Staying up, and drawing

Hi everyone,

Keeping a sense of humour looking at the deluge of marking
I've still got to do, is critical. Drawing helps me do that.
I'm showing you a little drawing of my son Sam, that I
did while talking to him on Skype tonight. The colour is probably
more flashy than I want exactly, but I like the mood.

Sam at his desk
Sharpies,
Enium highlighter, Staples highlighter
Prismacolor coloured pencils
on bond paper
8 1/2 x 11 inches

Sam's microphone on his computer doesn't work, so
he talked on the phone and I drew him. It's exam time,
and he's working away in his dorm room. It's been
a very hard working day for me -- lightened somewhat by both
drawing and Steven's delicious halibut, baby potatoes,
salad and home made applesauce dinner.

Now the day is done, gone the sun.

Have a restful, happy day.

99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer

I swear sometimes writing a daily blog is like the old
camp counting song. Get to know me, I really like
to hear people singing -- even the corniest of songs
make me happy, or sad. I could never go to my
chidrens' school concerts without being deeply
moved. In fact whether they were performing in the
band, or in the choir, my sons were the boys straining
their necks to try and see me through the crowd to see
if I'd started weeping -- yet. I was moved by how sweet
they were singing, or playing the Tuba or Trumpet.
The music and the atmosphere with the kids all
dressed up, and the proud parents always caught
me off guard, and profoundly moved.

As for this blog. What I mean I think, is that I committed (to myself)
to writing something every day, and I've kept my
word (to me). One of my blogging friends made it a big
event when she reached 200 blogs, and I'm coming up
on 300. If you have any suggestions of how I should
celebrate -- or how we could celebrate together let
me know. If you have no suggestions be aware that
I will happily toast you with Veuve Cliquot, my favorite
champagne, on that occasion.

I'm putting a picture I painted at my art class on
tonight, because I'm hauling my big "Promise"
painting from a week ago, home tomorrow and
fixing the face, and I'll show you how that goes when it's done.

Class sketch
acrylic on bond paper
18 x 24 inches

This image may be of my friend Peter, although
I painted it a couple of years ago, and I'm not sure.
I used to drive to class with a colour formula in
my head that I wanted to try out. I soon discovered
that blue was rarely a decent ground for a painting.
But it does give the work a certain air of sadness
and pathos. The model, if it is Peter, is actually
a pretty happy person -- a wonderful artist, with
a great family. As you know by now, happy is
she who paints happy. Happy is my life's work.
Being happy, making other people happy, and
recovering my own natural sense of good humour
when seriously horrible life events knock it off kilter.

Have a perfectly joyous day.

Sometimes you paint, sometimes you draw

Being a painter with too much to do to paint can
drive you nuts. But lately I've noticed that anything
can make you crazy if you let it. So what's the answer?
I teach a course in creative problem solving.

Coming up with solutions -- I'm good at that.
What I can do is draw -- it fits in nicely between
bouts of marking hundreds of essays and tests. Especially if
I draw people while I talk to them on the picture phone
--known as Skype. I keep thinking of that movie "mother"
with Albert Brooks and Debbie Reynolds. The
obnoxious brother in the movie gives his mother a
"picture phone" and she has trouble making it work.

At any rate. I've been pestering my friends and
relations to let me draw them in my marking breaks.

Christopher in Korea
Drawing 8 1/2 x 11 inches
Bic Marker, Crayola Marker
Sharpie Marker, Staples Highlighter
and Prismacolor coloured pencil
on bond paper

What's strange about portraiture, is that some people
are iconic -- burned into your visual brain. So when
I talk on the computer to my son Christopher I can
draw him really quickly. But other friends take two
or three tries just to get something like a likeness.

My friend Lyn #2
Drawing 8 1/2 x 11 inches
Bic Marker, Crayola Marker
Sharpie Marker, Staples Highlighter
and Prismacolor coloured pencil
on bond paper

It's been an exciting few days. I've met some
wonderful people through the blog, and will have
so much to tell you in a couple of weeks.

My friend Lyn #3
Drawing 8 1/2 x 11 inches
uni-ball Vision marker
on bond paper

But for now it's time for bed, and getting ready for
another day reading what my super students have
produced.

Have a drawing-out-the-best-in-people day.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends

Class sketch
acrylic on canvas
14 x 16 inches

Tonight I'm including an image of a fast sketch I did at the Tuesday
night art class. I liked the look of the subject, but only started
liking the painting a few months after that evening. The painting
was drawn in charcoal, and recently I washed most of the drawing
off to discover that I like the painting without the heavy lines.

