Alizarine

Paris Part 2

Let's hear it for jumbo meringues as big as your face! As someone who likes to make, eat, and even paint desserts, I can say that Paris is a wonderland of beautiful sweets, and Jeff and I felt like Hansel and Gretel most of the time.

In an attempt to adjust to Paris time quickly, we resisted the temptation to take a nap (I had been awake for 20+ hours by then) and headed in the general direction of the Eiffel Tower. Jeff's iPhone has an app that helped us navigate the Metro system--all you have to do is type in where you are and where you want to go, and the app tells you what lines to take and where to get off. Highly recommended if you have no sense of direction like me, and a nice backup if you know what's going on, like Jeff.

In case you've never been to Paris, the Metro is an efficient and reliable way to get around once you understand it, and if you enjoy surreptitiously glancing at bored Parisians without being some kind of creep, it's truly the way to go.

The Metro is also a great way to get The Metro by 80s pop group Berlin firmly lodged in your head for days at a time.

 

Jeff wanted to treat me to a couple of surprises before we did any actual sightseeing. "I think we should get some chocolate first," Jeff said, and have truer words ever been spoken? Does a more agreeable sentence exist in the English language? Soon enough we were gaping at an over-the-top variety of candy from chocolatier Jean-Paul Hevin. The small shop's interior, which looked sort of like this (forgot to take photos due to excitement), displayed the chocolates under glass as if they were precious jewels.

We bought a small grab bag (grab box) of variety chocolates and sat on a bench across the street and shared them, marveling at the unexpected flavor combinations and also loving the old reliables. Again I was too excited and hungry to take any photos, but I believe that blog photos of chocolate are a form of torture to most readers; wouldn't you agree? So here's a picture of the box instead.

Also photographed: my leopard (cheetah?) print gloves, big chunka Navajo turquoise, and red coat. Something about seeing those colors together brings me irrational joy, and when I wasn't surreptiously glancing at Parisians on the Metro, I amused myself by looking at my left wrist.

Chocolate appetizers devoured, Jeff led me to Le Petit Cler, a restaurant he'd researched that used pain Poilâne in its croque monsieur/madame. This was a huge deal to us because according to food writer David Lebovitz, pain Poilâne is "considered the best bread in the world."

The world!

Also we have had a four-year running joke about a dish I fix called croque monsieur bake, and loosely translated "croque monsieur" means "mister crunchy," and I'm sorry but few things are funnier to me. If you'd like to learn more about Mr. Crunchy, and I don't know why you would, please click here.

We sat in Le Petit Cler's very petit dining room (which was doing brisk, late-lunch business) and waited for our Crunchies to arrive, elbow-to-elbow with locals and a number of their children. Sidebar: French children were a revelation to us, and recent articles like this one rang true. Patient, quiet and exceptionally well-behaved as a rule, they made American children seem like entitled little monsters, I'm sorry to say. (And while I am not a parent, I worked in a middle school for years and witnessed firsthand the best and the worst that American children have to offer, believe me.) While in Paris, we saw one child throwing a legitimate fit while outside a toy store. His father consoled him while a sibling recorded the event on his camera--could tantrums be so rare in Paris that they are filmworthy? This outlier aside, we found a kinship with these serious mini Parisians and admired their cuteness.

HEY FOOD.

What you have here is a 4"x10" oval slice of the aforementioned pain Poilâne, its interior soft and complex, its exterior crunchy and slightly smoky, topped with a slice of ham and an exorbitant, indecent amount of Gruyere cheese that had been broiled until bubbly and golden brown, and crowned with an egg. It was one of those dining experiences where the food was so good and we were so tired and hungry that all we could do was gaze across the table at each other, slowly shaking our heads in disbelief.

And then we were off to find an Art Nouveau doorway Jeff's daughter Melissa thought we should see:

The address of this doorway: 29 Avenue Rapp, just a random street. Salvador Dali called this the most erotic facade in Paris, and it includes a bust of designer Jules Lavirott's wife in the center, Adam and Eve, and a giant penis. Oooh, dirty architectural joke, let's try to find it!

Soon we rounded a corner and WHOA EIFFEL TOWER HELLO.

