Day 122: Friday, August 26 - Air Swimmers

I have an aquarium in our dining room.  A 100-gallon tank. With 4 Koi fish. Who are 7 years old at my house (who knows how old they were when I bought them), who outgrew their 27 gallon tank so for Christmas I gave them a new, huge tank...............and they have expanded to fit their space. 

 

They're huge!  And they know me and come frantically to the corner of the tank every morning to be fed. And they're carnivores.  If you put any other kind of fish but a koi in their tank, they eat it.......lost a really fluffy gold fish this way in the beginning.  They love to have a sliced orange tossed in the tank so I do this right before I clean the tank - which is often because they're really dirty fish.  And then for my birthday and theirs (the fish have my birthday assigned to them as does the cat - that way I know how old they all are. Dogs always have my older sister's birthday since Australian shepherds tend to be born in May.)...and then for my birthday and theirs, I bought myself and them a new little brother, Nemo.  It took Nemo a day or two to figure out how to grab  some food from the big guys, but he's well on his way to becoming a big monster too. 

My husband sent me this link in an email today.  Absolutely love it!!  For all of the above reasons.

http://www.wimp.com/airswimmers/

Maybe my husband's getting me one of these for my Virgo birthday?

Day 121: Thursday, August 25 - Why the hell not!?

What a hiatus!!  My mind has been racing as has my body....too many fun things happening and no time to talk about them!  Today is a "for the hell of it day".  The latest Artist Magazine arrived asking, no begging, for entries from "old people" - old if you're over 60 and since my children are the only people I know who are younger than 60, moi decided to enter.

"Why the hell not" was my thought.

So I found the jpeg files on the computer and sent them off via the on-line entry form.  Have always loved the portrait of my cousin Swampy whose Virgo birthday and my Virgo birthday will be communally celebrated on the 8th with my Virgo sister.....

And then there's this portrait of Carol Marine, the Cheerleader for all of us, leading daily painting challenges, egging us on through her blog.....

And then the portrait of Karin Jurick, who mounted fantastic painting challenges before she became incredibly famous.  She now has the most fabulous paintings and a wonderful blog.  If you don't know her work, go take a look!! 

Karin had the most fantastic painting challenge of anyone.  She had over 180 people, all followers of her work, send her a photo of themselves. She then paired each of us up with an unknown person.  We had to paint them, they had to paint us, and we all had to submit our paintings so that she could post this incredible challenge.  I painted a wonderful (I thought) portrait that I've always called the "Hairdresser"

The hairdresser never returned the portrait she was supposed to paint of me.  But!!  I got my portrait painted by Karin which was, I thought, a really good deal!!  Because of Karin's generosity of time and spirit in mounting this fun, fun challenge, I secretly mounted a Thank You Challenge to Karin. It was the subject of my very first blog, over a year ago now.  I contacted everyone that I could who had painted for Karin, sent them a photo of Karin that I had found on the internet and we all painted from the exact same photo.  I had a book made of the paintings at Snapfish which we mailed her.  The link to all of the paintings that were done is at Picasa.  I'm still blown away that all these unknown people painted for me and that I was able to get everything up and onto the internet. Karin was stunned which was what it was all about.  Go to this Picasa link to see the paintings.



I'll try to catch up with what I've been doing.

Day 120: Thursday, August 4 - a mouse named Nosey

Lots of explanations in order to explain today's posting.

There's a San Francisco based artist out there, Chris Beck, who has her own website "I'm Painting As Fast As I Can". 

I've followed her personal work off and on for several years as she has such a sense of humor and such a definitive style of painting that I always smiled when I saw what she had done lately.

Where she got "famous" in my mind was with another blog she started called: Brush, Paper, Water.  Bi-weekly she would find a fabulous watercolor artist and would then fearture this artist on this blog.  We were exposed, as a result, to some really wonderful painters, each with a different style and/or subject.  Flowers, realism, plein air, architectural......just wonderful painters with wonderful styles.

