Oamul Lu

Oamul Lu is a freelance illustrator and animator based in China.

Kathe Fraga

Kathe Fraga has perfected the elegance of aged French fresco panels with birds and flowers in a modern Chinoiserie style. Also find her on Pinterest.

Organic shapes found in nature

The beautiful, organic art of Yellena James. Her Etsy shop and Instagram. Found via Zamorano Fine Arts Academy student work and real-world collaborations. Art projects created by K-5 students in San Diego where they ask students to explore her work and create their own versions. A beautiful assignment.

I discovered Lauren Kussro via my art director at Fred Hutch and immediately fell madly in love with her installations! She is navigating terrain and documenting botanical and geological matter, in the most beautiful way. Her Instagram here.

 

One more before I go. Rex Ray collages his way through organic loveliness.

The Protest Films

These are brilliant! 

 

 

Flowery discovery

Don't you wish you could have a running catalog in your brain of all your adored artist. I find so many artist and new artist that I just flip over that I am making my list! Here is a new addition. I want to paint flowers like Judith Bigham (and she is local!) I love her shapes, color combinations and fluidity! Sigh (oh, to be a "real" artist when I grow up).  Visit her website here.

Who am I? (an ongoing list)

Who are your favorite artists? John Singer-Sargent, Gustav Klimt, Henri Rousseau, Norman Rockwall, David Hockney, OKUDA SAN MIGUEL, Kirsten Ulve, RETNA, Kehinde Wiley, Aaron De La Cruz, Julia Ibbini, Jan van Os, John Hersey, Von Glitschka, Ron Chan, Nicholas Rougeux, Al Hirschfeld, Bunnie Reiss, Lauren Kussro  

Who are your favorite musicians? Earth, Wind and Fire, Louis Armstrong, Yo-Yo Ma, Johann Pachelbel, Vivaldi, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Edie Brickell & New Bohemians  

Tell us about your personal/professional background: It took me until my 30's to figure out what I wanted to do the rest of my life.  

Tell us about one event that completely changed the direction of your life. The birth of my son in 1991, made me more serious about everything.  

Who are your favorite heroes/heroines of fiction? Elizabeth Bennet (okay, any Jane Austen heroine) 

Who are your favorite characters in world history? Carole Lombard, Kathyrn Hepburn, Jane Austen, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Galileo, Leonardo, my art teacher - Otis Lumpkin, Alan Turing

Tell us about your background: Product of a single mom in the 50's, insecure from not having a hands-on father. And later, dealing with alcoholic fueled fights between mother and step-father, dealing with an alcoholic grandfather. Had an advantage of living in many places around the world.   

Where would you most like to live someday? In a rustic cabin in the woods. The entry has a 12 foot carved totem, there is a very large library, must have wi-fi. A river close and a view of snow-capped mountains. This is not a physical place, I just realized it is about the house environment, the place, rather than the location that interest me the most. I can literally live anywhere ... but it would be nice to have the perfect home.

New website

I found a job posting on Indeed that really intrigued me! And made me make a mad dash to finish my new website! It makes me happy to see one job in many that gives me a little thrill. ;)

kimcarney.com

Drink the bleach

Since I guessed I have been permanently banned from Twitter, they are still "thinking about my status" ... I must find a platform besides Facebook to air my anger.

Another installment from Margaret and Helen you might enjoy! Drinking the Bleach.

Get off our lawn!

I am not the only one done with this mess! GET OFF OUR LAWN: The case by an angry, old lady for why Donald Trump doesn’t deserve your vote.

 "How dare you. How dare you, Mr. President. We are out here in America doing EVERYTHING we can to NOT get or spread this disease. And some of us are doing it without knowing if we will be able to pay our rent next week. We are wearing masks. We are social distancing. We are making sacrifices every day in hopes that we can reduce the number of deaths. For me 1,000 deaths were too many much less 200,000.

Every other first world country has gotten this thing under control and here we are still leading the world in cases and deaths.  That’s not success.  That’s failure.  You want to blame this city or that state.  You want to blame this Mayor or that Congressman.  How is that helping anything? We needed to work harder at this.  We needed to ALL come together and do what was needed to be done.

And then you do this? You bring a thousand of your fans together without masks, without any precautions whatsoever? And then you put it on television and rub our noses in it with a million dollars’ worth of fireworks?  Fuck the Hatch Act.  I don’t give three shits about the Hatch Act.  Screw it.  And SCREW YOU MR. PRESIDENT."