In my previous trip to Paris, I had not visited the tower and was never anywhere particularly close to it, as my companion didn't want to do anything touristy. But honestly, suddently encountering the Eiffel Tower looming like Godzilla in the middle distance was a flat-out thrill, and ladies, I'm sure you know who I felt like.

 

We walked to the tower, becoming increasingly giddy. It's just so big. I've seen it a million times in books, movies, and on television, but those don't capture the scale of the thing, especially when you're close enough to see the underside of its lower platform. It occurred to me that the Eiffel Tower is like an upside-down tornado, and that idea made me love it ten times more.

Predictably, the closer to the tower we got, the crazier the number of tourists became, and we couldn't bring ourselves to stand in their endless lines. We enjoyed the tower from ground level and were more than content with that.

(The next photos of the tower were taken by Jeff when he was in Paris about a month before he met me.)

It started to rain, so we made our way back home. We pulled out the bed, checked our email, listened to some highly appropriate Lou Reed songs on Jeff's iPhone (it plugged into the apartment's alarm clock), and we fell asleep.

 

In case you missed them, here are the other installments. Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

Please come to my show!

I'm excited to announce that my watercolors will soon be on display in a one-person show at the David Strawn Art Gallery, including this brand new painting called Planets and Foil. (Info about this painting is coming soon, and I know they're not planets.) The gallery is at 331 W. College Ave in Jacksonville, Illinois, which is a small-ish college town located between Springfield and St. Louis.

The show opens on Saturday, March 31 from 6-8 pm. Want to see me give a five-minute mini talk about my work? Be there at 6:30. See the woman on the far left (photo found via Google image search)? That'll be me, and I hope one of those other people will be you.

Apparently a friend of a friend passed my name along to the powers that be at the gallery, and they invited me to display my work. I've never been to the Strawn before, and I couldn't find many photos of the gallery's interior except for the one above, but I do know the building looks like this:

I'm already crazy about this place.

I'll be giving a (sold-out) watercolor workshop at the gallery most of Saturday--similar to the one described here--and the show opens that evening. It will be a long day for me, but hopefully it will also be a lot of fun.

I'm hoping the gallery's regulars will attend the opening, and I know my family and some area friends plan to show up, including such Alizarine superstars as Poof, Jeff, Mom, Dad, Tyler, Terry, Melinda (possibly Kate and Mabel too), along with other fabulous people possibly unbeknownst to you such as Kendra, Zinnia, Chris, Jenny, Rob, Melanie, my young penpal Grace, Jay, TA, Annie, and hopefully many more people to whom I sent postcards. Bun will not be there, but she does star in three paintings, one of which I am working on right now.

And I'd love to see you! Please, if you are in the area and are the least bit curious about my paintings, come to the show. It's free!

You'd better believe we'll have refreshments including unnamed mystery snacks provided by volunteers, soft drinks, and fancy fancy wine. Come for the art, but stay for the snacks and especially the harp music that will be rocking the gallery all night long.

If you can't attend the big opening, my work will still be at the gallery during the month of April (click here for hours).

One of my new paintings, Glass Gems 3, will be at the gallery for the opening, but after that I'll need to take it home. It's been accepted for the Illinois Watercolor Society's national exhibition, which is terrific, but unfortunately there's some overlap with the Strawn show. I will replace the original with a print that will look just like it, thanks to the wonderful printmakers at Imagekind. Please visit Imagekind if you would like to purchase a print of any of my paintings--see this post for details (scroll way down).

Thanks as always for reading my blog, and I hope you can come to my show! (Excuse the bossiness of this banner.)

The Graduates

I'd like to introduce you to my club! Meet Annabelle and Emily, a couple of former students of mine. When I made the decision to end my teaching career and become a full-time artist last year, these two missed me and took the initiative to form an independent art club. I'm calling them co-presidents. Co-queens!

We meet at Cafe Kopi, a local coffee shop, four times a year (at the start of each new season). At our meetings, I give my former students new projects to work on just for fun, and then we sit around talking about our current artistic endeavors and anything else that comes to mind. We also enjoy coffee drinks and homemade snacks. Like most clubs, this one started out kind of big and has since reduced in size to its hardcore, founding members.This little club has touched my heart, and I've enjoyed mentoring Annabelle and Emily.

