Winter work
This January and February has been SO busy with gigs, commissions, teaching and painting. I thought I should post a bit of what I have been working on, so here's some of the caricatures I've done...


and a couple more of the wonderful birthday parties I have drawn at ...

The evolution of a smile...

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile,
but sometimes your smile
can be the source
of your joy.

~Thich Nhat Hanh

Winter lightPerhaps you would like to join us at a star party this weekend...

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
~Albert Camus

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power,
but for the passionate sense of potential -- for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.
~Søren Kierkegaard

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

~Frederick Douglass

A very creative video that Teesha Moore posted on her blog...I love it.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things,

but their inward significance.
~Aristotle

Anger always comes from frustrated expectations

~Elliott Larson

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone,

because I am the person I know best.”
~Frida Kahlo

Tonight I played on scribbler, doodling self portraits...its so much fun.
A nice way to start the week after such a BUSY weekend...
teaching, kid's stuff, a motorcycle show, cleaning house, and of course
drawing caricatures at another fun birthday party
(Happy First Birthday Natasha!)
with a family group picture thrown in for good measure...:)

"There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it! It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open..."

~Martha Graham

Tonight was the start of my creative journaling class at the Paint Spot. I am basing the first part of the class on a lot of the techniques found in Corey Moortgat's FABULOUS book "The Art of Personal Imagery" (definitely one of my faves).

I used Martha Graham's wonderful quote as the theme for the page tonight because I especially love "It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open..."

THAT is exactly what creative journaling has done for me. By painting, writing and drawing in my journals for the past 27 years, I have developed a level of trust and a way of keeping "that channel" open. There are always mental hurdles to jump (and always will be), especially when approaching anything new in art; new mediums, new styles or new techniques. Having somewhere to go where I feel the freedom to do, write, paint or draw anything and not worry about the end result is one of the best tools in my life.

Everyone in the class did a wonderful page...totally different from each other, yet using the same elements. (I will hopefully show some of them here eventually). Just like the demo that I did during the class was completely different from my pre-class sample . The best part of the night was saying "seeing you next week!". Most of the time I do one day or shorter workshops but this is a six week class and I can't wait to see the development of individual styles through the weeks.

I love to have music in my classes and this was who we listened to while we painted tonight...

Today I was drawing at MacEwan College, south campus, (where I actually attended- a mere 25 years ago) for a special "Get yourself Framed!" fun day. The Student council had provided 4 x 6" IKEA frames for the students to decorate and they could get their caricature drawn for free. What a wonderful idea for another blizzardy cold day!
Here are just some of the great faces I drew today...

and my fave of the day...a true Canadian Tim Horton's coffee addict...

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope

— a slight change, and all patterns alter.

~Sharon Salzberg

Today I was invited to teach an in-service for division 2 teachers held at Rideau Elementary School. I created the small journal (above) as one sample of some techniques I would demonstrate. As always it was a lot of fun!

I would like to say thank you to the teachers at the school for allowing us to take over their staff room and of course, a special thank you to Shama for organizing it all.

When deciding on the theme for my book, I chose the word Altered, or rather it chose me. I just love that word so much because it refuses to place judgement on whether the change that has happened is good or bad...it just is.

We are all faced with changes in our lives constantly, some big and some small. Sometimes we really can't tell how those changes will truly impact us until much later (and maybe from a different perspective).

"May be"
... There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically. "May be," the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed. "May be," replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "May be," answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "May be" said the farmer.

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play

than in a year of conversation.
~Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

I was "duty mom" at my daughter Piper's preschool this morning.
Its a "parent co-operative" and my "job" is to take photos.
These are 9 of the 175 I took this morning...
the rest of the photos were of the kids.
OK, well... most of them were.
See...here's Piper working on her numbers...
a LOT of numbers!...
I just LOVE her sense of design.
Even though she spoke them in chronological order she drew them with a courageous and obvious disregard for visual order.
I'm envious. It took me 40 years to stop worrying about things like that.

A "full on" fabulous weekend of ...tobogganing, wine and great conversation with a wonderful, old friend, 3 drawing gigs, poker and other assorted games with friends, lots of left over pizza, a great birthday party at the
Edmonton Art Gallery, and
WARMER weather....
finally.

