Bad mama feels like a winner with gambling son

We took a quick detour off the rush hour traffic and landed into the Magic City Casino. It was the first time I had been in a casino and we had fun. We lost track of time. I think we spent two hours on the slot machines and lost $15, but the laughs were worth it. And by the time we left the traffic snarl had passed.

It says "play Max"

Everytime it looked like I was almost out of money, I won some back!

Painting my son for the moment

Reliving a family tradition, my son agreed to hang out in the studio while I attempted to capture his likeness in a portrait. I was anxious to do it quickly, as the kid can be mercurial and bored, so I started with a canvas already messed with. My goal was to capture him as a young man on the edge of another milestone.

He is about to graduate from tech school and start working full time as a diesel mechanic. I am so proud of all his progress: healing from his bike crash, working full time until figuring he wanted to get a skill certification, moving across the country, and getting it done. Now he has multiple job offers ahead of him and, at age 21, he is becoming self-sufficient in the truest sense.

 Goodbye 2016!!!

The immersive optics of an Argentinian master in town

light piece from 2013

Walking into the Julio Le Parc retrospective show you must dodge Miami art lovers snapping selfies. Every piece seems the ideal backdrop. Warnings of the detrimental effects of strobe lights aside, the show starts with his paintings from the 1960's, and their virtual (movement) reality. Using formulaic color and a progression of forms with slight variations, he gives the impression of movement happening in the surfaces of the work. In fact- the painted canvases are completely interactive if you consider the active physical part being our eyes: our rods and cones go nuts!

Wind blows long strips of paper lit to enhance undulating tangled shadows

Le Parc then (chronologically) moves onto abstracting his paintings by adding wavy reflective metallic sheets that churn to the rhythm of their own embedded motors. Light and painted image reflect off of curved and moving reflective surfaces. Le Parc is a solid champion of early kinetic art. He layers and suspends bits of colored plastic so as to play with the projected color, the complex reflection and shadows.

The quintessential media for most Latin American works of the era is Plexiglass.

As a contemporary master, Le Parc has abandoned pigment and traditional surface completely. His medium is light and the absence of light. Motors and pendulums, and interactive stations with levers and dimpled reflective surfaces offer the viewer the chance to see how play affects the visual realm.

example of the interactive stations

 Julio Le Parc won the grand prize at the 1966 Venice Biennial, and has been working in France most of his adult life. This is his first major USA solo show. It will be at Perez Art Museum (PAMM) until March 19th, 2017. It's a good immersive show to share with guests, children, and anyone interested in the development of kinetic art and the field of light as a medium.

spray painting with the nephews

looking like gangsters

Shaving cream promises

Sandcastles and Sand Prince

Unsent Letter by Pavel Mylnikov, sand artist from Moscow

 Another lovely day... we stumbled upon the Sanding Ovation's Master Cup in St Pete

...and we found a perfect postcard scenic overlook.  I'm thankful for my intimate world and the larger universe around me. It's going to be a new year soon, and I am thinking of sending that "unsent letter"  clarifying my stance- my thoughts, my beliefs, an inventory of my gifts of health and wealth, and an affirmation of how much love I am willing to experience. I pray for wisdom and the capability to create the life I desire and accept all that is good and fight all that is detrimental to the planet.

Digesting with the Trippy Stuff

The Occulus...Or what my son's drag me too. It can blow the mind.

Second year in a row: Xmas at the movies

Christmas holiday decor

The best of times is spent with friends and family. But first you have to prepare the place.

add lights

set the table

Keep lubricated

Florida's December blooms

I've been thrilled to notice the night blooming pungently sweet smelling corn flower, the outrageous expanding cotton blossoms, and the seasonal orange blossoms! It's quiet a paradise, in many ways.

Always end the semester with Spray paint

It is a Miami tradition.

painted tree among sad students

I am lucky the school lets us. Some consider it a weapon. As you can see a student in ANOTHER teacher's class spray painted the tree. This might be the last year we are able to use this medium.

Creative Fallout

Together we have Hope                               Tillystudio at the ARTHOUSE 8893 SW 129th ST Miami

Recipe for a small art party (ala ARTHOUSE)

 You need clay and textural objects, color paint and canvasses...

My studio, oh so clean and ready!

 Pencils, scissors, Friends and aprons... and a few select prompts!

Emma with the dice of prompts

aprons are essential

Let everyone talk and play... yet allow space and time for reflection.

And send them home with something...

 small, that was a part of the whole. Like life...That is what we take and give...just a fraction.

#NowBeHere 3 Miami

There is a lot of movement in the visual arts fields these days. We are gathering, talking, "sharing our truths" and staring bravely into the culture. There is work to do!
Today at the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), in collaboration with Jane Hart, the Girls Club, and almost 400 artists we gathered together in front of the lens of Los Angeles-based artist Kim Schoenstadt. It was a sweet balm after the showy art events last weekend, with all of the attention on Art Basel and the 20-something satellite art fairs in town. Today was about the makers, visionaries, alchemists and dreamers. We saw a museum filled with such artists. We were the museum!

Ms Schoenstadt had an idea to call out the women who create and document the diversity of us for posterity. She has been traveling, meeting and arranging portraits of the urban communities. The first #NowBeHere was in Los Angeles, and then Brooklyn. The New York Times wrote about it here.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/arts/design/now-be-here-takes-a-portrait-and-makes-a-statement.html?_r=0 Jane Hart, collaborated with Schoenstadt as artist. Known as a brilliant independent curator, Hart seemed truly touched by the strength of numbers and growing crowd and the warmth of PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans.
Today was Miami's turn to be shine!

The weather was atypical and too drizzly for us to pose outside. Artists lined up under the eaves of the Herzog and de Meuron Museum to file into the auditorium space where we had coffee and saw faces familiar and new. I met some amazing women starting on the Metro train there, then in the line, and either side of me in our positions. Of course, I forgot my contact cards- made do with a pad and pen for notes. Lots of us exchanged Instagram names. Truly I can't wait to set aside more time to connect again soon. Meg Wallace, an artist who works with the post traumatic stress of child victims of child trafficking (a huge local Miami problem) and Haitian artist and author Alexandra Barbot sat on one side of me, (who graduated high school with a sweet mutual friend!), and I could go on, but my girlfriend Krisse couldn't make it, and not my studio mates either. So it wasn't a complete scene for me. But Today was wonderful. Today I saw, felt and heard the intensity of great ideas and from a range of diverse thinkers. I was so uplifted I should be floating around right now.

I am number 104!!!