I have a one-person show coming up at the end of March, and I wanted to add a new, big portrait to my collection, and...I can't remember what made me decide to paint the girls, other than obviously I needed to paint them. They're so beautiful. Annabelle reminds me of Natalie Portman here, and Emily's more like Nicole Kidman coloring-wise, so that contrast was wonderful to play with.

But in the end, this painting is actually a tribute to my favorite movie about teenage alienation, Ghost World. If you don't know what Ghost World is, here you go.

 

Annabelle is Rebecca, Emily is Enid, and I guess that must make me Seymour.

But back to the painting.

This is the painting after two days. The girls are gazing out a window in the coffee shop. Annabelle has a sort of dreamy expression, and Emily seems a little skeptical, maybe.

A couple of days later, I had started to add their surroundings. Painting portraits can be a little stressful, so I worked on their faces in the morning when I had fresh eyes and the background in the afternoon as fatigue set in.

The cafe has red doorways that were delicious to paint. Cadmium red light is a miracle color. A blurry man who reminds me of Paul Gauguin sits outside at a table beneath an awning decorated with colored lights.

I told Annabelle and Emily to wear something that would be challenging for me to paint, and they did not disappoint! Plaid and floral patterns are no joke but are so worth the time. You can see the beginning stages of Annabelle's buffalo check shirt on her rolled-up sleeve. This was no ordinary watercolor plaid shirt. The colors were such that I had to paint each square individually instead of layering glazes. In other words, it was hard. Emily's shirt would have been easier to paint had the print been bigger. The tiny roses were tedious!

I saved the table for last because I knew it would go quickly. The reflections involved a lot of wet-into-wet sections, and the damp paper did a lot of the work for me.

During my last days of painting, I told Jeff that the background reminded me of "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" by Charles Demuth.

"You think in color," he said. I guess I do!

And I also have a big announcement.

In the past I've offered two of my paintings as giclee prints (Burano Glass and Poppies), which are exact digital copies of my paintings on watercolor paper. I'm excited to announce that I've branched out: now you can buy ALL of my paintings as prints.

All of them, including this one!

I've joined a site called Imagekind, as you can see on the sidebar to the right. I have an actual ad on here!

My galleries are at http://KellyEddington.imagekind.com .

Imagekind allows you the freedom to buy prints in a variety of sizes and formats. Maybe you want The Graduates to be iPad-sized. Maybe you want it to be a poster. Maybe you want it framed. Maybe you don't. Maybe you want it on expensive paper. Maybe you want something cheaper. Maybe you even want to see it on a canvas. You can do any of these things! A couple of my friends have purchased my prints from Imagekind, and they report that the process is fast and easy. Imagekind ships internationally, too!

Note: I'm not going to get rich off this venture, but every little bit helps. I'd like you to think of this ol' blog as your Watercolor 'n' Recipe NPR or your Watercolor 'n' Kitty PBS, and baby, this is my pledge drive! Have I given you a recipe that you use all the time now? Have I posted a painting you'd like to see on your wall if the original wasn't so freaking expensive? Would you like to help me buy Bun's high fiber food and expensive drugs that keep things moving along? Please consider buying one of my prints. You'll get something new you can hang on your wall and you can feed and drug my cat!

Double Note: If you buy a print for $20, please know that I will receive $10. I earn an additional 15% commission on any frames, so if a frame costs $100, I'll receive $15. It takes a while before I'll see the money (to give customers time for returns), and if you buy something I won't automatically know that you did it. So feel free to leave a comment here or talk to me on Twitter (@kellyeddington)!

Triple note: the settings that pop up automatically are the ones I'd personally suggest (Hahnemule Torchon paper is the most like watercolor paper, for example), but you can change them at will. Hate the frame I've selected? Want a different mat? Do what you like!

Quadruple note: the premise to the cartoon below is that the man was making cool donuts shaped like planes.

Please buy my doughplanes. Thanks in advance!

