Thursday Thoughts

Janis is home from two weeks in San Diego, visiting family and friends. She got to play Grandma to little Jax, including taking him to the beach. It's been a long time since she was out there - she couldn't go while I was in Iraq, so it's been over two years. Time to catch up. I played single Daddy to our two dogs while she was gone. But two weeks is long enough, and now she's home and we're back to normal. And apparently, I didn't fail my housekeeping practical exam ... didn't get an A, but didn't get an F, either, so I'm happy!

This week there's been a lot going on at the studio. I worked on the series of prints that I'm creating for the show next month at Bella Vista Gallery. Glenn and Christin came to the studio and we talked thru some of the things surrounding the show. I came up with another image and have been pulling prints for the past two days. This one is a stinker: it needs a lot of very careful work to pull each print, much more than the others have required, so it's slow going. I need to finish this edition, come up with one more image, and edition that one, too, within the next week.

Yesterday, I re-started my regular Wednesday night life drawing sessions. This is something that I need to do on a regular basis - it's like hitting the gym for an athlete, but I haven't been able to do it since coming home. Man, I'm rusty! But it sure felt good to be drawing a figure from life again. Once my drawings improve, I'll start posting some of them here.

The Cotton Mill is getting a mural on the outside of the building, right below my windows. Here's the artist, Ian Wilkinson, working on it yesterday. It looks like there's a big hole in the side of the building, doesn't it? There's no hole, that's just the way it's painted. We're all excited about it and can't wait to see how it'll turn out.

Next door to us is a big lot where the rest of the cotton mill industrial plant used to stand. It has been overgrown with trees and weeds for the past several years. Now, however, the owners are removing the scrub trees and weeks, cleaning things up, and will turn it into a sorta park. I say "sorta" since the lot will be developed in a few years, but this "park" will let people use it until construction starts. And, hopefully, help keep the vagrants and troublemakers out of the area. Anyway, today they built a meditation maze on the property. It's a low "maze", laid out with rocks and sand, designed for slow walking and meditation, not getting lost. Here's the view from my studio. I was impressed: it was built in only about three hours.

So things are rolling along pretty well. My wife is home, my artwork is coming along, I've got some irons in a few fires, and we finally have some decent weather. Life's pretty good!