I've been fortunate enough to travel to Europe every few years, and while there, I'm always looking for scenes that I might want to paint when I get home. My current project is "The Doorways of Lyon", a project born during a visit to the second largest city in France. I was looking through some of the snapshots I'd taken that day, when I saw how beautiful and unique many of the doorways were. I knew they'd be compelling subjects for future painting, so for the rest of my visit, I was constantly pausing to take photos as I walked through the city.  I found, when framing my compositions, that including slivers of the walls and shop windows next to them was crucial. The doorways, as I see them in this project, are not just the doors themselves, but how they fit into their surroundings. 

My first painting of the Lyon (shown in the last photo on this page) was not of the doorways, but a view down one of the city's oldest streets,  Rue du Sergent Blandan. Tiny in size, at only 9" x 12", it packs a lot of detail into a small space.