Apprentice of Wonder

The Picture of Relaxation

My husband Dave wanted me to make it perfectly clear that he is VERY opposed to doing these types of things to animals - but he also chuckled mightily as I snapped away.  How could I resist?  I've never seen a cat that can relax and sleep so thoroughly as our 11-pound "kitten" Brewster.  He fell asleep on his own in this exact posture.  All I had to do was add the bottle of wine.  Throughout the photographing, he never stirred once. 

Perhaps I need to get a life apart from the kittens?

Naaaahhh....

Finding Images in Wet Paint

Today was my third "Spontaneous Expressions" watercolor class, and this has been my favorite day so far.  I'm taking the class at the wonderful Foothills Art Center in Golden.  Our class is in the most lovely historic home with large windows, great light, and oodles of art energy collected from years of classes and gallery shows.

Our instruction for today was to simply wet the paper in places, and drop in large blobs of pure watercolor.  Don't think about what you're doing, just drop in paint abstractly here and there, and let it run and mix and blend in that wonderful way that watercolor does.  As the color begins to dry, inevitably shapes begin to form, and we were to find the shapes or images within the natural flowings of the paint, and then do more detail on those to bring them out.  This was right up my alley, as I do lots of playing with water and color and then cut up the results into 2-1/2" x 3-1/2" sizes to use as backgrounds for my Artist Trading Cards. 

Last weekend I had done this canyon landscape (still in progress) abstractly, and decided to try another version of this using the above technique.  I came up with this.  It's actually one painting that I scanned into two halves because we all agreed the painting worked better as two vertical images rather than one horizontal.  I plan to go back and pull out the shapes of the red mesas and define the foreground a bit more.  But it was fun. 

While I waiting for this one to dry, I played around with some more color, dropping it in and swirling it around.  I couldn't see anything that looked like anything in this picture, but suddenly as I stared at it I began to see some koi shapes, and perhaps some lily pads, and thinking that perhaps these were water reflections in the lily pond at the Botanic Gardens.  So I began to lightly define some of the shapes, and wound up with this fun little painting.   

Spontaneous expressions indeed!  I so enjoy just playing around with wet paper, watercolor, and water. 

Happy Birthday to DebbyT!

Today one of my dearest friends, DebbyT, turned 65.  She makes it look very good, and easy, and comfortable, and like it's the only age anyone would ever want to be.  This is the woman who has taken me to places I've most likely never have visited on my own:  northern Spain and central Chile.  We met on an on-line writing group about 8 years ago, and began as writing friends, who later morphed into painting/art friends and foreign travelers.  I introduced her to a local writing group, and she introduced me to the perfect beginning art class for a 45-year-old (then) life-long artist wannabe who'd never taken a single art class.   We have spent the last several Christmas days together, and more than one Thanksgiving and simple wine-and-chatting evenings.

We celebrated Part 1 of her birthday in our Spanish class, with cupcakes, pineapple upside down cake (made by our Venezuelan teacher Maryan on the right), yerba mate, 2 candles and lots of laughter.

I wish I looked even half as good at 50 as Debby looks at 65.

Another friend of a certain age gave her this birthday card, which is one of the best ones I've seen in awhile.  Not only is the photo great, but the sentiment is even better:

"We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing."  Let's never stop playing, Debby.

Have a great birthday today, and we'll celebrate next week.

Winter at the Botanic Gardens

Just because nothing is blooming doesn't mean there is nothing to see in winter at the Denver Botanic Gardens.  I hadn't been there in months, but with the record-breaking highs in the 60's that we've had for 3 weeks now, I found myself wandering through there today on my way in to work.  I never tire of being struck by the beauty of yellow winter grasses blazing in the sun.  The warm grasses remind me of the four winters I spent working in the North Dakota badlands and wandering the frigid empty prairies in wind so cold it stole my breath away.  Few things stop my heart that like these days, but there are moments of wonder that happen here at these gardens - like being stopped by this perfect shade of blue amidst bare bushes. 

