Spooky Infirmary Door

Happy Halloween all you goblins and ghosts!  I had some fun creating a door mural for the school nurse's office. A Booboo ghost with a Mummy nurse sporting a giant syringe of love. Our nurse has to be one of the hardest workers on campus seeing over 65 students a day!

Love painting quick like this on brown paper... just black and white and a little red!

Tulips

Michael brought me a tulip.
I think I could stare at it all day and night. It glows. It smiles. It fills the apartment with beauty.

What little things bring you joy?

Do you ever ask yourself if you are enough?

I would never ask that of my friends, but even through a morning of deep breathing yoga, and an afternoon prone under lights for a facial, I keep asking myself if I can allow myself to just "be". Should I not be working? Planning? Promoting? Creating? Connecting? Cleaning? Catching up?

Collage portrait in greys

I reach the weekends mostly exhausted from days spent being a teacher engaging high school students, attending meetings, modeling good behavior, planning, planning, planning. Then I try to do the drawings and paintings that allow me to capture what it feels like to be human.
My art practice captures Time for me in a way that affirms my existence. So I do that... But is that enough?
Everything around me, (politics especially), in this city and state, seems to be spiraling into the darkness of economic, spiritual and environmental disaster. Shouldn't I be working harder to save the endangered, to shelter the homeless, to feed the hungry, to inspire the hopeless? I stand in a place of privelege, yet I am haunted by the responsibility to give back and do more.
When I am breathing in the park, or allowing someone to slather ointments on my body, I am guilt ridden because my Time is so limited. I am living longer than the days given to dear friends, and yet what am I doing with those days?
Is it enough to just Be?

Should I do Palms as a Series?

It is dawning on me that the inspiration of a few palm fronds is endless. I need to stick with my goal of #100favfloridathings and not get sidetracked. But the tree, as a topic, is juicy and vivid for me.
What should I do? (I realized recently that I cannot read comments left on the blog! Do not know why. But if you have an idea or an opinion or thought, please email it to me- tillystudio@aol.com)
Thanks

Palm Trees are my fantasy trees

I keep trying to capture the essence of a palm tree for my art series of #100favFloridathings, and I keep falling short. They never turn out as whimsical or funny or breathtaking as I want. I think Dr. Seuss did a good job of it with his Truffulla trees.

Each day the trees clap in the breeze calling me outside to my balcony. They refuge squirrels and parrots and frame jets leaving for Europe or Africa suspended in the sky. They cast purple shadows on the beach sand and beckon us to tie up our hammocks. Rising out of a turmoil of shrubbery and tangled flowering trees, the palm appears like a bursting frozen firework, hovering above the traffic light....a celebration of the day.

They make me smile.

Student artists make a gesture for Veterans

 We are gathering to paint rocks as thank you tokens to Veterans who have served, or are serving, to protect our liberties. It is part of a Kindness project that believes one kind gesture can improve somebodies day, and hence the world at large. It is also stress relieving for the artist to change channels and work this way.

Hilma af Klint rocks the history boat!

I just got back from NYC where a couple of my sisters and I experienced the fall fantastic Solomon Guggenheim exhibition of little known abstract artist Hilma af Klint and her Paintings for the Future. Don't misunderstand. She was well respected in her time (the early 1900's) but died into obscurity and left all her art, more than 1000 paintings, 125 notebooks and instructions to hide her art, to her nephew. That was in 1944.

 In 1906, Af Klint,  an award winning graduate of the Royal Academy in Stockholm, was earning a living as a scientific illustrator. She taught and took commissions for portraits. The loss of her sister and the social hobbies of the times drew her to spiritual investigations and seances. In these seances 5 voices repeatedly visited her and instructed her in painting.

 

Af Klint and four of her friends formed a group to meet regularly and communicate with the spirits and channel messages for an artistic temple of abstract art bearing messages from the spiritual world.

 My sister Annie was struck by the predominant markings of mathematics in the paintings. She also shared knowledge of the Rosicrucions, who believed messages were passed down from ancient sources, and Illuminati symbolism.

My sister Lise was also struck, like me, by the colors, the line work, and the similarities to Haitian Voodou art. There is something very universal in the paintings that seem to identify with our basic meditative musings.

Af Klint's work in series made me itch to run home and paint. I could feel the playfulness of each variation on the theme and yet stood in awe of the serious searching contained in each of the works.

Hilma af Klint was convinced that a woman's voice in the art world would be destroyed ignored and she was not sure that her society was ready for abstract art, so she instructed her works of art to be hidden from view for 20 years after her death. It actually was hidden for 40 years. But in her lifetime af Klint exhibited her paintings and she carried a small notebook with a photograph of each of the large works she painted, with watercolor notes to share with interested people. She documented everything in Swedish and now I cannot wait for a good translation of her notebooks for us to buy.

I got the postcard collection of her giant tempera Paintings for the Future series.

                                   And merchandise included this lovely silky sheer tunic!
Everyone who can, must see the show. It rewrites art history. Hilma af Klint's abstract paintings were painted years before Kandinsky or Malevich or Mondrian removed the representational in their works. Yet THEY are called the founder's of Abstraction.- up through April 23, 2019