More than any other painting I’ve made, this one looks like it would taste incredible if licked, like some kind of Willy Wonka fantasy candy. But I’ve got to think that saliva would do bad things to a watercolor.

These are, once again, glass gems, a.k.a. the stuff you can put in floral arrangements and aquariums. Under ho-hum circumstances, they look like this:

But stack them next to a window and get them under the right kind of lights and they become magically delicious. I’ve said this so many times: I love what light can do to glass.

I’ve been obsessed with this painting for two weeks. It’s as big as I can go at 21″x29″, so each gem is about the size of a dinner plate. I had fun with the crazy variety of colors in this one, from Opera to Permanent Green Light, which I almost never get to use. The white, eye-like ovals are my small table lamp. You can see my hands in the bottom gems and window reflections at 9 o’clock on a lot of them.

Obviously (or not?) I have to use photographs for this kind of painting. I can’t imagine our cats seeing a pile of these things–which are hard to stack–poised on the edge of a table and not feel the need to knock them over. In case you missed this photo of Bun helping me paint, here’s what my setup looks like:

I use my laptop to zoom in on micro-details while Bun glares at me. That’s because Bun is old school, I’m afraid. While I am loyal to what I see in my photos, I tend to pump up colors and edit the image as I work. Each whole gem took a day to paint, and each had its own abstract weirdness with which to contend, so I was never bored.

The red gem seems to be the brains of this operation–part of it actually kind of looks like a brain–and it influences its neighboring gems. My favorite section of the painting is in this neighborhood:

Like Bun, Jeff sometimes checks in to see how I’m doing, and his top comment for this painting was, “Aliens.” (Jeff is alien-school. He has an entire bookcase devoted to science fiction.) He likes the pink gem on the left which is probably the weirdest one.

Taste the rainbow!

I think Glass Gems 3 is a prime candidate for a giclee print, and I’m currently toying with the idea of offering it in two sizes, small and large. If I wanted to offer a near full-size print (around 21″x29″), the end cost to customers would be at least in the $100-$125 dollar range (***guessing***) if I wanted to make any kind of profit. Smaller prints would be in the $75 range. I really think this deserves to be big, though. Even unframed and just tipped against my studio wall, it has quite a presence. Please let me know if you’d be interested in jumbo gems (or small gems), and if enough people respond, I’ll get going on that!

In the same vein as my crab apples, here’s a 10.5″x13.5″ watercolor of some mushrooms I found growing next to a tree stump in our yard. They were hidden under some leaves, which I cleared away just a bit. This revealed all kinds of sticks and other dark plant material that was in the process of becoming our state’s beautiful black topsoil. (I’ve known international students who have been astounded by how black our dirt is here, including one who cutely took photos of it.)

Speaking of students, when I was a high school art teacher, kids always wanted to draw, paint, and sculpt mushrooms. I assumed that most of these kids were druggies and encouraged them to become inspired by, I don’t know, one of the trillion other subjects available to them on this planet. “But I don’t know what else to draw! And I just really like mushrooms!” I’m sure you do.

Also they’re way too easy. Come on.

Gee, what are you going to make next? An ashtray? An incense burner? A cylinder with an odd little tube coming out the side?

Mushrooms. Sheesh.

So anyway, a few weeks ago I decided I wanted to paint some mushrooms!

And what a lot of work this was. I got obsessed with every square inch of it. That colorful leaf near the top took two days to finish and was challenging to say the least. Painting the mushrooms made me happy. The little ridges look difficult but they’re actually pretty satisfying to create. There are so many tiny things going on here, and they’re the kinds of details you never notice, like what’s happening in the gaps between the leaves and the little fly (can you find it?). I tried to do them justice, but that meant mixing tiny amounts of hundreds of different colors, I’m guessing.

I posted this painting on Facebook when I finished it last week, and a few people thought I was making up some of the colors, especially the ones on the bright leaf. Those people don’t live in Illinois. Most of my Illinois pals agreed that this year the foliage was just this colorful. Lurid, even! I showed Jeff’s daughter Melissa my reference photo last night, and she said I should put it on my blog.

So while I pumped up the colors somewhat, in real life that leaf was still pretty loud. :)

I’m really pleased with the way this turned out, and I’ll have a few more fall paintings to add to this series.

“I’m not sure why, but I just don’t want to blog about my show.” — me, every day since August 23.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been feeling uncharacteristically vulnerable and borderline paranoid, and last night I finally figured out why: my paintings are on display and people are looking at them.