Birthday cards from my son's students in Korea

At the beginning of the week we received a huge package from
Korea in the mail. Our birthday gifts were inside -- a lovely
video of my son's typical day, slippers for Steven and for me,
like the slippers my son wears at school (super warm and
comfortable), a pretty scarf for me, and a fleece for Steven and
lots of birthday cards drawn by Christopher's six year old students.
I am always both moved and charmed by children's drawings.
Isn't strange that everyone's an artist at 5 or 6 like these
kids, and then poof -- someone waves a critical wand at them
and they lose their power? I hope that never happens to these
children. I have some more cards that I'll post another night. They
are such a treat.

Speaking of children, one of the family traditions I really
like about Christmas is getting my kids, and their close
friends chocolate filled advent calendars. The idea
of a chocolate every day in December seems like one of the
most civilized of Christmas traditions. So -- I have a few, displayed
where we normally set them up against the china hutch in the kitchen.
When Sam comes home near the end of the month he'll probably
eat all of them at once -- and that's fine too.
This week we also have spectacular deep orangey red day lilies
from our favorite flower store.

I'm still in intensive marking mode, and I'm enjoying it.

Have a there's-so-much-to-celebrate day.

I'm still standing -- and that's a good thing

Hi there,

It's going to be a short one tonight. Wednesday is my
long day at school, and I am soooooo tired. It is
actually a great accomplishment to be still
standing in every sense of the word, when I
look back on the months when I couldn't stand
at all because of my broken ankle.

Bowl of apples from my tree

So...here's an image from the season "of mists and
mellow fruitfulness!" (Keats, Ode to Autumn) that
I've always wanted to paint. One year we had
exceptional apples on our little tree, and luckily
we photographed them. I've been looking for
a set of bowls like this, so if you know where I
can get them -- in Toronto -- let me know.

I hope I'll have some new art for you tomorrow.

Have a pleasantly poetic day.

How busy are you?

Hi everyone,

There's a degree of busy that just tips the scale into "okay
this is a little crazy," and that's my life today. I spent
the day marking, then trying to organize my photos for
the wonderful fellow who is designing my web site. He
needs the images, names, sizes because it's end of term,
and my web site is a school project for him. I have been
having trouble getting everything to him because I
am a professor at another campus that's part of the
same college, Seneca(which is how I found
out about this great program), and I am marking round the
clock.

Plus tomorrow my students are taking tests all day, and I
am preparing those tests. I have been doing my best
to stay positive, staring fondly at my paints, which will
have to wait for another day. And a couple of things
made staying upbeat a challenge. First of all, my
internet connection has been faint to nonexistent again.
Then I put all the images and titles carefully together
in a file on my Mac, we burned a disc, and guess
what my husband's IBM couldn't read the Mac data.
The web designer is an IBM person, and here we go
again. So my husband carefully and painfully re-configured
all the names, and edited the images, and burned a new
disc. I think he's going for sainthood, and if I were in
charge he'd get the title.

A bird eating the seeds from our
backyard feeder. Today
all the snow melted, but there will be more
tomorrow

Yow! Deep breath. So I'm including a photo of one
of my favorite little birds sitting on the snow eating
seeds in my backyard, because the picture, taken by
Steven, calms me down. Tomorrow other things are
happening, but I'll tell you all about that then. It's
bedtime.


Have an it's-all-going-to-work-out-just-fine day.

Painting happiness

The catch -- if there is one -- to painting happiness,
is that the painting stays happy, perhaps for hundreds
of years after the happy day, event, moment, couple
are just a memory. Not only that, the painting holds
the memory more potently than most photographs,
even though it isn't a photographic record.

Reading together
watercolor

This painting of some friends of mine,
done back in my watercolour days is testament to
that phenomenon. Sometime after this painting
was made, the couple, who I think were happy when
I did this work, split up. Does that matter now? My
friend, the woman, doesn't understand why I keep,
and even like the painting -- but do you? I love this painting,
not because of the unhappy breakup that happened
a couple of years after this lovely moment, but because
it conveys what I'm always trying to capture --
joy, happiness -- the part of the human condition
that works.

As a watercolour I like its imperfections. As a painting
I absolutely love the mood. I can't begin to compare
myself with songwriters like Paul Simon, but some
of his songs are about relationships that are now
over. The songs can be loving, happy, moving and
stand alone. I hope the painting does too.

I wanted to share it with you, because it makes me
happy. Just that. Nothing more. I'm not a political
painter -- just an image maker.

Have a loving-your-own-work day.