In 2011 she featured the following artists:
Amanda Spencer,  Anders Andersson,  Aud Rye,  Chris Krupinski, Diane Morgan, Gary Bukovnik, Geoffrey McCormack, Ismail Kadir, John Salminen, Jonathan Frank, Phang Chew  and Ron Morrison.

If you go to the bottom of this link, you can see all the other fabulous artists she featured.

Chris called a halt to this blog about 2 months ago as life with her own painting was coming to the front of the pile and she wanted more time to paint for herself.

And then today, out of the blue, comes a blog posting from Chris that just made me smile and smile. 



See that little mouse on the top of the pile of books?  It's named Nosey and it's a bronze mouse made by Steve Worthington.  Over a year ago, Steve, who creates these fabulous bronze mice and lots of other wonderful bronze sculptures, sent 20 artists that he knew, a Nosey mouse, and asked them to create paintings featuring the mice........

and here I'm going to put Chris' words about what Steve asked of the artists: 

Chris said:  I'm pleased to introduce Nosey Mouse. She arrived this afternoon and has been exploring the studio. When she settles down, we're going to work on a challenge painting.
Sculptor Steve Worthington has asked approximately 20 artists to participate in a challenge using their choice of one of five bronze mice he's created. When all the paintings are finished, he's going to gather them into a book which he plans to publish this summer and he'll donate the proceeds from the book sales to animal shelters. I'll post updates here as things progress.

I can't encourage you enough to explore Steve's blog and website -- he has some fabulous sculptures of mice, frogs, and toads, to name a few of his critters. And his short videos are very quirky and fun to watch!!And then the wonderful paintings of the mice started.  Take a look at the 20 paintings here:  http://steveworthingtonart.blogspot.com/p/mouse-project.html

See I told you there were lots of explanations today.  This whole post started because Chris Beck, in today's email said that she got the news earlier this week that Nosey Mouse will be taking a little trip this fall.  Her painting of Nosey Mouse was accepted into the National Watercolor Society's Annual Exhibition in San Pedro, CA and Nosey will be visiting Los Angeles as a result. This painting also qualified as a Finalist in The Artist's Magazine Annual Art Competition for 2011. Award winners will be published in the December issue of the magazine.

Ted Nuttall, watercolor portrait artist, who comes to California every spring for a workshop in Pasadena, will be the main judge at this show.

Day 119: Monday, August 1 - The Fruit Conversation

And "The Conversation" for the National Sketchbook Project (see earlier posts) continues.  Nancie Johnson and I have named this one the "Fruit Conversation" because of its initial page which was an apple, some grapes and a banana.  It has morphed way beyond the banana and the apple.

I had sent her the beak of a bird, attached to the banana:

Nancie took the half of the bird I had made on the right hand edge and morphed it into an "Angry Bird".  That was Nancie's latest entry, complete with sleeping cat, full of z's.

With no hesitation on my part, the 5th panel became?  A flurry of feathers.

So sorry, said the cat.

Here are 3 panels together. It's getting too long, now that it's five panels, to show it in full.

It's now back into the mail, off to New Jersey, to see what Nancie's going to do with the remnants of a bird.

Day 118: Sunday, July 31

Wonderful day! We were invited to a private tour of the new Dinosaur Exhibit at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum.  We showed up at 8 a.m., 2 hours before the Museum opened, for coffee in the most air-conditioned building we've been in in ages!  Lecture just for the 30 of us by Doyle Trankina who is the main sculptor of missing pieces when the dinosaurs are reconstructed.  If you read his bio through the link, it's an interesting career.

 He goes on the digs and was talking about one of the upper blades (?) (name) on the spine of a Stegosaurus. 

He was walking the dig site and saw the the pieces of this blade and thought it might be broken pottery but it turned out to be a Steggie part that he then reconstructed and it was placed on the model.  Such a signature!

Day 117: Tuesday, July 26 - The Conversation

The Conversation for the Sketchbook Project that I'm working on with Nancie Johnson of New Jersey continues.  I received Nan's latest addition to our project: The Angry Bird!!

