October Flowers

We love Mexico during the Fall, especially at the end of October when they begin preparations for Day of the Dead. Offrendas begin to go up around town, commemorating deceased family and friends, and the flower vendors around the jardin, the town center, go into full swing. The vendors who sell dried flowers year-round now have a greater variety and more fresh-cut flowers. They especially like marigolds and cocks’ comb, two of the most traditional for the celebrations.

The flower vendors are one of the first people that you notice as you come into the jardin from the west side. They sit on low stools with buckets and buckets of flowers surrounding them and spend the time making intricate baskets filled with dried flowers. The colors and the tableau they create doing their work is unforgettable.

October Flowers

Watercolor on paper

4.5″ X 5.5″

SOLD

Los Globos

This week marks the final preparations for a new beginning, getting a second cochlear implant (CI) so that I’ll be able to hear bilaterally for the first time in nine years. I had my original CI replaced three years ago after it unexpectedly failed ( a very rare occurrence I’m told) and that made me realize how much I really needed a back up. In spite of rarity, things do happen, and we have two ears for a reason.

So this Thursday I’m going under the knife again to give myself a spare and also a means of improving the hearing I get with one CI. As I said, you have two ears for a reason, mainly because it gives you better hearing and better sound localization. Call my name and I probably won’t be able to tell where it’s coming from, especially if you’re not in my field of vision.

So this exercise and commitment to daily small paintings will be on hold for about two weeks while I travel to Chicago and have this procedure done and recuperate. I’ll have my computer so I can still keep in touch with those of you who’d like to leave comments on existing blog entries or send me emails. Soon enough, I’ll be back making these fun little watercolors that reflect my wanderings.

I’m posting a small painting today from our first trip to Mexico, a study for a larger painting of the balloon vender in the jardin, the center square of San Miguel. This is also one of the free and loose paintings without a lot of preliminary sketching. My main concern was how to execute the balloons so that they looked fresh and unworried. The big painting sold but I still have the study, a great little gem and rememberance of this gentleman who we no longer see.

Los Globos Study

Watercolor on paper

10.5″ X 6.25″

$50

Contact me for purchase

Winged

I rarely, rarely do anything that’s fantasy. This image just spoke to me from the first moment I saw it, and I had to make it mine. The original picture is a white moth taken through a window at night. Thanks to my fellow artist friend, Melissa, for graciously allowing me to use her photo as my reference. She has a great blog to match her wonderful art — artist books and paper sculpture — and this was taken during her artist-in-residency at I-Park in Connecticut through her studio window.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll do the actual moth, but I wanted to turn it into what I saw when I first looked at the photo, which was a ballerina. Of course it wasn’t, except to me. I just thought it was so cool. My lady has no discernible slippers, and she has some fanciful antennae. She’s really some kind of lady turned moth. You can decide what she is to you.

Winged

Watercolor on paper

4.5″ X 5.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase

The Guide

Whenever you travel you can’t help but notice other people out on the road with you, cameras slung around their neck, that vaguely lost appearance, and the map or guide in hand trying to figure out where to go or what to do next. Sometimes you meet some really interesting people that way. I met three women on Windjammer cruises back in 1986 and 1989 who are among my closest friends today and are like sisters to me. Other times the people you see simply make up part of the interesting backdrop of where you are. And I love to people watch.

This lady, reading a guide or maybe a map, we saw in Perugia, Italy resting in the square just outside the university. It was a beautiful day in March and one of the warmest we’d experienced since coming to Europe from the heat and humidity of Southeast Asia. Students were basking on the stairs of a nearby building and everyone seemed to be enjoying this early Spring day. I cannot say what she might have been doing or looking for. Maybe waiting for someone. Perhaps on a tour on her own. We were happy to rest with her in the sun along with our other fellow travelers, gathering energy for the second half of our world trip that extended through southern Europe, culminating in Morocco.

The Guide

Watercolor on paper

5.5″ X 4.5″

$50

Contact me for purchase