May The Blues Be With You

We went to a concert to benefit breast cancer research on Saturday night in honor of our friend Mai Cramer who died five years ago.  Mai hosted a radio show on WGBH on Friday and Saturday nights called Blues After Hours and the photo here is of her interviewing a musician I can’t quite identify.  [...]

Rex Ray

I was in Montreal with my daughter this week visiting my mother.  I sure didn’t expect to find this fantastic Rex Ray book but Montreal is a city that loves art.
I discovered Rex Ray last year when I bought a boxed set of cards produced by Chronicle Books with Rex’s art.  As you can see, [...]

Sing, Susan Boyle, Sing!

I‘m guessing that all of England and half the world is now abuzz with talk about Susan Boyle who, at the age of forty-seven, unemployed and single, went on a popular reality show, Britain’s Got Talent, to meet what seemed like universal sniggering only to move everyone to tears with her phenomenal voice.  She sang [...]

At Freddie’s

Ahhhh, the fun of this book even with its sordid undertones.  I’m reading my way through the work of the late Penelope Fitzgerald, the British writer who published her first book at the age of fifty-eight.   She was nominated for the Booker Prize twice and won once.  She also won the American National Book Critics [...]

Happy To Say…

I‘m very happy to say that my book, The Saturday Morning Drawing Club Manual, will be published by Findhorn Press in Spring 2010. Findhorn is a wonderful publisher interested in ideas about consciousness and social change. Books about art and creativity are new for them but I think it’s a great fit [...]

Drawing Class

On this cold, rainy day it seemed fitting to do another cloud collage.  I’m experimenting doing some with colored backgrounds now but I love how it was possible to just use scraps of other pieces of painted paper, cut them up and make them into these little collages.  Each person with their own little cloud [...]

Spring Cleaning

It’s truly spring here in Boston now and the magnolia tree in our back garden is already flowering, brave tree that it is.  It does make us happy.  I really loved our snowy winter but I think I was the only one.  It reminded me of my snowy Canadian childhood.
I gave two of my children’s [...]

Kid Art

This week was tax week and I found myself making an intrepid visit inside my file cabinet to unearth a stack of receipts that needed adding.  It’s a ghastly task but it was made a little lighter by the fact that my files were in a state of some disarray and amongst the receipts I [...]