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The Boca Imaging Center Exhibit | SPOTLIGHT 22/23

I enter art competitions with some regularity to confirm my belief in myself as an artist when other eyes get to view my work. Last October there was a call for artists to enter a multi-media exhibit, Fall for Art, at the JCC in Boca Raton, so I joined Women In The Visual Arts (WITVA) in south Florida and displayed two paintings in the show. Before the year was up, there was another call for a special exhibit that was only open to five or six artists of all who applied. This exhibit has been running since 2013, thanks to curator Edie Minkoff, who is on the board of WITVA. I entered 8 paintings and hoped for the best.

DRUM ROLL PLEASE!!  

I am greatly honored to have been chosen as one of only six artists in WITVA to participate in SPOTLIGHT 22/23, a collection of One Woman Shows at the Boca Imaging Center at 7070 W Palmetto Park Road in Boca Raton. The art is available for viewing and sales Mondays-Fridays from 9AM to 5PM for the next year or so. The link to the YouTube video for SPOTLIGHT 22/23 is: https://youtu.be/aBlovXGNxkw. It is my privilege to have these six paintings displayed there… 

Rising, On Fire, Blue Mood, Bandstand, Closeup and Diva

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The 2023 BallenIsles Art Show

The annual BallenIsles Art Show opened last night, featuring wonderful art in different mediums by the many talented residents who live and create here.

It was particularly special because after the last two years of wearing masks and few celebrations, we enjoyed a fabulous Gala, complete with cocktail party and spectacular dinner.

The show can be viewed through January 27th.

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The Greatest Gift

Our littlest grandchildren, when asked what they wanted for Chanukah this year, each requested a small painting for their new bedrooms. Lasa, who is 8, asked for a unicorn blowing rainbow bubbles. I cheated a little & made this unicorn’s bubbles the colors of a rainbow.

Mila, who is 6, asked for a cheeseburger with French fries and popcorn, her favorite foods. I stuck a toothpick with a gold star in her cheeseburger to celebrate her gold medal win for her vault in a gymnastics competition a few weeks ago.

Teddy, who is 4 and our 6th and last grandchild and only grandson, asked for a shark with a lightning bolt! At first, I painted a more realistic lightning bolt but decided Teddy would appreciate a more cartoony version.

Unfortunately unable to be with our son’s family this holiday season (though we did have a great time with our daughter’s family), I had to ship their Chanukah gifts to them this year. The greatest gift for me was watching their reactions as they each unwrapped their paintings. Priceless!!

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4th Annual Primary Colors Exhibit | November 2022

Anticipation

The LightSpaceTime Online Gallery held its Primary Colors juried competition from August through October, receiving 596 entries from 23 different countries and 31 states plus the District of Columbia. It was a call for art that used at least one of the primary colors (red, blue &/or yellow) as a key element, so I entered Anticipation in the Painting and Other Media category. How nice to have received an award for Special Recognition today–the exhibit will be featured on the website homepage: http://www.lightspacetime.art for the next three months. #feelinggrateful

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Dance Party

I’ve always been attracted to dancers. Maybe because I took so many dance classes as a kid…and actually got to dance on a local New York TV show like American Bandstand when I was a sophomore in high school. I took jazz classes as an adult, not to mention disco classes with my husband in the 70’s & early 80’s. We still often have a chance to dance on any Friday night at the club where we live. So that’s one reason I chose to paint Bandstand. There are a few others. I loved the idea of painting silhouettes where movement is the point, not features. And their shadows! I’ve been looking at images with shadows for a long time, thinking about painting a series…maybe this painting will be the start.

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4th Annual Summer 555 Art Competition

The LightSpaceTime Online Gallery holds a special summer art competition that features an entry fee of $5 for artists to enter 5 images of their artwork and the gallery selects 5 overall winning artists. Loving the rare bargain, I submitted my entries, and though I wasn’t one of the overall winning artists in the Painting & Other Media Category, I did receive Special Recognition for 2 of the 5 images I submitted: A Garden of Love and La Cubana. The exhibition can be viewed from July 5th through September 5th on www.lightspacetime.art. It’s so lovely to get good news, especially when most of the news isn’t.

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Shall We Fly?

Shall We Fly?

I had finished my last painting of a roseate spoonbill over a year ago when I saw a photograph of a ballerina online and knew I had to paint her…so I took a  screenshot. I had called the spoonbill painting Shall We Dance? because that bird reminded me of a ballerina about to dance. Now I had a photograph of a ballerina in a fantastic costume that reminded me of the spoonbill enough to think she might be asking him to fly, if only she had the chance! Some paintings come easy. This one didn’t. I started with the grisaille at the end of July last year,  did some traveling in August and then worked on her on and off, in between other paintings, for a couple of months. As my friend Alan Winter (winterboyart.com) has sometime said, “the muse is not always with me,” The ballerina lived on the floor in the corner of my studio until last month. when I decided to stop trying to make her look like a bird and just let her be the beautiful, graceful reminder (for me) of that bird.  

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Artistic License

   

A Garden of Love

I had my everyday life interrupted in a good way from mid-March until this week. I taught a beginner’s drawing workshop, called So You Think You Can’t Draw, in four 2-hour sessions for the Art Club at BallenIsles, participated in a panel discussion for the Art Club that included a 15-minute talk (with samples and slide show) about my “artistic journey” and co-chaired a luncheon for a dear friend of mine who was being honored. All of that meant that I didn’t have much time to paint, so A Garden of Love took forever to finish.

