I Feel Another Painting Coming On...

This week I met with Samanda and visited her family home where I was introduced to Chica, their parrot. She is sweet and gentle and very social so it was a real treat. I have already planned my next painting with Samanda in it but now I think there will be another to follow that...one with Chica included. I am envisioning something but don't want to discuss it much since when I do that the project has a good chance of never happening. I need to learn how to keep my consul when planning my work...I can be such a blabbermouth though. When I did the pastel painting of Lisa with a Lyrebird I didn't talk much about it and the result was successful and sold almost right away! I had to research Lyrebirds and try to incorporate found photos with the images I had taken of Lisa when she posed for me. This time I can pose Chica with Samanda - always a better option for having light and angle work together. I think it will be later this Spring or Summer when Samanda is home from school again and it will need to be at her house. Chica is very sensitive and might not want to cooperate in an unfamiliar setting (like my studio). In the meantime a friend has given me about $300 worth of canvases that she is not going to be using so I am probably set for the whole of 2011. Happy New Year to all!

The 100 Hurdle!

Sketches for Stained Glass ceiling, Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, circa 1973

Today is a milestone...One Hundred followers! Wow. I really never expected to earn the interest of so many and I am very appreciative, believe me! I shall endeavor to keep you all from getting majorly (is that a word?) bored and find good stuff to talk about and intriguing images to post.

This is a serious motivator for me to keep a fire under myself to produce the best work I can.

Thank you everyone!

I decided to celebrate my 100th follower by showing some old sketches of mine from my Illustrator days. I had just moved back to LA in 1973 and found free lance work with a company that made stained glass windows and lamps for commercial use (restaurants, etc.). They had me design windows and lampshades for The Rusty Scupper restaurant chain first and then I was hired to design a ceiling that was to be 24ft. long for the newly built Las Vegas Hilton Hotel...one of the lobbies. It had to have an underwater mermaid theme I was told. I knew a bit about how stained glass is put together having taken a short course that same year and understood about the necessity of designing to make sure the connecting areas of glass would not cause stresses that could compromise the stability of the whole. I was enthusiastic and excited. I worked for a couple of weeks on a lot of ideas and finally came up with the one you see at the bottom. I also did a colour drawing but that has long since disappeared unfortunately. Even more unfortunate was my client's reaction. Instead of the happiness and thrill I hoped for, he was very concerned over the complexity of my vision. He also did not want to pay for the 80plus hours of work I had put into this project. He paid me about half of what I expected, took my design and had his inhouse designers rework and simplify it. The result, which I didn't see until a year or so later when my husband was passing through LasVegas and stopped to take a photo of the ceiling, was a mere token of my idea. It was cartoony and limpid and a major disappointment. All I could do was chalk it up to experience. A few short years later the hotel had a big fire and the ceiling was destroyed I am told. Karmic justice I thought secretly to myself...

It's That Time of the Year

"Cat Nap" oil 22"x28"

How can I think about the upcoming plans for new work right now? This happens to me every year about this time. I am not especially enmeshed in holiday rush stuff as it is basically just Bob and me and possibly Elissa and Tyler will come up after Christmas for a few days. Old thoughts press to the forefront and it is hard to find the impetus to start a new canvas. That will pass as it always does so I just go with it for a time until I am sick and tired of not producing anything:-) Meanwhile I post some old work, but most of you who follow me have not seen it so to you it can be new. This was my son, right around Christmas time, back in the early 80's. The material on the futon was from drapes my mother had made for the house in the 50's. I used that fabric for quite a few things around my own places. I still have some of it. Very trendy stuff now I understand. She also made the afghan draped over my sleeping child. That got ruined when I washed it and put it in the dryer...I don't think she ever quite got over my doing that...I thought it was dryable yarn, which all her other afghans happened to be! I had just gone back to school to work on my MFA when I did this painting. I was excited and inspired. It got me into a good gallery and sold to somebody in Philadelphia but I don't know who. I often wish I hadn't parted with it.

The cat had been with me since Toronto and moved to LA with me and back to east to Rochester after I got married and had Tristan. Poor, Puff...had to give him away finally as my allergies began to cause serious health concerns for me...he couldn't forgive that but he didn't understand the deadly alternative to finding a new home for him. No body promised him life would be easy

but I did my best, for both of these little guys. Tristan is 34 now...

Winter procrastination

Cyclamen & Lace colored pencil 24"x30"

It seems to be happening a bit early this year, the sense of procrastination that overcomes me every winter. I think I can manage to get through it soon as the guilt will become too much and force me back at the easel. I will once again wonder what the problem was since I am always

very happy after I become absorbed in the work. In the meantime I am putting together all the

pictures of our wedding in an album - from eight years ago! They have been sitting in a box all

this time; talk about procrastination...

Above is a colored pencil piece I did quite some time ago when I still lived in Rochester, NY. This was a window in my tiny attic studio. I draped a lace tablecloth over the curtain rod and placed a small potted plant on the sill to brighten up a dreary, winter scene. I had used the same lace cloth as a curtain in previous abodes right from the mid seventies when there was no money to buy regular curtains. It always provided a sense of elegance to an otherwise somewhat impoverished environment, but then, I have read that artists know how to live well even when they have no money - my places never wanted for interesting decor:-) Now they call it "shabby chic."

I hear the pages of the wedding photo album calling...