A little girl kneels on a sun-warmed floor, pouring from a tin coffee pot into a cup that's almost too big for her hands. She's completely absorbed — head bowed, curls falling forward, a blue ribbon barely holding on. The light catches the metal, the folds of her white dress, the cerulean blue of her sleeves, and somehow makes the whole scene feel like a memory you've always had.

Sonya Terpening painted this in transparent watercolor — no white paint, no opaque layers, just pigment and water and the paper glowing through from underneath. That's what gives the light in this painting its warmth. It's not painted on. It's the paper itself, showing through where Terpening left it untouched. The shadows in the dress, the gleam on the coffee pot, the ruddy glow of the child's skin — all of it built from nothing but transparent washes, layered with the kind of precision that comes from thirty years of working in the medium.

The back reads: "Tea Party" ©2005 / Transparent watercolor, original / Sonya Terpening. And her signature on the front carries the letters NWS — National Watercolor Society.

And her signature on the front carries the letters NWS — National Watercolor Society.

This is the work of an artist whose paintings hang in the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, the Gilcrease Museum, and the Oklahoma State Capitol. She's been invited to the Prix de West for over twenty-four consecutive years — one of fewer than ten women in the show. In 2008, she became the first woman to receive an artistic award at Masters of the American West.

Framed in a silver beaded profile with white matting. Ready to hang.