Normally my paintings are safely tucked away in their owners’ homes or occupying the nonjudgmental walls of our house. Until I recently framed them, eighteen of my watercolors were stored in a portfolio in my little studio, looked at by no one but me maybe once a month (to make sure they were okay).

But it’s strange to know that 225 miles away, in the art gallery of a small liberal arts college, three dozen of my paintings are being seen by the eyes of strangers. Those people are reading my stories about the paintings on the title cards next to them. Most dauntingly, those people are talking about the paintings and judging them. That’s just what people do. And it’s going on now, and I don’t get to listen to a word of it, which is undoubtedly for the best. Admittedly, I put my images up on the internet all the time and it’s no big deal to me, but somehow this is different.

I don’t have children, but I bet I’m going through the same emotions that parents must feel when they send their kids off to school for the first time.

Sprinkled on top of this: the nagging idea that I don’t even deserve to have a show like this in the first place. Because who am I? I’m just some woman who quit her job so she could paint! Someone (I can’t remember who! who was it??) recently said that having a one-person show was the art equivalent of having a book published. It’s like people are reading the book that I’ve just started to write!

Hence the eerie silence on this blog over the past couple of weeks. Sorry about that. But now that I’ve been able to identify the simple problem–strangers are looking at my paintings and it’s freaky–I think I can write again.

And did you see the photo up there? They put my name on the window with letter stickers and how cool is that?

Three weeks ago, Jeff and I packed 24 paintings into the trunk and back seat of the car (Jeff’s 2004 Mazda 6) and took off for my parents’ house, en route to Canton, Missouri. Each framed, plexiglassed watercolor was separated from its neighbors by cardboard and towels/blankets. We decided to take I-74–see the purple line on the map–instead of a more direct route to western Illinois because it was the smoothest road. I cringed whenever we hit an unavoidable bump. Would the paintings shift and scratch each other during this 300 mile odyssey?

Early in our trip west we passed this guy. I decided that his superhero name would be The Yellow Jacket.

One of my favorite landmarks on this most boring of drives is a giant DeKalb operation near Farmer CIty, which is the name of an actual town in Illinois.

That photo does not do it justice, but please know that this place is enormous. In my book, anyplace that is intimidatingly big and makes me wonder what goes on inside earns the distinction of CONCERN, as in, “We just passed the DeKalb concern.” I actually look forward to seeing the DeKalb concern, and this should give you some idea of how uninteresting I-74 is.

We hit a nasty thunderstorm west of Peoria that forced us to pull over for a few minutes. Normally I love a good storm, but watercolors plus more water is a scary combination, and I imagined one of the frequent cloud-to-ground lightning strikes hitting our car, splitting the roof open, and rain pouring in and destroying my pictures. Also, we’d be electrocuted. I’m not buying the idea that cars are safe places to be in electrical storms.

After a side trip to Macomb to pick up the Mabel painting, which was being housed by her grandparents, we arrived at Mom and Dad’s house at around noon. They were going to help us take some extra paintings down to Canton in their car. The weather was sunny and pleasant, and the drive was uneventful save for one hilarious carnival food idea Jeff and I had. It’s too dirty to write about.

Once we found the art gallery on Culver-Stockton’s very small campus, the Great Unloading began.  Gallery director Debbie Myers, a small crew of students, my pal and C-SC associate professor Terry Sherer, Jeff, my folks, and I made short work of getting the paintings into the gallery. The number of pictures emerging in a steady stream from our two-car caravan brought thoughts of clown cars to mind. Then we went right to work placing the paintings throughout the gallery, setting them on the floor. I had been given a floor plan of the space months in advance, so I was able to plan my show. I wanted to put my portraits downstairs and the florals, still lifes, and Burano pictures upstairs. Do I need to say that Jeff was amazing when it came to helping me make instant, Sophie’s-level Choices when it came to my art? Because he was amazing.

Debbie and Co. then had 48 hours to hang the paintings. I didn’t have to lift a finger, but I did give them a whole lot of cookies. Jeff and I were given a complimentary guest room on the building’s second floor, a cute little place featuring the following print:

After looking at it for a while I Facebooked:

“We’re in Culver-Stockton’s complimentary guest room. The art on the wall totally says ‘sex.’”

Jeff commented:

“However, the two twin beds provide a compelling counter-argument.”

