Being away for a month without picking up a brush reminds me that my next cocktail should be Rust-o-leum on the rocks and not a Cosmo. How best to re-enter the atmosphere of painting than to sketch.
It’s been decades since I’ve had a life drawing class and was thrilled to find one here when I got back home.
Through a grant from the Virgin Islands Council on the Arts, a fellow local artist, Cindy, applied for and recieved a VICA grant to open her studio to anyone wanting to draw from live models at a ridiculously low fee for two hours.
She’s providing the space, the advertising to keep the word out, and live models in all stages of dress, period and regional costume and no stages of dress too.
Photos remove a critical dimension that flattens your perception. The flesh and muscle of a live model moves your pencil without trickery or shortcuts.
It’s hot, didn’t want to dally around details so I tried drawing from the feet up, to think of the model as a landscape of body parts and not a head on a neck on shoulders.
After 40 years of not doing life drawings, and feeling like a rust bucket, I wasn’t 
horrified.
It’s an exercise of stretching before doing a race.
And it makes you see what’s really there, not what you think you see is there.
And while mentioning buckets, how could I leave without some organic reminder of where I live.
This is another kind of bucket and although not of a rusty nature, it was a surprise from my husband who brought it home with the same pride your 4 year old would have shown in handing you roadkill.
It’s bat guano. The best darn fertilizer an urban transplant gal like myself could ever wish for after, perhaps a gift certificate to Bergdorfs’.
He really, really missed me.
Eat your hearts out ladies…………and you men, take notes.
It’s good to be home.
Now I’m going to open a tube of Ultramarine and see what a sniff of oils will do to get me motivated again.
Asheville: The North West of The South East 