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(NOTICE: Apple will stop supporting Homepage web sites in July 2009, so nothing will be added to this one after that date. This site should still exist as it is after that, but nothing new can be added, so it will go out of date with time.) Contact me at jtodd@csudh.edu.
Like many children, I loved to draw and paint. This early interest was set aside for decades while I pursued career and motherhood. After taking early retirement in 2004 from my position as Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology, California State University, Dominguez Hills, I returned to my first love and have been painting ever since. Occasionally experimenting with mixed media, I paint primarily with watercolors, although I use them in nontraditional ways. I prefer to work with pure color straight from the tube of paint and to create exaggerated organic shapes based on nature, animals, and people. I strive to express the beauty and joy of just being alive, so that we appreciate our brief time in this amazing world and take good care of it and of each other.
I have had two paintings accepted into the annual juried national exhibition of Watercolor West. "Will He Answer?" was in the 2006 show, and “Forest Birds” (shown above) was in the 2007 Watercolor West show at the Riverside Art Museum, where it was awarded Third Place. In addition, I have won a dozen awards in local art shows, and one of my paintings, "Bird Girl," was published in The Palette Magazine.
I will be teaching a painting workshop at the Festival of the Cranes in New Mexico in November 2009. For beginning to intermediate painters, this watercolor workshop will focus on the personal expression of impressions, feelings, and memories of the Bosque del Apache, rather than on accurate or realistic depiction. The beauty of the Bosque will serve as inspiration, and participants will be taught methods for creating emotionally expressive paintings that capture their personal experience and vision of the Bosque. Demonstrations will show participants how to use emotionally expressive color, exaggerated shapes, transparent and opaque layering, negative painting, and other methods to create several unique Bosque paintings to take home. Click "Workshop Paintings" above to see examples of expressive landscape painting. For more information, email me at jtodd@csudh.edu, or go to the Festival of the Cranes web site at http://www.friendsofthebosque.org/
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