Busy Week in Review

What an excellent and productive week! Amazingly enough, just as I was lamenting to a friend that there didn't seem to be enough time for all the creative things that I wanted to do, I realized that it had been a busy and creative week after all. This first photo is from the Xnihilo Gallery Showcase Showdown opening reception last Friday night. Dear friend Helen brought some buddies along before going out to supper. They might have all voted for my painting as the Peoples' Choice for Best in Show. If so, muchas gracias. Reese and I still want to go back and really look at the show...we were so preoccupied the night of the opening.


On our trip to Guadalajara, Mexico this summer, I took lots of photos hoping that some of them would be worthy of painting. This little boy was in Santa Ana in the school where we worked in the mornings; Santa Ana is a very impoverished area of Guadalajara. We were there to help the locals finish the actual hard labor work of pouring concrete floors and building walls for classrooms. This little boy was precious. He was sitting in the doorway of one of the front rooms close to the street. Normally I leave out details, but I like the effect of the truck tire in the background. It helps makes the poverty seem more real (in the painting.)

Earlier this week an e-mail came in reminding me of the October 9th deadline for submitting retablos for the Lawndale Art Center's Dia de los Muertos exhibit. How could I have forgotten about this?!! No inspiration -- none at all, except that I had been planning on painting a still life anyway...and what better image to represent a lost loved one than a painting of flowers used to decorate a grave. These sweetheart roses actually decorated our living room, but that's beside the point. Hopefully, it will be dry enough to submit by October 9th.

Whew. After two years, I've finally finished this mosaic. Two years. OK, it hasn't been non-stop work; it's just been looming in the background. Our den is long and lean. Just a few months ago, I gave our over sized "family heirloom" mahogany coffee table to Erin to replace it with the much smaller "better scaled for the long and lean den" unfinished mosaic coffee table. It took an impending visit from very young friends to propel a giant leap in work on the top. It took sheer determination to finish it this week.

A few weeks before Hurricane Ike, the light from our across the street neighbors' front porch light left the shadow of our red bud tree outlined on the front window. I quickly traced the shadow that night, and have been waiting for the right time to paint it ever since. Years ago, when daughter Erin was a senior in high school, she took a class in art history from Miss Mundy (who has since married.) One of her end of year class projects involved a self portrait painted on an old glass window frame. It was so interesting, and is still propped up in a window of our long and lean den. I've basically been wanting to paint on glass ever since. What better than our own front living room window? When I first traced the outline, Hilary and Joy though it was cool. But when they learned that it would be a semi-permanent painting on our living room window, they thought it was a little excessive. When the paint drys, I'll re-paint the inside to make/help it look neater. Right now, from the inside, it looks messy. It's hard to tell from this photo, but it looks pretty neat from the outside.