A journal page I did,
(scanned and desaturated in Photo Shop)
inspired by the brilliant Misty Mawn)...

Group pictures from 2 of the 3 gigs I drew at this weekend.
Happy Birthday Girls!
Thanks for inviting me to your parties!...

Thanks Ry for all your help this weekend with scanning, and BTW who's teaching you how to play poker so well?

This first week of January 2009 has been very full...of de-cluttering, de-livering, de-toxing, and de-cision making.

• De-cluttering 5 garbage bags of clothes and toys and miscellaneous things to goodwill, (as well as a handful of old habits, ideas and thoughts that no longer serve me anymore)
  
• De-livering 75o Birth Issues magazines
• De-toxing financially and physically
• De-cision making for new goals, patterns and directions
  

The biggest decision that I have made this year (so far) was to go here and I'm VERY excited.

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.
~Charles F. Kettering (1876 - 1958)

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made.
Destiny is made known silently.
~Agnes de Mille (1909 - 1993)

Some journaling for the start of a new year...

...and some of the last of my caricatures from 2008...

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.

~W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), The Razor's Edge, 1943

Merry Christmas!

Mother I love you so.
Said the child, I love you more than I know.
He laid his head on his mother's arm,
And the love between them kept them warm.
~Stevie Smith (1902-1971)



Born in the snow, and yet you hate the cold...



I can't even begin to describe the colours you have brought to my world...




Happy Birthday Kieran Amedeo, born Dec. 23, 2001
... you were my best Christmas present ever...

Love, Mom

Observe Everything.
Communicate Well.
Draw, Draw, Draw.
~Frank Thomas, Disney Animator, When asked to give advice to young animators (...and something I try to do at every gig— as fast as I can!)

This past weekend I was hired to draw at the "The Ultimate Staff Party" on both Friday and Saturday night in Red Deer, Alberta. I was one of the 5 "acts" performing each evening.

The events were HUGE...On Friday night there were 1200 guests and on Saturday night there was a whopping 1700 people (by far the largest event I have ever drawn at).

For three hours each evening I was on centre stage with two huge video screens projecting my drawing hand as well as the person I was drawing. What a blast! As much fun as it was for me, I guess it was especially entertaining for the crowd (as I was told, I was the sleeper hit of both nights).

Thanks to all the guys providing my technical assistance and a special thanks to Jeff for taking some pictures of me drawing Saturday night. Also a very special thank you to the organizers, Richard and Deborah Popovich for making my final 2 gigs of 2008 an amazing finale and giving my family and I a great reason to get out of town and stay in a hotel for a couple days of some pre-Christmas relaxation.

With the temperatures still hovering around the minus 30's it was wonderful to stay at the Red Deer Lodge and have a swimming pool and hot tub only 10 feet from our hotel room door in a beautiful open "inside" courtyard.

After 6 weeks of gigs and freelance work, it was so wonderful to stay in my pjs all morning on Saturday, then head straight to the hot tub and back to laze around in our hotel room some more and play Are you smarter than a 5th grader?. When I got home from my gig on Saturday night, the kids and I watched our Christmas classic Elf and ate cheese popcorn and popcorn twists.

We arrived home today to a very messy house but that still has to wait a couple more days. Now that I'm finished art work and gigs till January... its time to think about Christmas shopping. So I started it at 2:30 this afternoon and finished it at 7:30 tonight and now I'm just wrapping presents up, with a glass of wine and listening to some Christmas tunes...

PS...after I published this, I reread how absolutely perfect I made the weekend sound. In many ways it was, but it was also a weekend with 3 kids and for those of you who don't have children and think that having children is all relaxing and romantic like that, I think I should add some of the normal moments too ...
... like the arguing in the van almost the entire way to Red Deer, or Piper's melt down at the restaurant during our late lunch on Saturday because well, who knows, she just has issues with eating food that isn't made as perfectly exactly as bland and simple as she is used to at home, or my intense discussion with Ry about his attitude towards everybody AGAIN, and then of course there's Kieran's constant negotiation about everything...

...I could go on, but that should give you the idea :) ...

Be Authentic
Be light
Listen
Breathe

Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.