Random Assortment of Old Photos

Mom gave me some old photos when Jeff and I visited at Christmas--boy was that a gift and food bonanza!--and I thought I'd share them here. My folks didn't take lots of photos of my brother and me. We were at our cutest in the 70s and are among the last generation of kids whose every waking moment was not covered with photojournalistic zeal by our parents. Mom's camera was kind of a fossil. Developing photos involved sending rolls of film in special envelopes to some faraway lab and then waiting weeks for the prints to arrive in the mail. It had to have been a pain in the ass for Mom and expensive to boot. The existing photos that do document our childhood have, by virture of their scarcity, become iconic visual aids in our family's folklore.

Case in point: the photo above. This is one of my earliest memories, and I probably remember it because Mom thought it was important enough to photograph. I was given the fun job of putting the cheese on the pizza, and I distinctly remember the pleasure of placing the cheese in the nooks and crannies created by the hamburger. (We were having Poverty Pizza, as I fondly refer to it now, which was made with a Chef Boyardee pizza kit consisting of dough mix, packet of Parm, and a tall skinny can of sauce. Hamburger sold separately.) As you can see, I'm using my left hand even though I'm right-handed. Mom was a lefty, and it looks like she set the bowl on the left because that's just the way a lefty would do it.

More culinary prep work: it's corn shuckin' time. I'm sitting on a stool that remains part of my parents' living room furniture. Note also the corrective shoes I'm wearing. Those were supposed to keep me from pointing my toes in when I walked. While they are not exactly doing anything helpful in this photo, they must have worked because I don't toe-in (as I called it) when I walk now. At least not as much. Also, wagons seemed to be key toys for children to have back then. We always had so many things to pull around!

Here's a sweaty three year-old me and my baby brother Ryan. I had just run into the house after playing outside with my cousins Scott and Jamie, and Ryan was standing up in his playpen. Baby Ryan was stupefyingly cute and happy. How could you not hug him, standing there with his little face? Mom said that people would sometimes say things like, "It's a shame to waste all that beauty on a boy" when they saw him.

My grandparents had Shetland ponies that grazed in the pasture behind our house--how's that for enchanting?--and when I was three, a palomino named Duchess had a colt. You can see the ponies in the background, and I'm about to give them some carrots. I've got to hand it to Mom--that is the perfect outfit for a little girl to be wearing out by the pony barn.

Soon enough, it was time for me to go to school. Can you find me in this class of squinting kindergarteners? I'm on the far right in the back row, wearing a blue and red gingham dress sewn by Mom. I was one of the tallest kids in the class, along with Jimmy, the blonde boy in the orange shirt. I am thoroughly convinced that my life would have been completely different had Jimmy not moved away when we were in second grade. Standing beside me is Michele--we would become co-valedictorians in 13 years. And check out our teacher Mrs. Engle on the left, a.k.a. the most beautiful woman any of us had ever seen.

At Christmas a few months later, my brother and I scored a giant cardboard box that contained some big kitchen appliance. That night Ryan and I hid in the box and popped out at random times, jack in the box-style, screaming with glee, while our toys languished beneath the Christmas tree.

I have some more photos that were taken once Poof arrived on the scene, but I think I'll save them for a future blog. I hope those of you who celebrated Christmas had plenty of time to play in big cardboard boxes with your loved ones.

Edible Christmas Tree Ornaments

As I mentioned a couple of years ago, I came into our marriage with zero Christmas swag, and Jeff had several jumbo Tupperware containers full of it. In order to make the Christmas tree more of a 50-50 thing, I created homemade gingerbread cookie ornaments, and I have been doing so ever since. It's an inexpensive way to produce dozens of ornaments, and they smell great, too.

This year we decided to use colored lights instead of our usual white ones, and I am loving it. I was tired of elegance and longed for some whimsy, damn it. Plus the colored lights can add a note of intrigue to an ordinary snowman, see above. When I showed that photo to Jeff, he laughed and proclaimed the snowman "psychotic" and clearly in cahoots with that owl.

