New Painting of Foster Cat, Mutter

Mutter at home, 11" x 14" acrylic painting on gallery wrap canvas

This is a painting I did of a young shelter cat named Mutter. He currently resides at Kindness for Cats, a local foster home working with Orange County Animal Services (OCAS) which provides shelter and a nurturing environment for the countless unwanted kitties in need of homes. I fell in love with this little guy while doing his portrait. He seemed so serious, so I put him in a colorful environment that any cat would love, with nice fringy carpets to play with, fish bowls to gaze at and colorful trees to admire. Your home may not be as colorful, but Mutter would love it because it has the most important ingredient--you! His foster mother, Cindy, tells me that he's not as serious as he looks and is a very confident and outgoing little fellow with a wonderful and humorous personality. The adoption fee is only $40 and includes spay/neuter, initial vaccinations including rabies, de-worming, de-fleaing, testing for feline leukemia, and an AVID chip (ID for lost pets). What a bargain for unconditional love. And there are lots of bargains just like him waiting for your love at this foster home.

Giclee print on canvas available.  Will be shipped rolled and ready to be mounted on stretcher bars or cardboard/masonite.

New still life painting with cat

Still Life with cat, 20" x 24" oil painting on canvas

I was inspired yesterday after watching Susan Carlin's on-line painting demonstration. She's a wonderful portrait artist and she posted a painting she had done in a few hours with lots of paint and big brushes. It was lovely and reminded me of my love of Van Gogh. I love his sense of color and brush strokes and the way he piles on the paint with such abandon. I'm always conscious of the cost of art supplies and tend to go the conservative route and paint thinly. Another inspiration for painting is a blog I came across recently called Following the Masters. The current challenge is to paint a picture of flowers inspired by your favorite artist. Yesterday I said what the heck, you only live once, what am I saving this for, etc. I squeezed out large piles of color and went at it. While I can't say it's anywhere near a Van Gogh, I did learn something about brush strokes. I need to practice, practice, practice. And without scraping off, too many corrections on thickly applied oil paints turn quickly to mud.

"Thought" and Inspiration

"Thought" by Aristide Maillol

I love this statue by Maillol in the Musee D'Orsay in Paris. My "thought" is that I'd like to interpret it in my own way in class today and perhaps finish one of my paintings. Away we go!

Finished an oil portrait today!

Sophia, 11" x 14" oil painting on canvas

I've reworked this painting of my next door neighbor's daughter, Sophia, countless times and I'm not going to continue. It's time to move on and try to overcome my obsessive compulsive tendencies once and for all. Tomorrow, onward and upward, I vow to finish another painting in my increasingly large collection of unfinished art. If I can commit to memory the three wabi-sabi principles--nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect--perhaps I can do this. I so admire artists who do their painting, declare it finished and never look back.

The fuzz therapist is in!

A local good Samaritan I met through Facebook recently, Cindy, is caring for homeless kittens and helping to place them in loving homes. She posted this video on her Facebook page and it's hilarious. Thank you Cindy for all you do to help our furry friends! Generous souls like hers make this world a much better place. If you can't adopt at this time, maybe you could donate something to her cause. Every little bit helps.

Wabi-Sabi Weekend

My healing adventure has lead to a lot of roller coaster emotions over the past few days. In between trying to forget everything that's happened and avoid mirrors to obsessively googling anything and everything about recurrent skin cancer (with resulting frightening pictures), I've been fairly depressed. Jerry has been kind of worried, so yesterday he took me to an art opening at the Creative Spirit Art Gallery and then to a new (for us) Vietnamese restaurant. It helped to get out for a little while and talk about something other than disfiguring health problems. We talked about the art show and how some artists can display their work without all the agonizing self-doubts that plague other artists ;-) The thought occurred to me that the Japanese aesthetic that celebrates non-perfection, wabi-sabi, seems like a much more sane outlook to cultivate to help navigate the various inferiority complexes, emotions and troubles that afflict us all in our daily lives. The following two quotes sum up the wabi-sabi mind-set and I'm hoping to be able to incorporate some of that logic into my own thinking starting now.

"If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi."--Andrew Juniper

"It (wabi-sabi) nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect."--Richard R. Powell

Scarface Bell survives another day!

Well, the worst is over. I had the Mohs surgery yesterday and the doctor said she got all the cancer. (Yay!) She had to make three passes to get it all, but we were on our way home after a little more than four hours. I've been trying to take it easy, using ice packs every couple of hours and taking Tylenol. Today was kind of scary in that I had to take the pressure dressing off and begin caring for the wound with cleaning and antibiotic creams. I was afraid of what I'd see and I wasn't disappointed. Let's just say the incision is pretty impressive. It goes from the outer corner of my eye to my hairline. It should shape up to be the biggest scar yet for all my skin cancer surgeries. I guess I'm at the age where I'm not going to mess around with any wimpy scars--give me some with character. Yeah! Maybe I'll use some of my so-called creativity and come up with some good stories to go with them--knife-fight in a biker bar, saving a child from the jaws of an alligator, crack-up while drag racing at the Daytona 500, there's got to be something interesting inside this fuzzy skull.

Plato for painters

"The beginning is the most important part of the work." Plato

I have that quote of my bulletin board in my art room, and somehow hardly ever look at it. Procrastination is so much easier--you can't fail a project if you don't start (or finish) it. I need to commit Plato's quote to memory and get out from behind the computer and pick up a brush and just do it--finish some paintings. They're stacked up and on the walls and becoming a real emotional drain. I'm going to finish one tonight and I'm going now.......

Celebration of the red, white, and blue (and golden)

Happy Birthday USA and Marley

Journaling toward sanity?

Digitally enhanced page from my journal

It's hard to believe how time has flown since I last posted here. We ended up selling the rental house to the couple in Melbourne (instead of renting it to them) and closed last Friday. In the meantime, I've been researching and talking to various doctors about how to approach the newest bout of skin cancer on my face, near my eye. With much trepidation, I've decided the best course of action is to have it removed by a Mohs surgeon in Melbourne. She's highly trained and competent (she's done over 8,000 of these procedures), but I'm still nervous and had to get a prescription for Valium in order to face the knife this coming Monday morning. I've been trying to maintain some level of structure in my life by going to my journaling class on Tuesday, mowing the lawn, working out, cleaning the house (somewhat), etc., but it's kind of tough. It's hard to break my deeply ingrained worrying habit. I'm disappointed in myself also for not finishing up a few paintings that are almost complete. Tomorrow, for sure, I'm going to get at them and finish them off once and for all (or at least maybe finish one.)

In my various forms of procrastination during the week, I did run across an interesting and inspiring journaling artist, Bridgette Guerzon Mills. She's worth checking out. I'm having a hard time getting into journaling per se in my book (like writing things down and expressing positive affirmations), but I've been doing a few still lifes in the Tuesday class. This one looks much better digitally enhanced with a copper-type green over it. I'm hoping I can get this look on the page tomorrow in paint.