those is some great work you've done there! For someone who never took an art class I would say you have some very good artistic talent there.