Other factors influencing this decision include:

• If David Lynch and John Waters put up Christmas trees, I bet they have colored lights.
• Jeff and I are children of the 70s.
• "The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most." -- quote by art critic John Ruskin. I included this quote on a color wheel handout that I gave to students every year of my teaching career.
• Incredibly random things inspire me. Example: sometimes during episodes of Friday Night Lights, you'll see a character with unfocused colored lights behind him or her, and it's beautiful. I'm thinking Riggins in the season 4 opening credits below.

See? I wanted backgrounds like that in my life.

Have I made my case for colored lights?

This year I strayed from Nigella's tried-and-true recipe in favor of a new one by the usually totally reliable team at Cook's Illustrated. Mistake. The dough was fussy to work with, I ruined two pans because the holes had closed as the cookies cooled (boring story, my fault), and the icing (powdered sugar and milk instead of water) gave the cookies a slight but lasting dampness that caused some of the heavier ones to break when I hung them. Honestly, I think that recipe was more about creating a good-tasting cookie than a durable ornament. I'm not going to write it down because I don't plan to make them again. Nigella's much better recipe is here.

As you can see, I stuck faux jewels and sequins in the icing to produce about fifty delightfully gaudy Christmas geegaws. Since nobody's going to eat them, why not? They're so much more sparkly than standard cookie decorations. This year I hung them with those ornament hooks you can buy for about a penny each, and this was much easier than hand-tying a bunch of loops with fishing line or string.

And that is the story of our Christmas tree (please excuse inclusion of my laptop in the photo). If you can spare an afternoon and want to add a handmade touch to your tree, this is a fun way to go.

Mushrooms

In the same vein as my crab apples, here's a 10.5"x13.5" watercolor of some mushrooms I found growing next to a tree stump in our yard. They were hidden under some leaves, which I cleared away just a bit. This revealed all kinds of sticks and other dark plant material that was in the process of becoming our state's beautiful black topsoil. (I've known international students who have been astounded by how black our dirt is here, including one who cutely took photos of it.)

Speaking of students, when I was a high school art teacher, kids always wanted to draw, paint, and sculpt mushrooms. I assumed that most of these kids were druggies and encouraged them to become inspired by, I don't know, one of the trillion other subjects available to them on this planet. "But I don't know what else to draw! And I just really like mushrooms!" I'm sure you do.

Also they're way too easy. Come on.

Gee, what are you going to make next? An ashtray? An incense burner? A cylinder with an odd little tube coming out the side?

Mushrooms. Sheesh.

So anyway, a few weeks ago I decided I wanted to paint some mushrooms!

And what a lot of work this was. I got obsessed with every square inch of it. That colorful leaf near the top took two days to finish and was challenging to say the least. Painting the mushrooms made me happy. The little ridges look difficult but they're actually pretty satisfying to create. There are so many tiny things going on here, and they're the kinds of details you never notice, like what's happening in the gaps between the leaves and the little fly (can you find it?). I tried to do them justice, but that meant mixing tiny amounts of hundreds of different colors, I'm guessing.

I posted this painting on Facebook when I finished it last week, and a few people thought I was making up some of the colors, especially the ones on the bright leaf. Those people don't live in Illinois. Most of my Illinois pals agreed that this year the foliage was just this colorful. Lurid, even! I showed Jeff's daughter Melissa my reference photo last night, and she said I should put it on my blog.

So while I pumped up the colors somewhat, in real life that leaf was still pretty loud. :)

I'm really pleased with the way this turned out, and I'll have a few more fall paintings to add to this series.

Obama Campaign Poster

Last week I painted a poster design for the Obama campaign (above), which I read about here. The slogan that appealed to me the most, and there were about a dozen of them from which to choose, was "Every child deserves a great school."

Since she's such a smart, adorable girl, and since she's brought me nothing but good luck in the past, I wanted my young friend Mabel to be the star of this poster. So what we have here is the sequel to a painting I created a year and a half ago!

Mabel is in kindergarten now, and I thought her contemplative pose (based on a photo taken by her mother Kate) was appropriate for this subject. Because Mabel's expression is slightly ambiguous here, I think you can read the poster two ways. Either she's happy at a good school, and the things you see around her are real, or she's unhappy at a failing school, and the things you see around her are imaginary. I painted Mabel realistically in watercolor, and in order to achieve a believable child art style for the background, I drew and painted the rest with my left hand, which as you can see operates at a shaky 3rd grade level at best. Here's a small, early plan I put together on graph paper before I started to work.

