The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal
The Waterhouse Exhibit, Montreal
Our last day and evening in Old Montreal

A room from an 18th Century French Chateau, given to Chateau Ramezay.
Yesterday and Today

We learned just about three weeks ago that my husband, Matt, has lung cancer. He had been suffering from pneumonia for about a month and a half and it wasn’t responding to antibiotics, so he finally opted to have a bronchoscopy and find out what bug he was fighting.
The Musician Goes Spelunking
The Musician Goes Spelunking, Oil on Canvas, 36×36
I’ve been working full time since the Fall Art Tour and doing much painting has been an impossibility. However, I wanted to post this large work, a nod to the many interpretations of Orpheus and Euridice in the history of art. I haven’t touched it for a couple of months, until the last few days. It is pretty well developed.
1968I’m also reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke is an old favorite of mine, probably due to the fascination Greece and the Ancient World exercised generally over the 19th and early 20th Century German thinkers, poets, and musicians. (There is a connection between Nietzche, Rilke and Sigmund Freud in the person of Lou Von Salome, who as a friend and sometime lover, was what one must call a Muse to them all. Those who are interested in the personal lives of these creative people, however fantastical, might want to check her out.)
“The Musician in Mourning” will be appearing in The Best and the Brightest Juried Show and The Celebration of Fine Art in Scottsdale, AZ from January 15 through March 28.
High Pasture
Coconut Macaroon Pie with Chocolate Sauce
I’ve been snowed under with my other job lately, so I haven’t blogged in a while. However, I have been gathering the photographic references for the Odysseus-inspired painting I want to do. It’s been a difficult summer weather-wise, hard to get together with my models in the right lighting conditions. Now it’s late autumn. The sun is low in the southern sky, whereas the photographs I took of the pig, Elroy, were taken at the height of the summer when the sun was many more degrees towards the zenith. Either I put the project off for another season or I use my imagination to harmonize the lighting.
The painting above is a revision of the one I originally blogged on May 21. I was never happy with the whipped cream, which melted and lost its contours too quickly for me to paint accurately. I tried several times. So, because the painted garnish was so thick, I ground it down with a cuttlebone, procured from PetSmart, repainted the top of the pie and drizzled chocolate over it instead. The plate and the doily are unchanged.
Here’s a poem by A.E. Housman from A Shropshire Lad. It seems fitting for a November day.
XXXII
From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.
Now — for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart —
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.
Chocolate Macaroon Pie, Oil on canvas panel, 5×7, $110.00 USD
