~Frances Moore Lappe

Cold

(From Wikipedia)
Cold refers to the condition of having low temperature, it is the absence of heat relative to the concept of warmth. The color blue is associated with cold. Many things are also associated with cold, for instance ice. Absolute zero is the coldest temperature that can be reached which is 0 K on the Kelvin scale, which is a thermodynamic temperature scale, and -273.15° on the Celsius scale. Absolute zero is also precisely equivalent to 0 °R on the Rankine scale (also a thermodynamic temperature scale), and -459.67 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.

Cold places
* Jupiter with a temperature of -166 °C at the cloud tops.
* Mars has a temperature of about -180 °C (-292 F).
* Saturn with a temperature of -180 °C (-292 F) at cloud tops.
* Neptune with a temperature of -218 °C (-360 F) at the cloud tops.
* Uranus with a temperature of -218 °C (-360 F) at cloud tops.
* Edmonton, Alberta this past weekend... with a temperature of -31 °C ( -38 with the windchill)

I'm feeling cold. Outside is cold, inside is cold, even my thoughts are cold...they are kind of hunched over with their hands in my pockets scurrying to the next idea to see if they can find a little warmth there. So much going at this time of year, this time in our family, this time in our lives, this time in the world especially. Lots of cold thought spots and I just can't stay in one place too long...

On the drawing side...a very busy gig weekend, lots of great faces...especially the kids....and here's a group of cartoon portraits I did last week for the City of Edmonton's Asset Management department for their web site...

I think I'll just bundle up my thoughts and listen to some blues...

Is there
not MORE
to life
than getting
stuff?
and then getting
MORE of it,
BIGGER of it,
FASTER of it,
and
THEN
STUFFING
what you can't use now
somewhere
so you can use it
later?

If this is so...
what a sad routine.
How really very, very sad

On the other hand...
Know for sure
that you are
rich
when your
hunt for alternatives
becomes
sincere.

I bought a card with that written on it, about 10 years ago. At that time we were still living that kind of life. Mark and I approached everything from our "traveler mentality" and so it was really easy to refrain from collecting stuff. When your "home" is a backpack, the lighter you live, the better.
How I would love to say that we live as simple as that now. We don't. Unfortunately Mark and I still haven't quite figured out how to handle the amount of stuff that owning a house requires, not to mention how much stuff 3 children can generate in your life.

With Christmas coming, I can't help but get a bit stressed thinking about even MORE stuff entering our small home. I do love to sort, organize and declutter, (its actually something I'm VERY good at), but I can't keep up. It takes so much more time when you have to do it for 5 people, a lot more time than I have in my life right now.

Mark and I are both taking time off around Christmas, so this is going to be at the top of our "To Do" list.

...how I spent my drawing time yesterday...
(one part of a "Thank you" to Nora for helping Mark with our kids while I was in North Carolina)...

...while listening to this amazing song
from one of my favourite movies....

By the time I'd grown up, I naturally supposed that I'd be grown up.
~Eve Babitz

This cartoon was hanging on Mark's fridge when I met him and then it hung on our fridge for years. It made us laugh all the time.

I found it the other day while searching through an old photo album and it still makes us laugh. I remember having it on our fridge about 7 years ago and some "grown up" friends were over and saw it there. They didn't find it funny at all. They actually didn't get it. I remember the difficulty in trying to explain it to them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all an advocate for immaturity. In fact I really do have issues with some of that kind of behaviour. I guess it has more to do with the assumption that some people act or just seem more grown up than we do.

I do think that some people feel grown up eventually. I also think some people are just born that way. My son Ry was born more grown up than both Mark and I, and that is what has caused all the difficulty. He's always been "older" than us. At 3 —he was lecturing us on driving too fast, at 7—he was lecturing us on ancient Rome and Greece, at now at 11—he reads the paper in the morning, checks the stock market, and lectures me about the news and the government... oh and refers to his younger brother and sister as "the kids". Parenting him has never been easy.

However, he is still a child and is actually very naive in many non-intellectual ways. I have learned to understand his unique perspective a little more in the last few years. This happened the day I realized that he is almost as uncomfortable being a child as often as we are parenting him as one.

Perhaps some other people just know how to do the things that "grownups" do when they are "supposed" to do them (whether they feel like it or not), like register kids for swim lessons or make sure that there are groceries in the house.
..maybe I could take a class on that...

Oh and here are some things I've been working on (in between thoughts)...









...and of course always listening to music...

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
~Rainer Maria Rilke