Early Holiday Present is Making A Mark

Making A Mark– authored by Katherine Tyrrell. Her stamp appears on many blogrolls that I scour and is often accompanied by high words of praise for her dedication to her art and the business of marketing art. She’s thorough, extremely knowledgeable and ( so unfair ) very talented. Generous with her readers too. You should have her bookmarked if you don’t already.

I’m a little late in responding to  this wonderful recognition on her blog which she posted last week ( See HERE ).

I was nominated twice for her year end “Best of ” Contest. She called for art bloggers to send in nominations for ” The Best Female Portraitist “, and best all around Portfolio.

Sue Smith of Ancient Artist ( in my blogroll at right ) nominated this one of mine for Portfolio:

From this previous post.

August Sun

Look into Sue’s blog for great motivational musings on keeping all the facets of an artists’ life on good speaking terms with each other. She’s not ancient at all. She’s open eyed wise.

The second surprise for me was a nomination by Paulette ( also in my roll ) of Becoming a Renaissance Woman.

Paulette’s use of colored pencil is wonderful. It was a search for roosters on the web that brought her to my blog where she found:

From this previous post and the goose bump story that was its’ narrative.

Thanks Sue, Paulette and Katherine. Really, the mention was  present  enough. The ribbons and bells of the outcome are secondary. What carries heft here is the exposure to fellow artists, and the daily gifts of shared information, support and the variety of creative expression that makes this format  as vital as it is to all of us.

Maybe another post before the new year, maybe just time enough to eat too much cake.

Happy Holidays.

I Asked Myself That Same Question!

What IS that?

It wasn’t pulsating. That was reasurring. There was no eerie glow.  I had no idea. I’d never seen anything like this anywhere. And where WAS this you might wonder ?  It appeared overnight in one of my outdoor flowerpots.

What IS this?

” Is this an egg “, I thought. What kind of animal produces an egg that does THAT ? Sort of builds itself a useless parachute and then puts holes in it. Didn’t make sense.

This induced nonsensical explanations in my head – Dr. Seuss was involved in crossbreeding a wiffle ball and a quail egg.

Another possibliity, not so benign -something already hatched out of that egg , will grow exponentially larger and by next week, we’ll be on the mothership,  abducted by the pod people.

The first call was to my friend Scott in Vieques, a writer and knower of all things horticultural, who knew what this was and gave me the Latin.

Clathraceae

They’re in the mushroom family. The fruiting body is the cage like formation which attracts flies to enter, feed and with their feet, spread the spores. Oh, goody. More of these.

The egg like structure has root formations from which this whole bizarre array of fungii originate. With names like ” Phallus ravenelii, Mutinus caninus, Phallus hadriani, how can you not go look at the link above!

Michael Kuo has great photos and writes well and knowledgeably.

They last a day and then they’re gone.

That cold front that blasted New England worked its’ way down here. I only mention it ( see how squally, windy and overcast it was ?) because it coincided hilariously with our local, early morning weather channel.

It showed our local temperature in Christiansted this morning as -10. Minus ten. Clearly the proofreader was busy doing other things. It wasn’t THAT cold. Even though there’s snow on my blog. Happy Holidays.

Yes, there’s no painting to post. But industry lives, as does creativity. I’m taking a small detour to do another furniture piece for a fund raiser-the same cause I did  Chairman Meow for last year.

The Gatekeeper- New Painting

What good is 4 gigs of memory in a camera card, when you can’t persuade any of your devices to consider a detente and actually perform together?

The card didn’t like the reader, the reader didn’t like the computer. It’s now been reconciled so here are some of the images that were hostages in a 1 inch blue plastic card for two weeks.

The Gatekeeper- Oil on Linen Panel 9″X 12″

Knowing there was going to be lots of green in this ( the dreaded green..) I thought I’d neutralize it by toning the canvas with red- mostly a wash of alizarin and burnt sienna. Here’s part of the process in reverse.

I moved around on this one, didn’t concentrate too much on any one area and working it to death by hovering. A recent quote said ” A painting isn’t finished, it’s abandoned.” It takes effort to know when to walk away.

The sketch and photo preceded these and you can see them here.

The colors on the finished one were significantly sharper after Photoshop but some feature of downloading on to the blog seems to have left them looking a little chalky. At least to me.

More than paintings, I know it’s Larry you’re all coming back to see. So not to disappoint…..( Pat, avert your eyes! )

That’s a banana slice with some skin still on it.

He waits every morning. Tomorrow, maybe french toast.