The Accused

This man was accused of killing his estranged wife's lover. I did the sketch from a newspaper photo. The sorrow in his face!

Finding Myself at This Age?

Hello, my name is ... uh ... well ...

For whatever reason, I have spread myself so thinly that I am having to pull in my horns, so to speak.

I love these things:
husband and family
spirituality
yoga
walking, playing with Bear
singing, playing the piano
reading
painting, making things
creating and portraying odd characters in Second Life
writing
cooking

All these activities will stay. However, in some categories, I have expanded out like a helium balloon ... I have more books than I want, and I had that delightful bike and some Landroller skates, but those are now gone. I have been making so many trips to Goodwill they know me by sight and I now have only twice as many cookbooks and cooking utensils as I use!

The same was true in the art category. I studied painting, photography and silk screen in art school. Then I painted for some years in acrylic on canvas. Then as I became discouraged with the idea of being a painting "factory" I stopped being motivated to paint. Loved ones seemed to be dropping like flies, which also took up my time. I cared for my parents and Steve as they suffered and died.

In the hope of restarting my interest in making art, I bought all sorts of new media, including oil pastels, pastels, a silk screen and inks for making handmade cards, an envelope maker, encaustic materials and book, pencils and sketching materials, colored pencils, alkyd paints (oil without the odor). I have given away all of these materials now, and I am back down to:

Acrylics
Watercolor
Gouache
Colored Inks

That seems like enough, doesn't it?

Tom Killion's Woodcuts

Tom Killion has been making woodcut prints since the late 70s and has used the old Japanese woodcut techniques to produce images from his drawings of the California coast, the High Sierras and other areas. Click here to go to his website. His prints are also available as notecards and in blank books, available through Seabright Press.

He Drew a Bunny

I was in New York for some years and never heard about Ray Johnson. I was browsing in Netflix and saw "WATCH NOW", so I did and I chose How to Draw a Bunny, a documentary about the life of Ray Johnson. I found it moving and fascinating. Artists like Ray are not interested in making their art for the sake of becoming famous or making a lot of money. They HAVE to make ART all the TIME.