New year, new art

I haven't updated this in a while due to the constant busyness of creating new and exciting pieces for the Gamber Center.  There's nothing to see yet from any of those paintings anyway since I'm delaying their revelation until the exhibition.  But today I worked on my first painting of 2014, and I am more than happy to show that one off:

Cast of Cupid
oil on canvas
20x16 inches
2014

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas, by the way.  I have a few new art toys, so some things I'm looking forward to this year:  Plein air painting, more art shows, reading up on some 19th century art, and the joy of painting according to Richard Schmid.  I got his new book Alla Prima II, which I assume is a new edition with new additions to his previous book simply titled Alla Prima:  Everything I Know About Painting... or something like that.  This one is "Everything I Know About Painting - and More".  It's a beautiful book, so I'm looking forward to reading it.  It's in my stack o' books to read.  I just finished a couple on Zorn and Repin, and I'm currently working on Ivan Shishkin - a great landscape painter from 19th century Russian school.  Another one in the stack is the also-beautiful book on Jean-Leon Gerome, from Laurence des Cars, Dominique de Font-Reaulx, and Edouard Papet.  And if you know art books, you can probably imagine that my stack o' books to read weighs close to 30 tons.  But that's okay because they're all spectacular books for any artist to own.
I've also done a few hand studies for another painting idea that I have.  This will be one of my next projects to work on, and I won't talk about what it is, but here are the drawing studies I did to give you an idea:

 

I was actually inspired by a few painted hand studies by Kamille Corry (seriously, look up her work), and from the painting style of one of my favorites Rob Liberace.  Hoping that my vision for this project comes to fruition.
That's all the updating for now.. Portrait Painting class starts back up next Tuesday, and I'm going to be scrambling around in the next few weeks to get some art show applications sent out.  More on that to come later.  Happy New Year, and happy art-making!