Mimi Torchia Boothby

We never really think much about how those paintings hanging on walls in art galleries got there. What is it all about?
This summer I responded to two different invitations to juried art shows. A juried show is one where someone decides whose paintings will appear in the show. Then they are judged, and winners are chosen. One of the shows was at the Columbia City Gallery, it was their 8th annual juried show. This year there were almost 200 artists that submitted art works, but there were only 20 who got in! I did not win any prizes at this show, but it was indeed an honor to have my painting hanging there, for all the world to see. And maybe someone will buy it.
The other show is at one of my favorite venues, Festa Italiana, an annual fair that presents all things Italian. They sell Italian made jewelry, Italian food, Italian travel, Italian scooters, Italian music and lots of pasta. They always have a photography show, and this was the first year they opened it to paintings as well, so for sure, I was ready with a couple of mine!
To my surprise, I not only sold one of the paintings, but it won 3rd place in the show! For that I got a red ribbon.
If you’d like to see the painting that sold and read the blog post about it, go here
Lucky me, I only had to carry one painting home.

When I was six, we moved away from the street where I had lived for my entire life. We had lived in 3 different apartments there before life as I knew it shattered forever. It seemed that my two best friends, one, a girl named Roberta, and the other, a boy named Michael O’Hara, were lost to me. But Roberta and I started to write letters. As you know, most 6 year olds aren’t very good at writing, so we drew each other pictures. I was never one for good penmanship, I am sure her mother recoiled in horror at what I sent, but we both enjoyed making and receiving the letters. It was a correspondence that continued until just a few years ago when she became aligned with a very radical right wing movement and went off on immigrants.

But I digress. As we got older, we quit drawing pictures, so the letters became just letters. Then, in the 1970’s my cousin Cindy started writing to me, as she too had left home and changed coastlines. She made her own envelopes! Oh they were gorgeous. Nothing could incite me to write a letter faster than getting a letter from Cindy. And then I just took off.
I found that envelopes could be decorated with pencil, ink, stickers, watercolors. I decorated my love letters to Donald with fanciful drawings, each of which he saved.
Today I am even more into decorating my mail. Unfortunately, I have only a few correspondents who likewise spend time making their mail to me beautiful. Cindy is one of them and Elle, a great niece who shares my love of horses is the other. I need to write some letters today!

How about you? Do you do snail mail?

ps. I still occasionally exchange letters with Michael O’Hara, who is living a good life with his wife and kids on the east coast.

I took a paper marbling workshop with Liz Walker. I immediately got all kinds of ideas about what I was going to do with some paintings that I had already done. The workshop was two days long, and Liz promised us that we’d get messy. I walked into a room that was completely covered with old card board boxes and plastic sheeting, thinking; “Wow, a paint orgy!”
The first day began slowly as we covered blank sheets of paper with alum and water (which apparently helps the paint to stick to the paper). In the afternoon, we tried painting over some of Liz’s marbled sheets, it was fun, after all, now we were painting.

The second day we finally got to marble. From the start, it was a blast. We dropped paint drop by drop into this giant tub and watching how the colors pushed each other around. Then we just put a sheet of paper onto the water. Instant rainbows!

Both of these kitties are for sale, if you are interested, all sales proceeds go to wilderness conservation.

Once there was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very very good. No wait, that’s not the story.

When I was just newly married, my husband raved about a little niece of his. She was adorable. She was the fourth child, just like him, and had some of the same family dynamic
problems that he had, so he always had a special place in his heart for her.
When my first child was only a baby, and I didn’t even know I was going to have a second, my husband drove to the Oregon coast and brought Laurie back to us for a little vacation. She stayed with us for a week, she was absolutely adorable, helped with chores and played with our little boy. Thus began a long friendship that continues to this day.

The reference photograph for this painting was taken one autumn in the Arboretum.

My husband, Donald, had a special sparkle to his personality. He was extremely verbal and witty, full of energy, engaging and could be rather sarcastic. Imagine my surprise upon meeting his uncle, who had become estranged from the family in my husband’s infancy, and discovering they displayed the same personality characteristics. At this time in our life, meeting Tom gave me hope. He was reasonably healthy, still employed, and in fact, he lived into his eighties, with a full set of beautiful teeth. Meeting Tom was one of the events in my life that fueled my fascination with genealogy and family history. Donald and I started meeting the cousins, and finding true kin; people who were related to him and had much in common with him, even though they didn’t grow up in the same family. Tom Boothby was a bright light in my journey of human understanding.