Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Small Daily Sketches


Some small, quick daily sketches of regional wildflowers and grasses, studies for an upcoming portrait commission. Enjoying my Pro Artist Watercolor Travel Kit by Windsor Newton and brushing up my skills for September travel journaling in the EU!

Hawk weed? and clover with grass. Ink and watercolor.

Lamb's Ear - ink. I did add watercolor later, but don't have a photo

Wild grasses and ants and a bee - ink and watercolor 

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

"Dear Trixie"

"Dear Trixie" posthumous portrait of our lovely friend Lisa Hammer, pen name Trixie Kitsch,
29 x 22" mixed media


Lisa was kind and generous, a talented artist and writer, she had a biting sense of humor
and a heart of gold. She saw through our veneer and loved our souls.
The world lost a great woman at Valentine's week, 2014.

Farewell Dear Trixie, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. 




Friday, August 1, 2014

"Thinking Itself Is Love - Self Portrait with Brain Tumor"

"Thinking Itself Is Love (Self Portrait with Brain Tumor)"
16 x 8" mixed media
After thinking about this project for over a year, I finally made this self portrait. I used references from my MRI scans that were taken before neurosurgery to remove a benign Meningioma brain tumor. I am doing very well, nearly two years post-op. Thank you to everyone who supported me during this most trying time of my life. I really don't know where I would be without all of you.

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how a broken heart might effect the mind and physical and mental health. Forgiveness and Love are always the answer. 


"…the heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break. But it is the break itself that makes the heart. The heart is not an organ, and neither it is a faculty. It is: that I is broken and traversed by the other where its presence is most intimate and its life is most open. The beating of the heart - rhythm of the partition of being, syncope of the sharing of singularity - cuts across presence, life, consciousness. That is why thinking - which is nothing other than the weighing or testing of the limits, the ends, of presence, of life, of consciousness - thinking itself is love."

 ~ Jean Luc Nancy, Shattered Love

"Dove and Peonies" Commission

"Dove and Peonies"   

Commissioned charcoal drawing on beige paper with white pastel pencil. 10 x 8"