When I lived in the Sherman Hill district of Des Moines, I liked the area so much that I decided I ought to paint some scenes from the neighborhood. This was the first one I completed, a painting of some daylily leaves poking through an old wrought iron fence in front of one of the houses in the neighborhood. As it happened, I moved away from that neighborhood (and from the Midwest entirely) after living there only a year, so this is one of only two paintings I completed from that area. This painting is marked 'not for sale' because my husband liked it so much that he begged me not to sell it.

This was the first floral painting I completed. I worked from a photo reference, used with permission by Mary Muller.

Another still life from Mary Muller's studio. At times, this was a very amusing painting to work on because my still life kept changing. My lessons at the studio were only once a week, and usually when someone was working on a still life, everyone knew not to bother the arrangement. There were usually a dozen or more still life arrangements scattered about the studio with notes on them reading "Do not move! Still being painted!" The only problem with this one was that tomatoes don't keep so well from week to week, so every week I had a new set of tomatoes on the still life after the last ones had rotted away. Sometimes the new tomatoes were drastically different from the ones I'd half-finished painting the week before.

Another still life from my lessons with Mary Muller. This one was sold through the Art on the Hill gallery in Des Moines, to a bed and breakfast in the area that wanted it on display in one of their guest bedrooms.