love one another

“If people did not love one another, I really don't see what use there would be in having any spring.” 
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

never poor

Then Martine said: “So you will be poor now all your life, Babette?” “Poor?” said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. “No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor. We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.”
Babette's Feast and Other Stories  by Isak Dinesen (Author)

dreams don't grow old

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Christ is Risen Allelujah

Good Morning! Happy Easter Day and Allelujah, Christ is Risen, He is Risen Indeed.
Image shown is the 40 foot tall Christ Resurrected icon painting from the Easter Vigil service at Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois. Painted by Janice Skivington, Laura Tabbut, and Ray Wu.

under the Sea

Hello faithful blog readers, Happy Easter Saturday!

 

I have just returned from a trip to the Philippines where I spent my childhood. It has been 28 years since I last went home and I found changes, of course, yet much was the same. I'm posting here a photo of the view from a sea resort where I stayed for 8 days. I took a beginner dive class and did my first scuba dive in these very waters. Later that day I painted this turtle in my sketchbook. This is a hawksbill turtle, a critically endangered species, and several of them live in this bay, a protected marine sanctuary.
Swimming beside this large turtle that day was a majestic sight. and experience.

moment with owls

Christmas Eve, Florida near the Gulf, I heard two owls calling to each other from a tall palm tree. The sun was still setting, a long flaming blaze afire along the beach. The moon was rising, a bright silver sliver against the warm dark velvet above. I took a photograph,  or maybe a hundred photos, it was such a poetic moment. None of the photographs show what I really saw and heard. Now I have painted the memory.
This would be a category #2 in my sketchbook, memory infused with emotion.

four categories

There are four types of drawings in my sketchbook:

1. Direct observation from immediate experience of time, place, and emotion. Could show reality as perceived in the moment, but only that moment in time. (here we have that immediate in the moment observation of toes in the warm sand)

2. Memory of time, place, emotion and observation. Will not have quite the element of reality as immediate moment in time is missing and the art is not based on a photograph. Memories have a different quality of emotion and observation. (here is a memory of an encounter in the wild when I walked around a clump of bushes and found myself within a couple of feet of a very large alligator)

3. Fantasy idea or magical realism based on memory, emotion, and observation but does not contain immediate reality. (here is a drawing that I made in my sketchbook shortly after my 6th grandchild was born.)






















4. Art drawn from photography. Might include or encompass all of the above but more likely to imitate reality. (Here is a drawing of my first grandchild, now four years old, and I just had to draw it from a photograph because...she isn't likely to hold still, being quite a mischievous imp.)

in the moment

When a lovely morning on the beach includes playing with my grandchild, I sketch and watch, and stay with the precious moment forever.

counts

"It's what you carry to an object that counts."
- Andrew Wyeth

moment 5

I know a few people who love fishing and I know what moments like this mean to them. This guy was not anyone that I know, just a happy fellow as absorbed in his moment as I was in mine.