While I didn't change much in the final design, I added an extra child on the right side, and I turned one of the figures near the center into a kid version of Mabel's red-haired mother Melinda. (Mabel has two mothers, and they were granted a civil union last month--the whole family wore purple dresses on this great occasion. Genius Melinda wrote about the happy day here.)

As a  former art teacher who worked in Illinois' public schools for seventeen years, the theme of this poster is especially meaningful to me. I realize that I don't stand a chance at winning the contest, and the irony of designing a poster about creating jobs--for free!--is not lost on me. But for me this was more about having The Idea and wanting to see it through. And painting Mabel again filled me with joy.

Art Show at Culver-Stockton College

"I'm not sure why, but I just don't want to blog about my show." -- me, every day since August 23.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been feeling uncharacteristically vulnerable and borderline paranoid, and last night I finally figured out why: my paintings are on display and people are looking at them. 

Normally my paintings are safely tucked away in their owners' homes or occupying the nonjudgmental walls of our house. Until I recently framed them, eighteen of my watercolors were stored in a portfolio in my little studio, looked at by no one but me maybe once a month (to make sure they were okay).

But it's strange to know that 225 miles away, in the art gallery of a small liberal arts college, three dozen of my paintings are being seen by the eyes of strangers. Those people are reading my stories about the paintings on the title cards next to them. Most dauntingly, those people are talking about the paintings and judging them. That's just what people do. And it's going on now, and I don't get to listen to a word of it, which is undoubtedly for the best. Admittedly, I put my images up on the internet all the time and it's no big deal to me, but somehow this is different.

I don't have children, but I bet I'm going through the same emotions that parents must feel when they send their kids off to school for the first time.

Sprinkled on top of this: the nagging idea that I don't even deserve to have a show like this in the first place. Because who am I? I'm just some woman who quit her job so she could paint! Someone (I can't remember who! who was it??) recently said that having a one-person show was the art equivalent of having a book published. It's like people are reading the book that I've just started to write!

Hence the eerie silence on this blog over the past couple of weeks. Sorry about that. But now that I've been able to identify the simple problem--strangers are looking at my paintings and it's freaky--I think I can write again.

And did you see the photo up there? They put my name on the window with letter stickers and how cool is that?

Three weeks ago, Jeff and I packed 24 paintings into the trunk and back seat of the car (Jeff's 2004 Mazda 6) and took off for my parents' house, en route to Canton, Missouri. Each framed, plexiglassed watercolor was separated from its neighbors by cardboard and towels/blankets. We decided to take I-74--see the purple line on the map--instead of a more direct route to western Illinois because it was the smoothest road. I cringed whenever we hit an unavoidable bump. Would the paintings shift and scratch each other during this 300 mile odyssey?

Early in our trip west we passed this guy. I decided that his superhero name would be The Yellow Jacket.

One of my favorite landmarks on this most boring of drives is a giant DeKalb operation near Farmer CIty, which is the name of an actual town in Illinois.

That photo does not do it justice, but please know that this place is enormous. In my book, anyplace that is intimidatingly big and makes me wonder what goes on inside earns the distinction of CONCERN, as in, "We just passed the DeKalb concern." I actually look forward to seeing the DeKalb concern, and this should give you some idea of how uninteresting I-74 is.

We hit a nasty thunderstorm west of Peoria that forced us to pull over for a few minutes. Normally I love a good storm, but watercolors plus more water is a scary combination, and I imagined one of the frequent cloud-to-ground lightning strikes hitting our car, splitting the roof open, and rain pouring in and destroying my pictures. Also, we'd be electrocuted. I'm not buying the idea that cars are safe places to be in electrical storms.

After a side trip to Macomb to pick up the Mabel painting, which was being housed by her grandparents, we arrived at Mom and Dad's house at around noon. They were going to help us take some extra paintings down to Canton in their car. The weather was sunny and pleasant, and the drive was uneventful save for one hilarious carnival food idea Jeff and I had. It's too dirty to write about.

