Healthy Living

With the new year comes new resolve to eat better. I was raised on home-grown vegetables from my mother's garden, so I know a brussel sprout from a parsnip and actually like most veggies, but just finding the time to cook them is the tricky part. I bought a new juicer....apple, pear, carrot is my favorite so far. Maybe I should throw a brussel sprout in there for good measure. This collage is from 3 different paintings and drawings arranged in a new way. Very fun.

Out of my mind happy

When I look at the colors in this piece I did a few years back, I can almost feel a chemical change in my brain. It's not how I traditionally have worked, but I like it so well, I wonder why I don't do more. This little jewel-like painting was done on hot press watercolor paper using a Sharpie marker and watercolor paint. So simple.

Making this up as I go

Wouldn't it be nice if the artistic life came with some guidelines? Not really "instructions", because then it wouldn't be unique to each creative spirit. With so many possibilities, sometimes it feels hard to get any bearings...just a "jungle" of tangled creative ideas. That's when I pull back to simple shapes and play with composition, suspending expectations for any outcome....just exploring the possibilities. I think it's time to pull out the oil bars again.

Half Way Through

Being that we are almost half way through January means that we are half way through candy season also. If you are a chocoholic like I am, you know that the candy season starts in September with early Halloween candy and flows in a blissful blurr into May when the last of the pastel M and Ms are consumed. This collage pays homage to that tradition. So many of life's difficulties can be solved with chocolate, I think we should send a few boxcars full of the stuff to the Middle East.

Fresh Start 2010

Happy New Year to all! I love January 1. It's a time to reflect on what worked and what didn't work so well in the previous year. It's a day to plan new things. I get out my notebook of lined paper and a pen or two and start to map out a strategy for the new year. I'm careful not to make resolutions, because they seldom work for me. A series of collages using copies of my own work combined with vintage drawings has jump-started my creativity this month. It has been so fun to take familiar shapes and arrange them in new ways. I found that just the exercise of rearranging the shapes in different configurations helped get my creativity rolling again after a couple of weeks of "artlessness".