Wrapping up 2025

[denisejhoward]

Geepers, what a year 2025 was, in just about every sense. You can relate if you watch the news at all. Let’s leave it at that, and be glad to put it behind! It wasn’t all bad, though. Art keeps me sane, and my involvement in the Colored Pencil Society of America and local art activities force me to keep looking ahead and stay organized. Here’s what I accomplished this year…

• Exhibited work in 14 exhibitions, from local to international.
• Finished 11 new artworks
• Sold 3 original artworks
• Won 4 awards
• Taught 2 six-week colored pencil classes at the Pacific Art League (“Introduction to Colored Pencil”, and “Colored Pencil: Beyond the Basics”)
• Gave 5 presentations to local art groups and college classes
• Taught 1 workshop
• Exhibited 2 weekends in Silicon Valley Open Studios
• Exhibited in the Livermore ArtWalk
• Had artwork featured in both American Art Collector and Fine Art Connoisseur magazines
• Had a two-person show in a Silicon Valley startup incubator during their summit of 3500 attendees.
• Bought a new polyester mesh display wall system for festivals–no more heavy, bulky metal panels
• Re-read “Taking the Leap” by Cay Lang
• Finally bought a wide full-spectrum lamp for my drawing table, replacing the two small lamps I previously had on either side. Spent extra to have a custom mount made for it so it would work on a slanted surface.
• Finished my 3rd year as president of the Colored Pencil Society of America
• Thanks to my efforts, CPSA now owns trademarks for “Colored Pencil Society of America”, “CPSA”, and “To The Point”
• Attended the CPSA convention in Bethesda, MD

Not particularly art-related but important for me:

• My computer died (motherboard failure) suddenly and without warning in January, forcing me to spend several thousand dollars for a new one. Thank goodness for backups! Restoring the “soul” of the old computer to the new one was easy, and all the full-resolution digital images of all my original artworks were safe.
• Vacationed in Chicago playing tourist and museum-hopping
• Returned from Chicago via Amtrak’s Empire Builder, a two-day trip full of scenic plains, mountains, lakes, and antelope
• Spent four days museum-hopping in Washington, D.C. after the CPSA convention. I wrote about one of the highlights of this in my August blog post, “Go in for the closeup when you can“.

Eleven seems like a lot of new artworks, but eight of them are only 8″x8″! They’re the first half of a set of 16 that will be shown together in an invitational exhibit in San Francisco in August 2027. Each of the eight took on average three weeks to finish, so I’m glad I have another year and a half to do the other eight as well as other work and projects. As I write this, I haven’t uploaded them to my website, because I can’t let them go before they’re shown in the exhibit.

2026 starts in just a few hours as I write this, and already it’s filling up! My two 6-week colored pencil classes start up again January 15. I’ll be exhibiting two weekends of Silicon Valley Open Studios in May. I’ll be teaching a two-day workshop in Winston-Salem, NC in June. The CPSA convention will be in Prescott, AZ at the end of July. I’m currently mulling over which reference to use for my next large piece–sometimes it takes days! But for the next day or two, I’m just going to daydream ideas into a sketchbook.

Happy New Year!