Once we found the art gallery on Culver-Stockton's very small campus, the Great Unloading began.  Gallery director Debbie Myers, a small crew of students, my pal and C-SC associate professor Terry Sherer, Jeff, my folks, and I made short work of getting the paintings into the gallery. The number of pictures emerging in a steady stream from our two-car caravan brought thoughts of clown cars to mind. Then we went right to work placing the paintings throughout the gallery, setting them on the floor. I had been given a floor plan of the space months in advance, so I was able to plan my show. I wanted to put my portraits downstairs and the florals, still lifes, and Burano pictures upstairs. Do I need to say that Jeff was amazing when it came to helping me make instant, Sophie's-level Choices when it came to my art? Because he was amazing.

Debbie and Co. then had 48 hours to hang the paintings. I didn't have to lift a finger, but I did give them a whole lot of cookies. Jeff and I were given a complimentary guest room on the building's second floor, a cute little place featuring the following print:

After looking at it for a while I Facebooked:

"We're in Culver-Stockton's complimentary guest room. The art on the wall totally says 'sex.'"

Jeff commented:

"However, the two twin beds provide a compelling counter-argument."

With two days to blow in a small town (pop. 2000) in the middle of nowhere, Jeff and I had to work to keep ourselves busy. Terry, whom you may remember from such paintings as...

...kept us amused. We love spending time with him.

Activities included:

• a side trip to Iowa City with Terry for sushi and a lecture about Haiti
• a side trip to Quincy with Terry for German food and a look at the city's beautiful homes, and
• a side trip to Nauvoo, Illinois, i.e. Mormon Jerusalem, sans Terry, who was teaching. Some photos!

Jeff looking iconic by the banks of the Mississippi River.

The rather beautiful Nauvoo temple.

Butterfly stalking.

But really, there was not much for us to do during the day, and I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on my recreational reading because of the dreaded gallery talk I'd have to give on Thursday night. To make things easier, I had put together a PowerPoint presentation on my work and I had planned to give the talk in a nearby classroom. I spent all day Thursday memorizing what I was going to say to...the five people who would show up? None of my friends who might have wanted to see the show lived in the area, and anyway it was a school night, so I had no idea how that was going to go, either. A few hours before the show's opening, Jeff and I (mostly Jeff) hooked up my laptop to the existing system and dealt with the classroom's faulty projector.

Wondering how tired I must have looked, and instinctively knowing that no one would take photos of me during the show that I could later use to illustrate this blog, I snapped a quick self portrait in the semi-darkness.

Here's a better picture of me (taken by me in our house last month) with my apple blossoms. Hopefully I looked more like this on the night of my show.

The opening itself was wonderful, and I even managed to sell some work! Culver's president, its visual arts chairperson, and fine arts dean attended and had kind, generous things to say about my paintings. Art students and a smattering of local people were also there, along with a surprise appearance by my Uncle Ted and Aunt Terri.

I'm in no position to say whether I did a good job with my speech, but Terry told me, "You wowed them." He reported that one of the cute artsy girls said, "I want to be just like her." My parents, who had never seen me teach, were able to watch me talk about art and engage with young people for the first time, and they haven't stopped talking about it. The whole night whipped by in a lovely flash, and then it was over, and then I had to leave my paintings for a month. And then the aforementioned ennui set in.

Sidebar: I got the word "ennui" in a state Spelling Bee in 8th grade, and I spelled the heck out of it.

So here I am back at home. Bun continues to thrive--thanks everyone for asking about her. Saturday she wedged herself into a very small basket. Pardon my thumb; she wasn't in there for long.

After spending his birthday helping me schlep art all over the tri-state area, as opposed to having fun in Spain, my husband is happy to be home, too. Thank you very much for all you do for me, Jeff!

If you're in the Canton, MO, area for some reason, my show will be up until September 23. The gallery is open M-F, 9-5.

