Tulip oil painting and nude figure sculpture

"Tulip" 2.5x2.5 oil on canvas

Well Linda, here's the tulip I was painting while on the phone with you! I'm terrible! This was the freshest bloom left of my husband's lovely tulip bouquet that he came home with last Friday. It was so artsy with lanky stems that drooped down and each tipped with tulip in a beautiful red shade. We normally just go out to nice dinner for Valentines, but this year I got flowers, chocolates, a very thoughtful card, even some cash, dinner and show! Well we passed on the show since they were all goofy ones at the theater. :-p

I originally had a teenie landscape on this canvas because the view across my window was inviting with the sun hitting the pine trees and the house across the lake. Though I actually finished it, I decided the canvas was best saved for another still life so I took a napkin and wiped it off! I was just as pleased to satisfy my urge to paint the scene as I was to save the canvas for another piece! You see from the glare that it still have left over light source from my window.

It took a while to get started today as usual. But today was even more inconvenient because we had to clean up the house for company all weekend long lol When we clean up, things get thrown all over the place so it takes a some thinking to re-locate the usual items that are normally within my reach.

This is my only sculpture and I'm glad I took a couple photos before I ended up giving it to the model. It's 10 inches tall. I enjoyed it so much, working from a live model that had to be turned on a revolving stand every 20 minutes. We had to work fast! And when some of us weren't quite ready to let go of the view, we pushed our sculpting stands that were on wheels to find the same view again! I do wonder how much of that hectic energy is transferred to the poor model that had to maintain the pose and attitude. Not bad for my first sculpure, it would be so much fun to pick it up again at some point hopefully before I'm 100 years old.

Nude Pastel Figure and Imagekind 2009

"Fatal Fetal" 9x12 pastels

I've been working feverishly updating my blog. It is now 3-column vs. 2- column blog. And through the process I managed to lose every gadget I had but I think I've recovered the majority and I've added new things as well. On the left are two websites where you can find some of my prints and originals. I still have to upload some items so when I am closer to show time, I will mention it again. Currently I'm still trying to recover from long hours of prettying up this blog a bit. It's also been so cold that I think my brain literally freezes so I'm just sitting here staring at my monitor lol

I've also added a section for a charcoal drawing I did for EBSQ and I will be adding more as the year progresses. :)

It seems Karin Jurick's Portrait Challenge in the Different Strokes by Different Folks blog got me embedded in portraiture mode for the month of January. I'll also be working on a self-portrait or two. Oh boy, more images of me for the wall! I thought for certain I had enough of those!

The cheerful pastel drawing above was done for an EBSQ show "Conversations with Dead Poets" It received Juror's Choice Award and it's also sold. This is how the piece was inspired:

This show exposed me to more poets than I've ever encountered in my life!
One of the first poets I responded to was the late Anne Sexton who lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide in 1976 at age 46. My 9"x12" mixed media entitled "Fatal Fetal" was inspired by "Wanting to Die". The whole poem was powerful but these two stanzas were the ones that inspired my art:

"...To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison..."

The poet seemed alone and hopeless. The figure in my piece seems cold and appears to lack comfort from clothing or human contact. Taking the fetal position and her fingers in her mouth, she appears to be regressing into a dark direction like a deep depression.

I remember finishing it and planning to paint it in oils on canvas at some point. I still might. I was proud that I made up the figure lol Anyway, as I said this piece sold but I am selling prints in Imagekind where you can also order it in your preferred surface and even framed. Well Red, glad you brought it up since I never touched it since last year lol!

If you need a happy fix, let me show you a video of my bird Joey in case you haven't had the pleasure of seeing him! He's been quite popular on Youtube!

"Wheels of the My Mind"

"Notice Fleeting Life"

I thought I'd show you a couple of my 3'x4' acrylics on canvas art that are really too big for me to take good photos of lol