Why is he so angry? He's heard that he's the star of an addictive game called Angry Birds and he just realized he's not getting any royalties!!

This is attached to my painting of last week:

Yielding:

So now I connect something to the sleeping brown cat, the blue z's from the cat's mouth and the floating orange balls.  Suggestions? Ideas? Email me!!

Day 116: Friday, July 22 - The Conversation Continues

And Nancie Johnson of New Jersey sent me the latest installment in this "Conversation" we're having for the Sketchbook Project.  We're on our fourth panel............

Here's number one - she did - "The Helix" - which started our "conversation":

 Then I added the snake by coming off the right hand side of her helix:

Which yields this:

She then took my right hand edge, extended the head and tail of the snake and created the barbecue fork with steak:

So, for my turn, I took the cherries and the croissant on that right hand edge and created this:

Which when you put those two pages next to each other, creates this:

And that's what's in the mail to Nancie, on her birthday weekend.

We're four pages into our Conversation for the Sketchbook Project and we're both anxiously awaiting the mailman and our next installment!

Happy Birthday Painting Partner: Nancie Johnson of New Jersey

"Art Is Not A Thing"

Day 115: Monday, July 18

Nancie Johnson, my sketchbook partner in New Jersey, was worried about our Conversation.  I had mailed her my latest drawing last Saturday, first class postage and it still hadn't reached her as of last night, Thursday. 

This afternoon I received a very much relieved email that the package had arrived.  We decided that we each, in order to forestall a catastrophe, needed to scan each page of the Conversation in our possession this week so that if anything goes truly wrong in the mailings back and forth for the next few months, that we would at least be able to recreate our project.

I can't wait to get started on what she sent me.

Day 114: Friday, July 15

I don't know how I got there, but I've ended up reading this particular blog off and on for several days.  Love the photography, love the woman's words, love her quotes as she starts each entry.........all about a way of life so foreign to me: that of being a rancher around Calgary.  Horses, dogs, plowing, roping, branding cattle, mending fences..........and she still has time to celebrate the beauty of where she lives with some stunning photography.

Enjoy if you have the time.

http://prairierunner.wordpress.com/

Day 113: Thursday, July 14 - Photographs

Received this interesting site from a friend. So sentimental, so creative, so thought-provoking. I sat here thinking of photos from my past and my family's past that could be used this way. We're lucky enough to have lived in one house for 40 years where we raised our children and enjoyed our neighbors and neighborhood so to place a photo in the correct position wouldn't be all that hard. It sure sends your mind on a sentimental journey though.....even though some of the captions on the photos weren't pure sentiment.  Take a look.

http://dearphotograph.com/

Day 112: Wednesday, July 13

Have followed, via email, a wonderful blog site called "A Postcard From My Walk".  It's a group of 14 people (having "interviewed" the owner of the blog, Pat from the U.S.A.) who live around the world and who exchange  monthly sketches on postcards over the course of one year.  The participants are on their own schedule of sending a postcard so that the recipients never know whose postcards they'll be receiving that month - they just know that over the course of the year there will be 13 postcards per month in their mailboxes.  If I had friends all over the world I would start this project immediately.....or perhaps it could be done here in the U.S. if we all lived in different cities.  If you're reading this and think it sounds like fun (or that it doesn't sound like a chore), get in touch and we'll see if we can get a group together.

Here's this month's postcard TO Pat FROM Liz in Australia:



Just love these postcards and what a treasure to receive REAL mail in your mailbox, not just throwaway catalogs!

Day 111: Tuesday, July 12

Painted off and on all weekend. Twas fun to have "projects" that needed doing. Needed to finish a Conversation that I'm working on with my teacher Peggy Reid, needed to finish the Conversation with Nancie Johnson for the Sketchbook Project........and then in the middle of it all, I decided I wanted to start a new portrait.

I'd had a photograph of a darling baby, Dylan, whose mother is my daughter's best friend since they were three.....darling little girls.

