Rain or shine

"Will you love me rain or shine, will you be my Valentine?"

says one of my kitschy 50's Valentines.  After working six or seven days a week throughout most of the spring we actually proactively booked coverage at home and at the shop and took off a long weekend at the beach.  The weather was gorgeous. 

And the weather was NOT gorgeous.  But we were tickled, the day that it was "supposed to" rain we sat on the beach for 4 hours watching the clouds go in, out and around us, reading and people watching.  Until I said "Time to go, this time I smell rain".  We can't move out too quickly as Bob's prosthetic "water leg" is truly a peg leg with foot. Impossible to be nimble but serviceable enough to get us to the water's edge and IN so we don't complain! We got ourselves packed in and BOOM, what you see below.  So we were feeling pretty smug on the way home.  Bob actually took a shower in the outdoor shower in the rain.  Pretty brisk as it was getting chilly!

We spent the whole weekend junking for treasure for the shop, eating tasty treats, drinking wine watching the sunsets on the bay.  Fun, fun fun until I was nagging him about camera angles for this shot below. Oh also when I didn't lock the cereal and the ants came marching in to take it back to their ant lair (ugh). Other than that, rain and shine a perfect weekend, Valentine.  xo

And thanks to everyone who held down the fort and home and at the shop so we could run away. It will make us MUCH more pleasant to be around this week!

Trying a new technique.

 I am trying a new technique for building my mixed media collages.  I tend to get glue happy and regret some layers I have laid down so this time I am doing of the pieces separately before I combine them in the final work.  My poor son gets the shirt shrift as I tend to make "girly" pieces so I asked him to model for a large work that I will display in my solo show at 1st Stage in Tyson's this November.  Above is the photograph I took.  Below is the pencil sketch. I decided I like it "flipped" better.

 I asked my boy what color he thought the background should be for my next painting and he said "moody purple"  He picked dark green for my last one (see previous post) and so I followed him again for this one.

Then I decided on the large scale object materials.  In this case fabrics, sheet music and leather.

 then I hand embroidered the face & finger delineations.  The most amusing part so far?  The t shirt on the figure is from a REAL rhino shirt that my son inherited from my good friend and fellow artist Beth Loftis' son YEARS ago and has grown out of!

I am psyched to continue working on this but ran away to "pick" for the shop inventory for Stifel & Capra on the Eastern shore!  Got LOTS of good loot today!  Can't wait for you to see it.