June news and volunteering

 

Margaret and Justin, photograph

Margaret and Justin oil painting on canvas 16x20"

Ghost Ranch, New Mexico - watercolor

This is the portrait commission I was busy with. Margaret and Justin were very happy with the portrait and that meant a lot to me. You are looking at the picture just before my last day of work, when I put the glaze on and touched up little details here and there. The portrait's final photographs did not turn out good. I suspect because of the glaze I used. I had the same problem with Tess' Landscape which I finished and was unable to take a satisfactory picture of. I really need to learn how to photograph art from Edward Povey.
  Ghost Ranch - New Mexico was started at Ghost Ranch in August 2012 and finished at night in the hotel room in Albuquerque, NM.  It was after visiting the O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe that we saw Ghost Ranch. While the collection of O’Keeffe’s landscapes at the museum inspired me, the actual landscapes in the area were so fascinating to me that I have been wanting to go back to do more work on location ever since.  If you are local and want to see Ghost Ranch, it is on display in Dr. Robert Rodriguez' new dental office, 

7434 Blanco Rd.
San Antonio, TX 78216
P: 210-341-6824

 The following piece I wrote after volunteering at the Universal City Library this month. I only volunteer organizing the summer art program at the library, I usually teach a class or two and assist other artists when they teach. We usually get elementary school students and a few middle school ones.

  The afternoon of June 10th, 2013 was special at the Universal City Library. Liza Stein was volunteering to teach a collage class. The children enjoyed cutting pictures of animals, food, flowers, landscapes, and Easter eggs out of the stack of magazines provided by Liza. They glued the images onto paperboard that Liza had saved and added colored tissue (sometimes made into flowers) and construction paper. One girl made a picture of a bone out of 30 or 40 dog pictures; a grandma helped her grand-daughter compose a beautiful garden landscape; one of the boys chose to create a colorful display of sweets; and a mother and her daughter made an interesting person out of apples and flowers adding a drink, legs and a hat. All the creations were sealed and protected by a layer of glue. What made the afternoon special was one of the girls was making a picture for her father. He had been absent for Father's Day and they had planned a celebration after his return. (At the summer art program at the Universal City Library we often hear about absent or deployed parents.) And there were the parents and grand-parents spending quality time with their (grand-)children absorbed in a common adventure. There was the boy who had a hard time sitting when his collages were done and who helped to sweep up the small pieces of paper that had fallen on the floor. Then there was the Universal City council member, Adam Salyer, who happened to be at the library, looked in on the class and sent two of his neighbor's children (also at the library) over to join. I remember the two siblings who were carefully rolling their pencils down a table to a teen library volunteer, so that their sister and mom could finish working on the heart of dog and cat pictures that took a lot of time and patience. There was the single mom who started out helping her sons and ended up making a beautiful collage of her dream vacation.
 Certainly volunteering at the library is not creating art ourselves - there usually is too much to do for that. It is, however, deeply satisfying to witness and assist the creative adventures of children, teens and parents and some art classes have an extra dimension and remind us of our common humanity and the struggles and delights of being a family.