The Purple Glass

On one of my final days as a teacher, I talked with my second-year art students, a truly wonderful group of teenagers, about Vincent Van Gogh. I had been saving this art history unit for last. I had a compelling story to tell (for the last time), hauntingly beautiful images that elicited appreciative murmurs from the students in the dim light, and some really good handouts. I was kind of the queen of handouts at my school. As I projected a series of his greatest hits on the screen, I told them about Vincent's unique vision and his life as a painter.

I ended my lecture with Irises.

I talked about the painting's technical elements--its writhing forms, its use of warm and cool colors, its composition--and then I paused. "Who's the star of this painting?" I asked. A few kids quietly volunteered, "The white one."

"This painting has always been a comfort to me when I've felt lonely or strange and nobody understood me," I told them. I pointed at the white iris. "Sometimes what makes you special makes you different, and sometimes what makes you different makes you lonely. And Vincent Van Gogh really got that, and looking at this painting always makes me feel as though somebody else knew what it was like to be different and that made me feel less alone." I looked at my students. "And you're all different, and you're all special, and I love you guys, and I hope that when you feel lonely you'll remember this picture." The kids, cutely and predictably, went, "Awww!" and I gave them a big grin. Teaching at its best.

So this is my new painting, another small-ish watercolor that I completed in a few days, of glasses. And all of them are blue except for one.

 

Liquid Oculus

During Bun's various health ordeals, my painting did indeed have to go on. I'm trying to create as much work as I can over the summer in preparation for my one-woman show at the end of August. Honestly, even though my numbers are in pretty good shape, I still fear that I won't have enough paintings to fill the gallery's two floors. So I paint every day. The above painting is going to be my last Burano painting for a while. Those have been a blast, but I want to focus on smaller still-life paintings over the next few weeks.

I asked Jeff what he thought I should call it, and he responded immediately with my initial idea, Under the Bridge. But that seemed too obvious, and it caused the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song to begin looping through my head--and it continues to do so. I didn't want that to happen to viewers of this painting because maybe not everyone likes the RHCPs. The song is actually pretty important to me: it was playing on my car's radio as I drove into Oregon, Illinois, to begin my art teaching career 18 years ago. (I keep track of things like that.) But I wanted something more original.

Jeff and I kept coming back to the fact that the composition of this picture, with its arching bridge, shadowy areas, and yellow-boat-focal point, kind of resembles an eye. You can see this more clearly if you look at this tiny version:

When I studied art history in college, I enjoyed learning about the Pantheon, a nearly 2,000 year-old structure that serves as the final resting place of Raphael and other legendary Romans. It's an architectural marvel that featured the first hemispherical dome. At the top of the dome is a hole called an oculus, which is the Latin word for eye. This hole lights the Pantheon's interior. The enormity of the dome is stunning when experienced in person. The oculus at its center seems impossibly bright, and the circle of sunlight travels around the Pantheon during the day.

My students were always curious about the Pantheon's oculus--where does the rain go?--and it's a great art history vocabulary word. I have always wanted to use oculus in a title, and today I finally got my chance. Sorry if Liquid Oculus sounds pretentious (Jeff maintains that it does), but I'm going with it. And naming paintings is hard!

The painting is 21"x29", which is as big as I can manage on a standard-sized sheet of watercolor paper. The small squiggles of shimmery water on the right were not fun to paint, but everything else was, especially the yummy colors near the center. I really nailed that yellow boat, I've got to say. The painting contains one highly unusual detail--can you find it?

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Did you find her? A woman's face was printed on the shiny tarp covering the boat in the lower-right corner, and I was happy to add her to the painting. I like how she appears to be gazing up at the bridge.

Lately I've been listening to podcasts as I work, and two in particular have provided me with laughs and fuel for this painting. I can't recommend Julie Klausner's How Was Your Week? and The Ronna and Beverly Podcast enough. These women will stun you with their quickfire wits and general awesomeness. I've incorporated some of Julie's sayings into my own lexicon, such as "I'm done!" and so will you if you listen. I also like to think about making her favorite food, "Noodles, with cottage cheese and salt and pepper," whenever Julie mentions it, which is just about every show. These podcasts have helped me cope with Bun's problems, the stress of preparing for my big show, and this awful, awful heatwave. Definitely check them out.

I'm done!