And then Allison, the blonde, got married and had Dylan, who's almost two:

 I had cropped the original photograph to this version - wish I still had the original photo.  But I started up with a painting and was so excited about how it was looking, that I put my brushes away for fear I'd "wreck it".  I'll take up the brushes again tomorrow and see what I can add to it.  But I sure love how I started out and that's a rare sensation!!

Day 110: Monday, July 11 - The Conversation with Nancie Johnson continues

The Sketchbook Project
Nancie Johnson of  New Jersey
her blog:
Our "Conversation" continues

Nancie and I have now completed our third page/conversation in this ongoing Sketchbook Project we are working on.  If you remember:  We both painted "something"......colors and shapes on a page.  We then sent that first page to each other, me in California, she in New Jersey.  We attached a second painting to that first page by continuing any lines, colors, shapes from that first painting's edge onto the second page.  And this weekend we both completed our third page and put it into the mail.

Here's my first painting. Nancie ended up turning it on its side:

 Here's Nancie's response which continued the line of the banana:

Here's the 3rd - my response:

 And here's all three pages together - A Conversation

Tomorrow I'll post the other Conversation that's taking place, the one that starts with Nancie's first painting.

Day 109: Friday, July 8 - Virtual Paintout

A wonderful man, Bill Guffey, runs a monthly challenge which uses the Google Maps of the world.  It's called the Virtual Paintout.  Each month he chooses somewhere in the world - this month, July, it's the Isle of Jersey. You go to the Virtual Paintout, you click on the Google Map, you then cruise around Jersey, using the little yellow man feature on the Google Maps (he shows what that little spot on the map where you're hovering actually looks like.  You spend hours cruising around hoping to find something picturesque enough that you'd like to paint it.  I've done this every month, spending hours and hours and have never found anything that I wanted to paint. Grump, grump. I look at the paintings other people have done and wonder how in the world they found that!! on the google map.  I wish that Bill Guffey would post the location on the map that was used to paint from.  He says that we're supposed to put the link on our blogs/websites but I haven't found anyone who's done that yet.  I think it would be a fantasic learning situation: what you see and what you paint.

I finally found something I thought I could paint so I submitted it this month. It should be on the website by tomorrow or the next day.

Here's the link I used on the Google Map:

and here's what I painted from that link:

My friend Nancie Johnson also submitted a painting this month. Here's her link and then look what she did with it!!

There's another wonderful painter out there, Nancy Goldman, whose work I found because of her comment re my blog.  She has already painted two versions of her search of the Isle of Jersey for Bill Guffey's challenge.

Day 108: Thursday, July 7 - Ray Turner!!

Ray Turner is a local Pasadena artist who trained at Art Center.  To say that he is a portrait artist diminishes his work!  He paints faces on plate glass, about 1/2" thick, probably 14 inches square. The backside of the glass is painted with a very specific solid color and the frontside of the glass is heavily impastoed with oil paint..........incredible portraits.  Occasionally you notice that he has scraped through the paint of the face to reveal the color on the backside of the glass.  Because of the glass, the works just glow. Sometimes your face is even reflected onto the glass - you're conversing with the portrait.

He had a fabulous exhibit about a year ago at the Pasadena Museum of California Art........Pasadena was abuzz about the show and I actually went twice it was so incredible.

Today I made it to the Long Beach Museum of Art, about 45 minutes away to see Ray's latest show: Good Man Bad Man.  There were probably 200 "normal" portraits mounted in order of their background colors, normal being recognizable faces. It was kind of like being in the Denver airport tunnel where the neon lights change color very slowly - so did the backpainting on the portraits.







Then the next room had the Bad Men.  Made up faces, just enough features so that you knew there was a person in there.....but more gestural. You knew it was a mad person, a mean person.........by the suggestion of the features.  The one below was even partly done with a paint roller from a look at the texture of the white paint.