With two days to blow in a small town (pop. 2000) in the middle of nowhere, Jeff and I had to work to keep ourselves busy. Terry, whom you may remember from such paintings as…

…kept us amused. We love spending time with him.

Activities included:

• a side trip to Iowa City with Terry for sushi and a lecture about Haiti
• a side trip to Quincy with Terry for German food and a look at the city’s beautiful homes, and
• a side trip to Nauvoo, Illinois, i.e. Mormon Jerusalem, sans Terry, who was teaching. Some photos!

Jeff looking iconic by the banks of the Mississippi River.

The rather beautiful Nauvoo temple.

Butterfly stalking.

But really, there was not much for us to do during the day, and I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on my recreational reading because of the dreaded gallery talk I’d have to give on Thursday night. To make things easier, I had put together a PowerPoint presentation on my work and I had planned to give the talk in a nearby classroom. I spent all day Thursday memorizing what I was going to say to…the five people who would show up? None of my friends who might have wanted to see the show lived in the area, and anyway it was a school night, so I had no idea how that was going to go, either. A few hours before the show’s opening, Jeff and I (mostly Jeff) hooked up my laptop to the existing system and dealt with the classroom’s faulty projector.

Wondering how tired I must have looked, and instinctively knowing that no one would take photos of me during the show that I could later use to illustrate this blog, I snapped a quick self portrait in the semi-darkness.

Here’s a better picture of me (taken by me in our house last month) with my apple blossoms. Hopefully I looked more like this on the night of my show.

The opening itself was wonderful, and I even managed to sell some work! Culver’s president, its visual arts chairperson, and fine arts dean attended and had kind, generous things to say about my paintings. Art students and a smattering of local people were also there, along with a surprise appearance by my Uncle Ted and Aunt Terri.

I’m in no position to say whether I did a good job with my speech, but Terry told me, “You wowed them.” He reported that one of the cute artsy girls said, “I want to be just like her.” My parents, who had never seen me teach, were able to watch me talk about art and engage with young people for the first time, and they haven’t stopped talking about it. The whole night whipped by in a lovely flash, and then it was over, and then I had to leave my paintings for a month. And then the aforementioned ennui set in.

Sidebar: I got the word “ennui” in a state Spelling Bee in 8th grade, and I spelled the heck out of it.

So here I am back at home. Bun continues to thrive–thanks everyone for asking about her. Saturday she wedged herself into a very small basket. Pardon my thumb; she wasn’t in there for long.

After spending his birthday helping me schlep art all over the tri-state area, as opposed to having fun in Spain, my husband is happy to be home, too. Thank you very much for all you do for me, Jeff!

If you’re in the Canton, MO, area for some reason, my show will be up until September 23. The gallery is open M-F, 9-5.

I’m calling my newest painting Gelateria, pronounced jell-ah-ter-EE-a, which is where you can buy gelato*. Gelato is something you should eat while you’re in Italy if you want your entire concept of “good ice cream” to be ruined forever. Trust me: if you’ve never had gelato, you don’t know what good ice cream is. And I’m not bragging here. What’s happened to me is tragic. Ever since I’ve eaten this stuff, no American ice cream comes close to measuring up. I am doomed to be forever dissatisfied.

Plus it’s so beautiful! The Italians’ presentation of their gelato puts our ice cream shops to shame. You’re not going to see chunks of hard ice cream at the bottom of some big cardboard-y bucket in Italy.

No. You’re going to see voluptuous, swirly mounds of perfect-texture ice cream decorated with fresh ingredients and little name cards and dripping with sauces.

So that’s why I wanted to paint it. This is a big painting, around 20″x28″, and it took me a couple of weeks to finish (although last week was crazy around here; I think I had one good painting day). I started in the upper-left corner and snaked my way around to the cherry-topped behemoth in the lower-left corner. Here’s the painting at the end of Day 2.

I wish I would have taken more in-progress photos. Where was my mind? I must have lost it after painting seven Elenka dipping spoons (what are those called, exactly?).

Painting the chocolate sauce was so satisfying. I painted the vanilla ice cream first, with its blue and yellow shadows, and after it dried I topped it with fudgy brown paint, almost exactly the same way you might apply hot fudge to an actual sundae.

