Hi there fellow artists and art lovers

My name is JoAnn Russell and painting is my passion, second only to exploring every nook and cranny of this earth for as long as I am able.

About Me Then

I have been drawing and painting since I was a young child. High school classes renewed my interest and gave me the foundations for my future in oil painting. A few local and national awards helped my self confidence and painting has remained an important but small part of my life.

Adulthood took precedence over my painting, but it still hovered in the shadows, calling me whenever a few spare moments appeared during my nursing career and family responsibilities. Over the years watercolor emerged as my medium of choice but oil paints and canvases are always somewhere in my studio.

About Me Now

Retirement has offered me the luxury of traveling and painting as often as I please…and as much as the Pandemic will allow. Even though I have the time for painting, inspiration is often elusive. I find that I need the company of other like minded people to keep me working through the ‘ugly stages’ to get to a completed project rather than setting it aside in a closet or drawer and starting something new, which might also suffer that same fate.

Even though I am fortunate to have many talented artist friends  I am always driven to seek out new artistic challenges, new styles, new mediums. To push myself by learning new skills to try and to travel to new places and find new friends.

Each time I travel I wished that I knew where the local artists were. I wished I had more information on local events…the kind that are not widely advertised. I have scoured through Meet Up groups, Facebook groups and local art venues but found very little to connect me to the heart of the artist community. Not the famous artists, not the commercial venues, but those artists who paint strictly for the love, and fun of painting.

Finding a Solution

So, I decided to give a new website a try. A sort of Facebook-MeetUp-Instagram hybrid where artists can come together, create their profile, share stories and art work, ask questions and post local events. A place to get to know each other and meet for a bit of Urban Sketching, an impromptu weekend Plein Air day, a Zoom meeting to show off our creations or to ask for help in finishing them. Or, to plan a trip halfway around the world

My vision is that someday I will be able to sign in to this website and see a long list of small and large venue artistic events all over the world. Then I would  have the awesome task of deciding where my next artistic venture will be.

“Not all those who wander are lost.”