I haven't written a blog in a while--sorry about that for anyone that looks forward to them. I've been inundated with numerous crisis and I've found it difficult to find or see the positive things I like to write about.
I have a couple of artist's projects in the works at the moment. I've taken stills of Kensington Tower in downtown Omaha, which is a historical building that doesn't get a lot of attention. It's got some wonderful architectoral details that I'll be making study sketches and then paintings of before I attempt the entire building. I've also been taking stills of flowers for sketching/painting, especially on arbors, and that's another project I'll be working toward. One of my long term goals is to do a continuing series of paintings of architecture I've found interesting, which will probably consist of mostly classic/art deco in large urban settings, and farm related buildings and scenes denoting the aging or timelessness of the agricultural enterprise. The other long term goal is to paint flowers, since they are so beautiful but also so fleeting, never staying long but certainly making an impression in their short timespan. I have been collecting photos of flowers against buildings lately, with different brick/stone/siding backgrounds, so that I can paint them later.
For a little bit of background, I come from a very talented and artistic family. On my mother's side, we have a long line of engineers and domestic engineers who were very artistically inclined. On my father's side, my aunt was an oil on canvas artist who recently left us, and my cousin is greatly gifted in photography. There is a great deal of people mechanically inclined or minorly artistically inclined on that side also, too many to mention here. I was raised working with my hands and training them to accomplish what I could see in my head--I really have to thank my mom for teaching me and hanging in there with me when I threw projects across rooms or buried them in my closet for months out of frustration. I was not an easy kid to raise, and she deserved far more recognition than she received during her lifetime for putting up with me. I also have 5 incredibly talented progeny, who cover the spectrum from stained glass to woodworking to sketching to welding and metal arts.
Well, that's it for today. :)