I knew the swirls and ridges in each flavor of gelato would be challenging but no worse than anything else I’ve painted lately. I painted the melon gelato a couple of days ago while Jeff and Melissa watched Rango in the living room directly below my painting table. I listened to my iPod in an attempt to drown out the movie’s beyond-obnoxious soundtrack, but I could still hear the movie’s explosions, stampedes, and, I dunno, volcanoes, earthquakes, and rocket launches roaring below me. I could also feel them through the floor. I have never painted under worse sonic conditions, but I was behind schedule on the picture and wanted to catch up. So that melon gelato was painted by one highly annoyed but stoic woman.

This picture concludes my 4-month painting spree in preparation for my show at Culver-Stockton College eleven days from now. CSC is in Canton, Missouri,a small town in the northeast corner of the state. More info about that is here:

http://www.facebook.com/ev?ent.php?eid=23135170690198?5

If you can make it, please come to my opening on August 25 at 7:00 p.m.! All of my new paintings and some of my older ones will be on display. I realize that most of my friends (a) live 200+ miles away, (b) are teachers just starting the school year, and/or (c) are parents of young children just starting the school year. But if you live in or are visiting the tri-state area and would like to look at a whole lot of my watercolors for free, I’d love to see you there! The show will be up until September 23.

*Plural of gelato is gelati, and I dislike the sound of that word so much that I had no other choice than to call this Gelateria, although that word kind of bugs me, too. No reason.

In animal husbandry news, Bun continues to thrive after her visit to the U of I Veterinary Teaching Hospital about a month ago. I’m so happy with her progress! I almost hate to say this because I don’t want to jinx it, but her procedure seems to have fixed her other problems, too. We’re managing her condition with meds and special food, and she seems so much happier. Here Bun is sitting at our dining room table, where apparently we have all kinds of magazines lying around. We were eating homemade sushi, which was relevant to Bun’s interests.

Another thing Bun is loving: watching water in the bathroom sink.

Quixote digs it, too.

Finally, earlier this week Jeff and I visited the Prairie Fruits Farm, where we purchased some goat cheese and their exceptional peach sorbet, which we’d rank right up there with Italian gelato but not quite as this was sorbet and sorbet is easier. While at the farm, we had a brush with goatness.

Every year the Illinois Watercolor Society invites artists across the country to enter their juried exhibition. Simply entering this show is no guarantee that you’ll be accepted–it’s a hundreds-will-enter-60-will-win kind of contest. This spring, as I got set to mail the appropriate forms and fees to the IWS for this competition, I kissed the self-addressed-stamped-envelope that would come back to me in about a month, hopefully with good news.

Each artist can enter two paintings for this show, which are sent to the juror as jpegs, and he or she accepts one or the other or neither. I thought Abandoned Knowledge and Dale’s Super 400 had a chance, even though this year’s juror, Robert Lee Mejer, is an abstract expressionist. The jurors are different each year, so it’s impossible to know what kinds of paintings will please them. You just have to go with what you feel is your best work. If you and the juror share a similar aesthetic, don’t expect that person to be impressed with you. Judging art is so subjective, and as an art teacher sending student work to contests year after year and now as an artist entering my own paintings in shows like this, I’ve learned to keep my expectations extremely low. If I don’t get accepted for a show, it’s no big deal. If I do get accepted, it’s no big deal.

But I got accepted for this show and it was a totally big deal!

Mr. Mejer selected Abandoned Knowledge, which I FedEx-ed up to The Next Picture Show art gallery in Dixon, Illinois. Dixon is just down the road from Oregon, the small town where I taught art for eleven years. Last year I was part of this IWS show, and I described the weirdness of seeing my former home and school here.

The show opened on Saturday with a watercolor demonstration by the incredible Robert Krajecki followed by an awards presentation. My parents met Jeff and me there. Since we live on opposite sides of the state, I rarely get to see them, so we had a nice reunion with plenty of time to chat. It was also nice to see some locals I remembered from my teaching days and IWS head honcho Tony Armendariz. Last year I gave him some chocolate chip cookies to thank him for doing me a favor, and this year I felt the need to make him some more. Over the past year I have found a new recipe that has me making the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever tasted, and you just can’t keep that kind of thing under wraps.

So there’s my painting on the gallery’s long wall next to the woman in blue.

And there’s the best-looking man in the room.

Above is the other end of the long wall.

And here is a chunk of the short wall.

Janet Doll, another painter with work in the show, sat next to Jeff and me while Robert Krajecki created a watercolor landscape in about thirty minutes. Janet is just about the sweetest person imaginable, and she reminded me of any number of beloved teachers I’ve known. We started chatting about technique and things like the current “in” watercolor shade, which I’ve indicated below:

It’s a blue-green that’s too green to be turquoise. Janet claims she’s been seeing it everywhere this year, but she doesn’t know the exact name of the color or who makes it, and I was thinking, “It is so awesome to talk shop with somebody else who paints.”