Or the endlessly interesting path of hand-laid river stones in the PlantAsia garden.  The stones are so wonderfully laid there are actually ripples and eddies within the stone path itself.  My dream would be to have such a path in my own garden.  I can almost pretend, while stepping softly along this path, that it's a Yellow Brick Road of a sort, taking me forward to more garden adventures.

Like the last rays of sun lighting up these pampas grasses. 

Or this placid bunny having a late lunch.

As I was leaving the gardens and turned to look quickly behind me, for an instant I saw what looked to be a gigantic eyeball staring at me.  Can you see it too?

 

The Cats - And So Much for New Year's Resolutions............

One of my top ten resolutions, in addition to the usual lose weight/ eat more healthy/ eat out less/ exercise more, smile more, etc. is to re-apprentice myself to wonder and post about it regularly at this blog.  I'd like to do it every day, but I don't dare promise myself that.  Now suddenly we are three weeks into the New Year, and this is my first post!  I AM going back to catch up on a few days of this quickly-fleeing new year, but wanted to say hello.  All is well here in Denver Land.  The Old Ones are still hanging in there, but look so scrawny, bony, dinosaur-spined and dull-furred these days I'm too sad to post photos of them.  Well, okay - here's one of Phenix, who did indeed arise from the ashes last February, and is just one month away from surviving another year.  Perhaps she will hit 18 in April after all.  She looks much worse in reality than she appears in this recent photo.  Rajah bypassed his 19th birthday in December. 

The Youngsters keep us on our toes all day and night. 

Their fur is so sleek and glossy and their skin so full of health it's almost impossible to feel their spines through their fat and muscle.  We've had one of the warmest Januarys on record, with days and days of temps in the low to mid-60's, so they've been able to run off most of their wildness in the backyard.  They play hard, and they sleep hard too, though not nearly as much as we'd like.  Smokey and Java can often be found curled up together in a variety of tangled and contorted positions: 

Whereas Brewster tends to be as close to a warm human body as possible:

No cat is quite as blissful in repose as our Brewster is.

The best thing, however, are the positions the kittens settle into whenever we have a fire:

What joy and laugher these little wonders have brought to our lives.

ATCs: The Obsession Continues

This month marks two years since I discovered the world of Artist Trading Cards ("ATCs"), and quickly became obsessed with the making and trading of them.  In the last two years I've created and traded thousands of them, and have 7 FAT 3-ring binders full of original ATCs from artists all over the world.  I also have a very fat binder that is full of the ATCs I've created.  It began at the local Denver ATC swap which meets on the second Saturday of each month.  But it wasn't long before I began trading with a myriad of on-line groups as well, and my handful of a few dozen ATCs turned into a large portable art gallery of images and techniques I never tire of poring over.  To the right is a 9-panel sheet of ATCs I did for a recent "celestial dreams" swap.  The purple is a wonderful shiny starry foil wrapping paper that I cut and glued over hand-painted watercolor backgrounds.

I've also done several music-themed swaps in the last year, and the 9-panel to the left shows some of my personally-created favorites.

Creating these tiny works of original art have given me a freedom in my regular painting and collage work that I never had before.  I feel free to play and experiment in ways I didn't before, because any "mistakes" I make simply become ATC backgrounds.  Sometimes I scan and copy individual ATCs which themselves then become backgrounds for new ATCs.  The possibilities are endless, and I am forever astonished by the wonder I am filled with in sharing these cards with others.

At the Denver swap today, I had lunch and laughter with my friend Elaine, whom I hadn't seen in months.  She kept telling me that there are far worse things to be obsessed with than ATCs.  I tried to argue with her that "obsession" is negative, and that "passion" would be a better word, but she would have none of it.  And really, she's right.  There are SO many things I could be obsessed about that would be truly unhealthy.  For now, I love this bit of the art world I've stumbled into:  just one more wonder to which I've apprenticed myself.