Father's Day 2009

I've been doing so much gardening lately that my parents have been on my mind even more than usual.

Both my parents loved being surrounded by lush plants and both were excellent cooks. While they lived at their house in the southern Italian countryside, from 1972 to 1987, my father was a gardening fiend, staying out until after dark to tend to 3 acres of flowers, vegetables, fruiting and non-fruiting trees. In the summer the sun would have long gone down and he would still be outside. When we yelled to him from the house, "What ARE you doing out there?" he would sometimes answer, "Fertilizing the roses!", the fertilizer being "liquid gold", if you know what I mean.

In the photo above and in the one below he is the light blue speck in the distance.

When they moved to Seattle in 1987 my mother became quite passionate about the plants on the deck of their condo and in the apartment, and joined my father in his love for gardening. After his death in 1993, for the next 12 years, she kept the flowers blooming.

Here I go again...

“Here I go again” seems to be my favorite saying these past few months. After dropping out of blogging, both reading and writing, as well as all forms of art making or crafting (unheard of for me!), and spending a year just reading and gardening, last December I stumbled upon Danny Gregory’s website, via a book I was buying on Amazon.

Suddenly the drawing bug got a hold of me. I used to draw a lot as a child, as well as in high school and in college, and in one way or another always incorporated some form of drawing in all the crafts that have rotated in my roster of obsessions. Whether it was clay or silk or metal it ended up having an image of some sort on it.

From Danny Gregory’s podcast interviews of artists who keep visual journals it was just a hop, skip and a jump (actually just a free fall) into drawing in a sketchbook, to buying a bunch of supplies, to taking online classes, to making mixed media, to buying more supplies, to buying books, more classes...

You can see why at every turn I kept saying to myself “here I go again”.

Even though I have yet to make a folk art doll, or paint a mixed media “petit doll”, I learned something from all the classes I signed up for, in some of them I actually produced a lot of work, and in all of them I had a blast!. Obsessively, of course.

Here they are:

Suzi Blu’s Petit Dolls

Kelly Kilmer’s Prompt a Day

Jane DesRosier’s Cloth and Clay Dolls

Alisa Burke’s Graffiti Chic

Mary Ann Moss’ Pure Experimentation: Stencilry

Somehow this made me want a new camera for bigger and better photos, as if the 5,606 currently in my iPhoto Library were not enough, and the capability to make little videos. Of what? I dunno. Dogs? Walks? Whatever. Any camera suggestions would be very much appreciated. Nikon D90? Canon EOS XSi? Canon EOS 40D?

Taking the classes also got me reading blogs again, and reading blogs made me want to revive mine. Now I need to upgrade to iLife 09, in the hopes that it will give my blog a new and spiffy look. Today is the first day of my 5 week vacation (yes, I am lucky), so I guess it’s the perfect time to wake up my blog and make something old new again. I just realized it’s also the 16th anniversary of my father's death. Hi Papa.

By the way, I went through all my old blog links in the sidebar and was amazed to see that almost everyone’s blog was up to date and more beautiful than ever. I was impressed.

Good job folks!!

P.S.

I just signed up for a Blogger blog because I was totally frustrated at getting a repeated error message when I tried to publish my iWeb (Apple) blog, and now I am totally frustrated at trying to get the font size and color and layout I want on Blogger. Why isn't any of this REALLY easy??