Janet won one of the three “Award of Excellence” ribbons for her painting The Collector (scroll down), and I received one of the three honorable mentions, and I was told that the juror thought my work was one of the best “from the get-go.” I was so happy! IWS favorite Ken Call–he seems to win a lot of awards, and deservedly so–won Best of Show for A Late Night, below.

After the show, Jeff and I loaded up my parents’ car with eight paintings in anticipation of a one-woman show I’ll be having at Culver-Stockton College at the end of the summer. Mom and Dad live a lot closer to Culver, which is in northeast Missouri, so this summer is going to be all about us getting as many paintings as we can over to their house before the show. They’ll store the paintings and help Jeff and me haul them to the C-S gallery in late August. Because of their glass or plexiglass, framed watercolors can be fragile and difficult to transport. You can’t just stack a dozen on top of each other like you can with, say, acrylic paintings, so this is going to be a major operation.

As we were transferring the paintings from our car to theirs, Janet Doll came over and admired my work, saying, “Why didn’t THAT get in?” to my Dale painting. So that was gratifying and awfully kind of her, and I hope I see Janet again next year, if I’m accepted for that show.

Earlier in the day, during the always-boring drive up to northern Illinois, I amused Jeff by reading various Yelp restaurant reviews for Peru, Illinois. To celebrate our anniversary, we had booked a hotel room in Peru, where we would spend the night before exploring Starved Rock state park the next morning. Everybody on Yelp was raving about Ripp’s Tavern, home of “possibly the best fried chicken I have ever had,” according to one reviewer. It sounded like a mom-and-pop kind of place, and it served chicken and only chicken to an endless stream of customers, with french fries or fried mushrooms as sides. Feeling adventurous, we decided to give it a try for supper.

Ripp’s was a small place with two main rooms for customers: the bar and the seating area for the restaurant. As we stood in line for a half hour in the bar, we were able to watch teenagers working the tiny kitchen’s fryer through a window at the far end of the seating area. Waitresses emerged periodically with paper plates loaded with chicken (either light or dark meat), fries, and mushrooms, which were good but not life-changing.

The place also offered “crispies,” i.e. lost nuggets of fried chicken breading. The lighting was a little on the dim side with unflattering bluish undertones thanks to the various Miller Lite and Chicago Cubs neon signs. A haze of grease filled the air. Our chicken arrived flaming hot about fifteen minutes later, sans utensils. Everyone in the place was forced to use their hands, a primitive set-up that made a certain amount of sense.

Boom:

Note the piece of white bread placed underneath the chicken to soak up vital chicken juices.

The fries were merely okay, so I gave the chicken my full attention, starting with the wing. I removed one of the wing bones and used it as a utensil to protect my fingers as I pulled the breast meat apart. The breading was almost tempura-like, very light and crunchy, but kind of one-note in terms of flavor. The chicken was tender, juicy, and not a bit tough, which made me think that maybe Ripp’s partially cooks the chicken before frying it. Whatever they are doing, it’s a real achievement, but we couldn’t help feeling that for the 45+-minute wait, this chicken had to be stellar, and it just wasn’t quite there. By the end of our meal, we were wiped out. I felt that grease had infiltrated every part of my body. It’s the kind of fried chicken that makes you want to take a shower with some unforgiving soap.

Look at us, all tired, greasy, and in love.

We got up early the next morning to hike at nearby geological oddity Starved Rock state park. For once the weather was on my side: partly cloudy, not humid, 72 degrees. We climbed formidable stairways to enjoy views of the Illinois River like this one.

Then we went way, way down to investigate Wildcat Canyon, which boasts a waterfall, a rare sight in Illinois.

We were pleased with the waterfall…

…and other formations and plant life.

After about three miles of uphill and downhill hiking, we were ready to tackle the two-hour drive home and see what amusing surprises the cats had in store for us. Bun, for example, left two and a half surprises for me to find, Easter egg-style, throughout the living room, but for the most part the cats handled our absence like champs.

And that was our anniversary weekend of art, chicken, and nature. If you’re in the Dixon area during the month of June, you should definitely check out the IWS exhibition at The Next Picture Show (it’s on 1st Street).