Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Paradise is one of the wildflower paintings on sale at Vegeria

The art Reception at Vegeria was such a relaxed event; thank you all for coming! We had poets, artists and mothers, family, old time friends and new ones, animal activists and animal lovers, English as a Second Language teachers and Peace Corps volunteers; as a group we had lived in and traveled to so many countries. The food was delicious! Two paintings and one print were sold. Thank you for your nice reactions and for thinking about us, friends who are far away!

The following paintings found a new home in the last 2 months.

Petroglyph Parrot

Egyptian Don Juan

Aunt Katya's Icon

Enjoying Lost Maples

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy 2013! Happy Holidays!

Art Reception at Vegeria on Dec 12th 2012

The Art Reception will be on Wednesday, Dec 12, from 6:30 till 8:30 pm at Vegeria inside the Viva Bookstore on Broadway just inside loop 410.

Robert, Gerald and I are planning to have dinner at Vegeria  at around 5:30 and I wanted to let you know in case some of you want to join us for dinner or dessert. Vegeria is San Antonio's first vegan restaurant; a lot of the food, which is delicious, is also gluten free and the desserts are fabulous.

10% of the sale of the art work will benefit SARA Sanctuary.

I hope to see you there!

News

Our Lady of Vladimir, watercolor

Our Lady of Vladimir, watercolor

 First of all my husband, Robert, is doing very well, all the test results were negative! We are so grateful!

 Some of my recent icons  are on display in "Art on Main" in Pleasanton, TX (www.artonmaingallery.net).

 The past Saturdays I have shown my art at 2 events and 2 original paintings found good homes. My Petroglyph Parrot went home with a dear friend, who did a great deal of work for my Waring show in 2007. Thank you, Kerri! Every time I think about the watercolor being at your home, I smile. My Egyptian Don Juan was bought by a nice family last Saturday.

Our lady of Korsun, watercolor

This coming Saturday, Nov 10th, I will be at Canyon Lake, Texas, at the Tye Preston Memorial library (www.tpml.org), participating in the Canyon Lake Art Guild Holiday Art Show. The library is located on the Access Road South close to the dam and I so enjoyed taking pictures in its butterfly garden. It had been a cold morning, it was so quiet and the sun felt wonderful to my friend and myself and to the butterflies. This was my best picture. Come by if you are in the area.

Petroglyph Parrot, watercolor 2012

Egyptian Don Juan, oil 2010

In December and January, I am having an exhibit at Vegeria (www.myvegeria.com), the vegan restaurant in the Viva bookstore (www.vivabooks .com) on Broadway in San Antonio, TX. If you haven't eaten there, the food is delicious. I will let you know about the opening reception.

Latest Creations

This blog is dedicated to my friend, Olga, whose birthday it is today. I could write a whole blog about Olga. She is generous, has a heart of gold, is faithful, a wonderful wife and mother. She is beautiful, intelligent, hard-working and fun loving. Happy Birthday, Olga!

Red Hills sums up my vacation. It was painted using a photograph I took at Uplistsikhe in the Republic of Georgia. I was thinking about these hills showing what the landscape might have looked like before the rock-hewn dwellings were made. The low hills in the desert of Azerbaijan and the natural gas burning eternally right out of the ground around Baku crept into it. And last of all our anniversary trip to New Mexico with a visit to the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and Ghost Ranch left their mark.
The lines in the foreground may refer to some ancient structure or use. Walnut trees are a common sight in Georgia and a cheerful one to me.

Petroglyph Parrot was painted in New Mexico from a sketch at Petroglyph National Monument. It was very hot at the monument, painting on location was no option. My husband, Robert, who enjoyed the petroglyphs and vacation as much as myself had a seizure during the trip. He is back at work and doing well now. We spent the last month finding out what may have caused it, what to do to prevent any future ones and living as healthily as possible. Two new developments came from this experience: Robert has decided to be proactive about his health like never before and he wants me to earn money. I see his point and am ready to be proactive as never before about making art and finding a market for it. Do you have any suggestions or ideas that might help me? I will give them a fair try. Thank you!

Caucasian Georgia 2

Uplistsikhe was a Greek town, though the site was inhabited well before Antiquity. It later became Georgian and was inhabited through the Middle Ages. We found it very impressive. The rock is really grey which led me to continue my experiments with color.

The view from inside one of the houses inspired this one. The rocks, the church and the hills, we had it all to ourselves: Ucha, Robert's (and his fellow teachers') driver and friend, left us because the hot sun had given him a bad headache. Besides ourselves there was only the little lady at the church who had walked up the hill with Ucha, Gerald and me. She told Ucha she was afraid in one overgrown spot early on the trail, where she had encountered a snake before. We only saw big frilly lizards, "jorjo" or "jojo" is what Ucha called them.

This is our cat, Misty. Gerald says her eyes are bigger, I didn't want to attempt to make them so, thinking they might not keep the expression I liked. The 2 earlier paintings are done in oil, this one is in acrylic.
Enjoy the rest of your summer!

Caucasian Georgia 1

I got back from my trip to the Netherlands and the Caucasus very happy with everything. My only regret was that I hadn't found (or made) the time to paint a watercolor daily. Luckily the Texas heat enabled me to finish two of the attempts that I made in Georgia. Georgia is a country full of beautiful places and my son, Gerald, and I were fortunate to see a lot in only a few days.
In Tbilisi on our first day together my husband, Robert, showed us the old town and the fortress on the hill. Soon afterwards I found a spot for a painting, while Robert and Gerald went to see more of the fortifications. I had barely begun and there she was, a little girl holding out her hand with a winning smile. (I had just been instructed to not give money to "gipsy" children, they were being kept out of school to beg.) So, I told her "no" in Russian. She did remind me of a stray dog who ventured into our yard many years ago, the same heartwarming message: "I am so glad I found you!" She was direct, but polite and very intuitive and it was that intuition that helped her navigate in the world. It was my first encounter of this kind and I was glad she did sit down and we talked a little. She said, she was 12, her parents were dead, she had a 16 year-old brother and lived with her grandmother. Her name was Zarina. I continued on my painting in the Georgian sun. She wanted to paint as well, I gave her some paper, a pencil, sharpener and eraser and she proceeded to draw the one flower she knew over and over and to write her first name in curly Georgian letters. Last of all she covered the page with rows of letters, she was obviously practicing her handwriting. My husband and Gerald had checked on us once and when they came again, she informed me of it well before they got there. She would not look at them, not even for a photograph. She had green eyes, that were striking with her dark hair and red shirt. However, I had to go and told her to keep the pencil etc. and gave her the little notebook. A minute or so later when I looked over my shoulder she was nowhere to be seen.
Later in the week when I met Nora and David (both from the Netherlands), I was very glad to find out more about street children. David was helping them (and handicapped children) in Georgia. He told me the street children did have parents who didn't or couldn't take care of them. The stories they told were made up and some of them even pretended to be deformed etc. It had been a struggle, but there was a good home for them now. He told me a couple of success stories, but money was getting hard to come by in the Netherlands as well because of the recession. I remembered Zarina had said that she went to school, but she acted like a child who was learning how to write and did not often have a piece of paper...
















The watercolor I started with Zarina is finished. It is the view of Tbilisi from the hill with the Armenian church in the foreground.

The next watercolor is the view of an interesting building seen from the hotel. The architecture really made it stand out. I asked about it and all the info I got was that there had been parties there in Soviet time and that people still lived on the upper stories. The first evening we had seen the small arts and craft market on the steps in front of it and glanced into the courtyard inside. It seems a building from before the revolution..