Tonight (November 20) is the night of the Hope House gala at the Fredericksburg Area Museum.
30 artists were asked to create 4″ x 4″ works of art to decorate a ginormous 7 foot Christmas tree. The artworks and the tree are being auctioned off to benefit Hope House. If you haven’t heard of them, Hope House gives housing for homeless women and children in our area. And they do more than that. They provide substance abuse counseling, parenting classes, social skills tutoring, financial education classes, transportation and vocational training. Plus a whole bunch more of excellent, most definitely needed services.
And guess who one of the artists was that they asked to contribute to the auction!
That’s right, Susan Ishii! Susan is a sweet friend of mine, and an amazing artist, her still life paintings are rich and lovely. One of her still life paintings is gracing the Artist Tree at tonight’s gala.
I met Susan at my favorite Tuesday night figure drawing sessions, she’s been organizing it for months now. She also coordinated the Hope House Artist Tree (and gave it it’s punny name) and convinced Hope House to let me have a spot on it.
Yea, that’s right, one of my paintings is up on the tree.
Writing that last sentence makes my tummy feel weird.
Anyway, here’s the painting I contributed to the Artist Tree. I named it “A Royal Thrush”.
Just a little poker humor, folks.
Lovels forever,
JD
UPDATE:
Susan just emailed me to let me know that $1200 was donated to the Hope House as a result of the silent auction for the tree! Thank you, everyone, for your generosity. It will be put to excellent use.
TODAY: My husband and son were both mentioned by NASA in their online magazine. And hubby was mentioned in a post on wikipedia. ALSO: I killed a really big bug.
Ok, Michael did that too. But I FOUND IT.
Graphic depiction of The Bug.
I guess you could say I’ve been teaching myself art backwards.
According to my friends who are teachers or who have been students in ateliers and expensive art-colleges, I’m supposed to be an expert at drawing before I even pick up a paintbrush.
Also, I’m supposed to work in limited palettes before I go all crazy with the colors.
There are very good reasons for doing it their way. And a part of me wishes I knew that that was how I was supposed to be doing things before I spazzed out and started slinging paint.
Another part of me knows that a slower, methodical pace would have bored me. And made me give up before I had a chance to appreciate what I was learning.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m self-taught, and the way I’ve learned is the way I’ve learned. And also the way I’ll continue learning. Nothing to be done about it now except move forward.
SO! That said, lately I’ve been studying figures, portraits, still lifes and all that jazz. I’ve been copying other artists (in my sketchbooks, of course, and with notations. Don’t get all crazy on me.) and I’ve been filling my books with figure drawings.
And that’s why I haven’t been posting too much finished work these past couple of months. (though that’s soon to change…)