I'm working on a whole-house remodel of a 1928 Spanish Colonial casita in Glendale, CA. We're mixing up traditional 1920's Colonial elements with 50's mod, which I've tagged #MexMod. I'll post later about other aspects of the project, like the gorgeous 1920's light fixtures I found.

Off the kitchen is a small breakfast room which will have a banquette that needs lots of pillows. I started doing these paintings, looking at Talavera tile (but wanting a more modern Mexican style and color) a few weeks ago, under the kind guidance of my amazing painting teacher, Caryl St. Ama. My assignment was to come up with a series of related paintings: one cold, one cool, one warm and one hot. My intention is to use the paintings, with some additional patterned elements, to create fabric to make into pillows for the banquette (which will be upholstered in vintage serapes I've been collecting.)

This morning I received a new color deck from Sherwin-Williams, "The 2015 Color Mix, Optimistic Odyssey". Now, there are few things that excite me as much as color chips, but as I was flipping through and came to the Unrestrained palette I came to a full stop. Those colors seemed to look a lot like my paintings. And, sure enough, when I threw the deck into the middle of the paintings, every color on the palette was represented in my paintings. Now that is really, really exciting.

It's really nice when something that springs from your heart is actually on trend, without you intentionally trying to be trendy.