Ernal Optimism and Catalogue update 2024

Finally I got caught up on the catalogue, there were a lot of paintings to number and record. I put a small number in pencil on the corner of each painting, and register in a giant spread sheet with information on size, year, type of paper, and who owns it. This abstract painting was in the pile but never get scanned, probably because Cilei liked it so much I left it on the kitchen table display for a long time. From the look of it, I was cleaning off some burnt sienna and vanadium yellow, along with some other neat colours. 

Ernal Optimism, watercolour 9 x 12" watercolour paper, 2025 (No. 4289b)

In the end, 2024 was the most productive painting year ever for me, by quite a margin (graph below) with 885 paintings. Most of those were small location landscapes, with additional abstract and World Inspired Landscapes. To date, I painted 179 in 2025, which is tracking slightly higher than last year since the summer is always more productive. But the number of paintings is not the important thing, its whether I have fun with it, and if people on the blog/Facebook/Instagram continue to check in. Perhaps I can spend more time per painting, it just gets tedious on location but well see how it goes. Here is a graph since 2018... it goes way back to 1989 but I just show the last 6 years.