And not I am following: Margaret and Helen Best Friends for Sixty Years and Counting…   

About: My name is Helen Philpot. My grandson taught me how to do this so that I could “blog” with my best friend Margaret Schmechtman who I met almost 60 years ago. I have three children with my late husband Harold. Margaret has three dogs and some birds with her husband Howard. I live in Texas and Margaret lives in Maine.

Shona Wilson

For the last twenty years Australia-based artist Shona Wilson has intimately collaborated with nature by building sculptural assemblages that incorporate a myriad of found organic specimens. In her 2016 body of work, Offering, she formed mandala-like pieces from objects such as seedpods, twigs, and bones that were intended as gestures of gratitude to her practice’s source—nature.

 

Stick a fork in me, I think I am done

My best friend was telling me the other day that I was posting happier stuff on Facebook and she thought I was doing better with my trump-rage-posting. She has been telling me for three years that I was radicalized which my response is/was: If I don't speak out about the stupidity I see going on, I will be complicit in acting like this presidency is normal, which he is not! If I don't say something about something illegal he does daily then it will feel like I approve of that behavior, which I do not.

I agreed her assessment but later started thinking about that. After 3+ years of sheer panic, I mean waking up every day at 3:45am in tears, thinking about where our country is and where it is heading ... I am exhausted emotionally. And our situation gets worse BY THE DAY.  He lies and 39% of Americans believe him. He gets the CDC and the FDA to lie and play along with his Covid-19 cover-up and ignorance. He has the GOP by the nuts, afraid to speak truth to any lie that falls out of his mouth.

Losing my job didn't help. Worrying about finding another. Worrying about the world trying to deal with Covid-19 while many are ignoring science and facts that we are not going forward in our quest to overcome this pandemic until we all get on the same page, wear mask, stay home as much as we can, limit social contact, certainly DO NOT go to Sturgis and hang out with thousands of bikers NOT wearing mask. At this rate, we will be in this pandemic for a long time and our economy will NOT bounce back. Small businesses that we love will shutter their doors, restaurants will falter, more jobs will be lost and jobs we have lost will not come back. All preventable, if we just practice some smart and civilized restraint and stop listening to politicians, in particular ONE idiot (I will not call him a politician) that wants his great economy back ("the greatest economy HE created in the history of our country") and keep encouraging schools, business to open no matter what the risk. Trump's new Covid-19 professional advisor, Dr. Atlas is telling the world that we need herd immunity which means most of us "older folks" will be dead ... and they don't care. Of course, let's not mention that Dr. Atlas in NOT an immunologist like Dr. Fauci, who has advised six Presidents on HIV/AIDS and many other domestic and global health issues.

I have also been worrying about the vast number of people about to be evicted, families, older Americans, bound for the streets? If the economy keeps going in this direction, we will see another great depression.

Trump has literally tainted everything he has touched. He has ruined our wonderful country. His hate, his lies, his racism, his cult followers have turned this country into someplace I do not recognize. I have seen little hints of what is going on in the past. My own father whining and complaining that "the government" was coming after his guns FOR YEARS and guess what ... he still has all of guns. I have heard my own family spewing hate against Mexican/Americans and gays way back when ... I ignored it because I saw a world that was growing away from that kind of thinking. My world, the world I lived in, worked in, did was not think like that. Then Trump's birther movement started and I ignored that because I thought it was stupid and was not worth the energy even addressing it or fighting with people about it. And I was so wrong. There we 39%+ Americans out there, including some of MY best friends and family who nodded their heads in agreement and would have sworn Obama was not an American citizen, or that Michelle was really a man in drag, or that he was tarnishing our "White House" with his "black thinking". I now know I should have started screaming much sooner, severing family and friends way before trump was elected, in general, paying closer attention to QAnon, the Federalist Society and the dribble over at FakeFox and right wing radio. I knew about all of these entities but not as much as I should have. I was far too busy and comfortable wearing my blinders.

We have a willfully ignorant man in office, supported by willfully ignorant "Christians" claiming this man is sent by God! Every time he said something horrible during the 2016 campaign we all thought, surely people will now see him for what he is. And NO, they didn't. Even now when something comes to light his cult ignores it and still claims God has sent him to us. I made the statement on election night, he is the Antichrist and I believe that more than ever. He is evil. 

But I am tired. And I am working on getting the VOTE out. But if he wins again, I really do not have a game plan to hold onto my sanity. And by the way, 187,000 Americans have died as of today from Covid-19.

I woke up in the middle of the night and ended up watching Showtime's "Love Fraud". Graphics by Martin O'Neil were fantastic. You can look at one piece of art for hours and never take in all the elements!

LOVE FRAUD title sequence from CUTITOUTXGRIFF on Vimeo.

A page from his studio

Kevin turned his studio into a page from his studio! Adorable.