One of the best parts of loving art is having the chance to share it. Two of the grandkids spend Tuesdays and Thursdays with me and we do a lot of art on those days. Thursdays, there is a group of us who get together for some plein air painting. The group is pretty tolerant and they don't seem to mind if I bring along a couple of energetic kids.

Thursday we went to the Greenbank Farm on a glorious, perfect Whidbey Island summer afternoon. The best part of the day for me was helping the two kids soak in the natural beauty and have fun.

This is the third attempt at writing this; my laptop keeps shutting down. Here I am with the best laid plans of mice and men. I had a dream of being offered rare surplus aircraft parts to use in a sculpture but felt I had to decline because I didn't even have time  to enter new stuff into my blog. That's what woke me up.

I was replacing the hard drive in my old XP computer, then decided to get a new one. I started to transfer the data from the old to the new when the septic tank failed. Now two months later the tank is still uncovered though operational again. The control switch for the seat in my pickup truck is still dangling under the seat, but is operational again. The kitchen is still stacked in pieces in the dining room after replacing the kitchen floor because of a water leak, now repaired. We are still waiting for the new refrigerator after the old one stopped working for the second time in the last month after being repaired. The "new" kitchen cabinets (from the Habitat for Humanity store) are almost installed, as soon as we finish the shelves. But I still haven't transferred the data.

I understand that as exciting as life becomes it may still not be interesting to others, although writing this has allowed me to keep my priorities straight. The blog would normally come last.

Moving on, Mary's new heart is doing well, her surgery went well. My seeds seem to be doing their job. We are both healthy again. Our friends 5 year old daughter is improving every day as she recovers from open heart surgery six weeks ago. Life is good.

I will attend to a few distractions and return to writing about my new work and experiments with cold wax technique. But when the Universe comes to you in a dream and says you should write on your blog, you should write on your blog.

Intro to encaustic  class at the Freeland library went well. I had 14 enthusiastic students who seemed to enjoy the experience. In preparing for the class I started experimenting with methods of cold working the wax. I will post new work with this method soon,,,as soon as I figure out how to work this blog.

After several months of life challenges, I am finally able to get back up in the studio. Haunting the hallways of hospitals allowed me to view a lot of art, but I wasn't creating any. In the past I have tried to spend a few hours on art everyday but that wasn't possible for a while. I realize now that too much time away tends to diminish my creativity. I have worked hard to get it flowing again. Being around the art and the materials has helped.

To that end, I will be teaching an Introduction To Encaustic class at the Freeland Public Library on Friday January 24, 2014 at 1pm. The class is free but limited to 12 participants. It will be a very basic introduction with participants having the opportunity to try the technique of creating an encaustic. Contact the library at 360-331-7323 for more details.

If you have company coming or are just looking for something
different to do with your day, we’d like to recommend a trip to Seattle to see
some art . We spent the afternoon there and had a marvelous time. Thursday’s and  Fridays, SAM (Seattle Art Museum) is open until 9pm. We went in the late
afternoon and stayed until 7. We missed all the traffic and only had a few other
people in any given gallery at any given time. It was quite lovely. 

The trip was the day of big paintings for us. We spent the
afternoon going to the Winston Wachter Gallery www.winstonwachter.com in Seattle to see encaustic portraits by Tony Scherman. He has
painted portraits that range in size from 28” x 24” to 84” x 96”, with prices
that reach $60,000. There are fewer than twenty pieces of art on view in the whole  gallery, including the sculpture. It’s worth checking them out, just to see a  different kind of gallery, one that has a mission statement and an approach that  wouldn't work for us. 

Then we moved on to SAM to see the European Masters exhibit,
there through May 19th. That exhibit also had a fair share of rather
large paintings. If you add to that the new exhibit “From Abstract Expression to
Colored Plates” and “Together Again: Nuxalk Faces of the Sky” the Northwest
Coast art exhibit which has a few big pieces, we saw some rather large pieces of  art. It was day well spent; we recommend it highly.


Take a day and treat yourself. Visit these or other galleries you
really like.

My new work that will be going up at the Whidbey Art Gallery for the month of April.  Come and join us for Art Walk on April 6th from 5pm - 7pm.  www.whidbeyartists.com