As part of an artistic challenge, I am planning to do a painting every day for 31 days. Leslie Saeta is leading the challenge, and over 300 artists are participating. EEEk.
My first painting is an attempt to capture the intense sunrises we have around here when the cloud cover is almost complete, just a crack that the sun finds at dawn before it goes back behind the clouds and everything goes grey.
This painting is SOLD!
All proceeds go towards endangered species conservation. That’s right, no $$ to me at all.
December 16th, 2013
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So I responded to a silly Christmas card challenge. “Send me a Christmas card” he said, and the only rules are the words “Buddy Holly” have to be on the card. So, the left side of my brain says “I don’t want to have anything to do with Buddy Holly on a Christmas card” and the right side of my brain said, “but I LOVE to paint animals and plants and stuff!” So Buddy became a little white cat cavorting in the holly.
I am working my way back to sending Christmas cards again. It has been very hard to face all the full of life Christmas letters that people send. What can I write back? It stinks to be a widow? But as the wounds heal, I feel more and more like saying HAPPY MERRY JOLLY and BRIGHT. SO maybe next year.
December 11th, 2013
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Being a big fan of postal art, I became very excited when I heard about this swap. Initially I had to buy a post card, which cost about two dollars and came all the way from England. The blog, Friends and Faux, is filled with wonderful examples of filled out and partially filled out cards. What a wonderful collection of teeny tiny art to be able to be a part of!
So I designed a stamp, a beautiful unicorn-horse trotting through a meadow in the woods. I am sending it to a mail art buddy of mine in Staten Island. Hopefully she will be as excited about it as I am, and will send it on.
I am getting another postcard soon, and I will design a different stamp for it. If you would like to be the next person to play with me, (make a stamp, and send the postcard to yet another person ) please let me know in a comment below.
November 15th, 2013
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I have been painting a lot of postcards lately because of the mail art swaps I have been doing and Enza is the one cat I have that actually enjoys modelling.
In the first painting, she poses regally on her red throne. In the second, I roughed her fur up a little to make her look rustic and I put her on a rough-hewn fence. These are both 4″ x 6″ postcards and if you hurry, I might sell you one. All proceeds go to endangered animal conservation, so if you buy my art, you are saving some wild creatures in some corner of the world.
My father was born in Newark, NJ, in 1920 to two Italian immigrants. The midwife misspelled his name, so instead of being Alfio, he was named Alfredo Luigi Torchia.
He was born at home, a first generation American.
So much time has passed since his childhood that I realized it would be interesting to try and illustrate the things he told me. This is part of a correspondence that I am doing with another woman who happened to have been born in Newark, New Jersey; like me, like both of my parents!