Inspiration strikes in many different ways, and I am often inspired by photographs I see online. I don’t mean that I go trolling for photographs of things I might want to paint; I mean that when I see a photograph that interests me while I’m reading an article or checking notifications on a website, I take a screenshot and save it. In October of last year, I saw a photo of a stained glass torso with an infant in utero that I thought was brilliant.  

While I start almost every painting with a monochromatic drawing, my approach to painting this torso was a little different. I began with a simple drawing of her shape, but once I started to draw the flowers covering her breasts, I just set myself free and let my brush travel all over her body to include the leaves and blossoms and color wherever I thought they made sense. My proportions were also slightly different from the original image (she’s taller now…more like me), so I had to correct my version to include more of her body. A bit of a departure from my original inspiration, this was just great fun to paint. I can still see the stained glass in it, but I’m not sure anyone else would.

Artistic license…      

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11th Annual All Women Art Exhibition | February 2022

Blue Mood

The LightSpaceTime Gallery’s competition for January was open to 2D & 3D women artists only and appropriately had an open theme. The gallery received 1,147 entries from women artists in 30 different countries around the world, as well as from 41 different states and the District of Columbia. With such a huge field, I am particularly proud that Blue Mood received Special Recognition in the Painting and Other Media category. The exhibit can be viewed this month, February 2022, on lightspacetime.art. Enjoy the all women show!

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The 2022 BallenIsles Art Show

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

The 2022 BallenIsles Art Show closed tonight and celebrated the artists with a closing reception and cocktail party. It opened on January 10th and was extended through today and features the many talented artists who live and create here in BallenIsles. Another art show wearing masks in the clubhouse and having opening celebratory events cancelled because of the pandemic, at least we were able to enjoy seeing the art for an extended period of time…

Shall We Dance?
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Serendipity

La Cubana

Our friend Michael Wolov took his first trip to Cuba in 2009 and walked around Old Havana on his own with camera in hand on day one. He saw an interesting looking woman in traditional dress standing in the street and asked if he might take her picture. She said yes, of course, and he imagined that it hadn’t been the first time she had been asked. He snapped his shot, gave her some pesos to thank her and went on his way.

Fast forward to the summer of 2021:
We took a trip up north to visit family and friends last August, when travel was once again a possibility, however briefly. Our trip ended with a weekend in the Catskills with dear friends of 45 years, Judith and Michael Wolov, who have a charming lake house that they enjoy on weekends away from NYC. When we walked into the guest bedroom, I couldn’t help but notice a framed photograph on the wall of that Cuban woman smoking a cigar. I ask you, what are the odds of my finishing Retro, a painting of a woman smoking a pipe, just weeks earlier and then seeing an arresting image of a woman smoking a cigar? I knew right away that I would be painting her, so I took a picture of the photograph. I finally found time to work on La Cubana last month, after cropping her beautiful dress and intending to hang her in a diptych with Retro called Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. They’ll be on display in the BallenIsles 2022 Art Show from January 10th to the 20th. How serendipitous…

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Screen Shot

I’ve always loved the movies. When I was twelve and had whooping cough that kept me out of school for the last six weeks of sixth grade, I remember watching Million Dollar Movie on Channel 9 in New York almost every weekday of those six weeks. That probably explains why I’ve seen so many of the movies run on Turner Classic Movies before. They weren’t and aren’t all in black & white, but I still enjoy those movies made in the 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s. The same movie would repeat all day and night, so you could tune in at any time and watch the beginning after the end! Strangely enough, in the old days when I was young, it was common practice to go into movie theaters regardless of showtimes.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when I was sitting in my studio doing some work on my iPad and looked up to see the TV on pause while my husband had left the room. I have no idea what film it was or who the actor on the screen was, (now, of course, I’m sorry I didn’t think to click on the guide to find out), I just knew it looked like a painting to me, so I picked up my phone and took a screen shot. Working on two paintings at once these last few months, it’s taken me a while to turn that screen shot into Blue Mood.

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Attitude is Everything

Seven years ago, fascinated with the challenge of being able to paint transparency in oil paint using glazes thinned with linseed oil, I started a series of paintings on 12” x 36” gesso boards with a match that had just been blown out. Painting the stream of smoke wafting up from that match led me to paint a birthday candle, a stick of incense, and a big fat cigar. For the fifth and final panel, I intended to paint a pipe. I googled images of pipes and came across several before I settled on a calabash, the kind of pipe that Sherlock Holmes smoked. Fast forward to last month, when I was going through the photos on my iPad and found the quirky blond smoking that pipe that I had painted for my fifth panel. I’ve been looking at that blond for years and finally thought I’d try to bring her to life. As much as I always enjoy painting portraits—she was a trip! She looks so very 1940’s to me, and with her chin out, pipe in mouth…that’s attitude for you…so Retro is what I’ll call her.

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Special Recognition

I entered my first online art competition at the Light Space & Time Online Gallery in April of 2017 and have been awarded 8 Special Merit Awards and 25 Special Recognition honors for my work in 28 of their online exhibitions since, including the 3rd Annual 555 Special Art Exhibition that opened today. Double Exposure took the honors, my effort to simulate a photographic effect in oil paint. You can view the exhibit at lightspacetime.art through the end of the month. #feelinggratified