Birthdays are bittersweet. I love watching children who express utter delight at the attention and excitement on their own birthdays. I observed this with my grandson at his second birthday a few months ago. We dimmed the lights to show off the cake and its bright candles. William was focused on the cake and the […]
State of mind: Fear and sadness have been stalking me. I’m trying to figure out where it is coming from. Buyer’s remorse? I have had that before. I just stocked up on some art supplies that I may or may not have needed. Last night, I really beat myself up. Lots of bad dreams Mom […]
Thank you everyone who has been following my personal drama. I came out of the kidney stone procedure with flying… colors, I guess you could say. Today’s watercolor experiment: I started this morning (the day of the surgery) by imagining all the dream images I would be privy to under anesthesia: The wicked witch of […]
Change of pace for today. Circumstances dictate that I take a break from the outer landscape to concentrate on the inner, at least for today. Had a crummy night last night. Dreams. I can’t recall exactly what they were, but I’m sure that some of them had to do with my mother, who died in February […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Yesterday I did not take my eyes of the plant I was drawing. I did not look at the paper. Today I did the opposite. I closed my eyes and did not look at the paper or the subject. The subject was my mother’s face. I used to practice drawing her face […]
I decided to take a break from thinking about grief, drawing plants, ferns and fungi. Today’s watercolor experiment: I did not want to think. I wanted to try my new watercolor paper. It is larger (12″x16″) than the paper I am used to (9″x12″). I pre-wet the paper with my 3” brush, which seemed much […]
My wife, Joy and I just started watching Mad Men. Frankly I was a little bit leery about rehashing the 1950s and its prevailing attitudes. Drinking, smoking, antisemitism, treating women badly was the norm back then. The protagonist, Don Draper, is a mysterious, emotionally empty Madison Avenue ad agency creative director. Little by little we […]
I seem to be surrounded by broken things, things that are incomplete. Mom died just over a month ago, not more than two weeks after her 90th birthday. Many cousins I hadn’t seen in a while came to her party. We all had a great time. I traveled from California to New Jersey to be […]
One of the reasons I wanted to draw and sketch was to be able to remember. I wanted to be able to have an image in my head and faithfully transcribe it to paper so other people could see was I saw. I wanted to be able to sketch in case I didn’t have a […]
Below is a watercolor I painted the day before I flew back to New Jersey to see my gravely ill mother. Dave, my younger brother, called me to say she wasn’t doing well. We had all gathered the week before for Mom’s 90th birthday. Although Mom was still alive when I painted this, it has always […]
