I love all art.  I don’t really have a filter through which I pare things down to one or two genres, or one or two favorite artists, or any particular style.  I love abstract as much as realistic, Georgia O’Keeffe as much as Jackson Pollack or Grimshaw, or Tiepolo, or the Hudson River School, or Takashi Murakami, even anime and Ghibli.  Don’t get me started on James Jean, Jessica Zoob, or FIona Rae…  So many artists, so many styles…all delicious.  So, deciding what to create has been the one biggest issue of my art study.  I have vacillated from detailed photorealistic landscape to pet portraiture, to digital illustration to abstract art.  I really tried to dig deep for this next project, to find a subject that I adore and want to recreate to the best of my ability, to show the world how beautiful this particular subject is.  I considered flowers, landscapes, animals…  But of all the possibilities of beauty that God has enriched us with, I’ve decided His greatest creation – humanity – is most worthy.  For that reason, I wanted to test my abilities and attempt to recreate a painting made by a masterful artist.  As you can see from the first sentences, even just deciding among those artists is a labored decision for me.  At first, I leaned toward the Hudson River School…could I pull off Thomas Cole’s “Consummation of Empire?”  Maybe if I had a couple of years, I suppose.  Oh, and I forgot to mention – this piece would be completed in pastel…so, yeah….  Then it was Frederic Church’s “Cotopaxi (1862).”  I was close.  And then I started thinking about the Pre-Raphaelites, artists such as John William Waterhouse, John Everette Millais…  Eventually to land on one of my all-time favorites, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.