For this exhibit, he spent the Spring of 2011 painting people from Long Beach: elected officials, docents from the museum, an electrician from the restaurant next door.......people at the show today were identifying people they knew on the large wall of portraits.

Above are two "reals" and two "bads".  I think they're phenomenal!!  The show runs through September 11. The Museum opens at 11 most days but do check before driving there. There's a Museum restaurant next door, open or closed air....open is on the bluffs above the harbor where the Queen Mary is "parked". A wonderful day. Go.

Day 107: Wednesday, July 6 - anamorphic typography

Interesting art exhibit where it's not trompe l'oeil, it's actually a form of distorted perspective, which takes advantage of our minds and what we think should be there.  Enjoy Joseph Egan's work.

http://portable.tv/art/post/the-art-of-perspective/

Day 106: Tuesday, July 5

Watercolor painting class started up again in an unairconditioned building in Glendale, CA, the same unairconditioned studio that 16 people suffered through when taking the Ted Nuttall Portrait Workshop two weeks ago. Nothing's changed. The bureaucracy's still in charge of doing nothing. They did put the giant industrial fan in the room which makes so much noise that you become exhausted from fighting with the extra, extra, extra noise.

And then I found this wonderful email from my son, Dan, who lives in Berkeley. He has a varied reading list during his days and always sends me such interesting side notes to life.  I loved this:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/a-musical-impromptu/?hp

and the source of the pianos:  http://pianos.singforhope.org/pianos/manhattan/lincoln-center-alice-tully/


and then the follow up article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/arts/manhattans-quiet-shelters-of-solitude-amid-the-noise.html

Click on the links in the above article. Enjoy looking at the quiet shelters of solitude.............

And then I've discovered http://www.accuradio.com/   
It's possible to listen to any composer, any artist, vocal or instrumental....just to have some wonderful sounds going on behind.  I had just started playing around, listening to string musicians (YoYoMa, Hilary Hahn for starters) when in came the email from Dan.

Enjoy today!

Day 105: Monday, July 4

My watercolor painting teacher, Peggy Reid, sent me an email with a link to a video she wanted me to watch - DeWitt Jones - who's now a motivational speaker.  He was employed by National Geographic as a photographer for most of his life and was given the instruction to go out and "celebrate what is good in this life" by the them.  I enjoyed the video and started clicking on other videos on YouTube by DeWitt.  This one in particular is a stunning compilation of thoughts and images.  Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBLhTJMJ8_8&NR=1

Day 104: Friday, July 1 - The Conversation with Nancie Johnson

Several weeks ago Nancie Johnson of New Jersey and I started a "Conversation" for our Sketchbook entry which we are doing jointly.  We each created an opening page and sent it, via the mail, to each other.  I had sent her four choices to work from:

She chose the fruit with the banana and joined her drawing/painting to the edge with the banana.  Here's her painting attached to mine on one edge. She's now sending this to me, here in California, and I have to think of how to extend her painting along that one edge, matching lines and colors in order to continue the "Conversation".

Nancie sent me two paintings to work from:

the helix

the kasbah

I tried and tried to build on the Kasbah but had to give it up. Took the Helix and by adding on to the right hand edge, created the 2nd page of our Conversation.  This is what I put in the mail to Nan today.



 

Her job is now to add on to the right hand edge of my page, to continue the lines and colors and create another "story".



Day 103: Wednesday, June 29 - a bit more Ted

Still cleaning up my desk/studio/computer after Ted Nuttall's class in early June. I was getting sick while the class was going on and ended up with full blown bronchitis by the time it was over and everyone had gone home. Been sitting on my keester, taking meds and feeling sorry for myself. 

But back to work finally!  Found a few more photos of Ted's work that I'd like to show all of you........the incredible detail that we all think is "Ted painting loosely".  It's actually incredible attention to the minutest detail which makes his paintings so special.  Take a look at these three closeup details from a couple of his paintings.

a nose and a bit of a mouth

look at all the colors and strokes just for the nose and moustache

so many colors, so many strokes of the brush