Where Did The Year Go??

Six months later, and I am making a new post about my artistic endeavors.

Pitiful.

Tonight, a week before Christmas, and I watched/listened
to the wonderful Nutcracker Ballet this evening.

I have seen the ballet live in 5 different cities: Lansing, Cleveland, Tulsa, Denver, and Kansas City. Which did I enjoy most? That's impossible to say. But one particular dance that I thoroughly enjoyed was in Lansing, Michigan, and the Mother Goose had a huge hoop skirt from which all the tiny little ballet dancers and teeny ballerinas escaped. Such a cute production. I have enjoyed several productions on TV and DVD, and Tchaikovsky's music is unsurpassed for the holiday festivity dances. The Nutcracker is a fun story - and one that anyone can identify with if he/she has ever experienced a family & friends Christmas party.

What's new on my art endeavors? Well, I have a new baby great-niece,
Baby Charlotte Kate,
and she has a new baby quilt:

But I don't think I ever got to post the baby quilt I made
for my FIRST great-niece:
Baby Addison Nicole,
(wow-am-I-getting-old...)

And a nice photograph, somewhat artistic, I think, of the moon, 2% waxing, and Jupiter, across the rocky Mountains in November:

Week 25: Cello Challenge

This is what I am learning this week. I don't sound quite like this...yet:

Handel: Larghetto

But it IS fun, kinda slow, kinda long...

Week 23

Art comes in different forms. This week, I enjoyed two different forms of art: quilting (which I adore), and gardening (which I adore).

Yesterday I enjoyed touring a large quilt show in Manhattan. I loved every bit of it! It has inspired me to get in there and CREATE. Or, at least, COMPLETE. I saw several quilts which reminded me of some unfinished projects lying in my art room. Case in point: the 12+ quilt squares I cross-stitched some 27 years ago while living in Egypt. I had sent these to my sister, who, quite a few years later, returned them to me, un-pieced, and there they have lain...
It's time to address these unfinished works:

Works in progress (WIP)
Unfinished objects (UFOs)

Today I enjoyed a local garden tour, hosted by the K-State Master Gardeners. I love garden tours. I have gone to many such happenings. Today, I enjoyed many gardens, and I was unimpressed by two on the tour. (More on that later).

My companion Mary & I visited all the homes on the tour, and I think the heat finally set in at the last home we were to visit. It was a nice garden, and it gave me ideas for some of the wildflowers that both Mary & I have seen in our mutual pastures. So...I am thinking that she & I will arise early some morning soon, and transplant some of these into our yards - before the summer heat sets in again.

We saw several gardens in Manhattan which were nice. Not remarkable, in my opinion, but nice. One home put me off, though - the homeowner was apparently NOT the gardener of the place: she could not identify shrubs and plants on her property. She panicked when I asked about a shrub in her garden, and she exclaimed, "Someone took the plant sign!" several times to her husband. She must have employed a landscaper. To me, this was fudging a bit, to get on "the Tour." Meh.

Mary & I drove a bit for one home's garden, and we are SO HAPPY that we did! The homeowners were obviously THE master gardeners of their home. They knew every nook and cranny of their ? 2+ -acre yard, and it was positively lovely.

Another home on the tour was grand: grand in size. The "garden" was simply ridiculous in my opinion, in that she (the homeowner) must have spent $$$$$ in landscaping. I mentioned to my companion Mary that this "garden" was a product of landscaping, and not gardening. Come to find out later down the "tour line", other visitors felt the same. A simple gardener such as myself can easily discern a master garden from "landscaping", any day. So, in my opinion, that home on the tour was a "fail".

So here I am, Saturday night, wanting to go out and GARDEN!
And yet, wanting to stay in and QUILT!

Both are good.

Week 22

Someone dear to me is having a baby in just a couple of weeks!

I found this old, old quilt in an old, old antique store, stuffed in a corner. (Truly.)
There is an obvious "mouse" flaw in the quilt,
but the other squares are an awesome example of very fine hand-stitching and hand-quilting.
So I have thrown it over the rail (after I hand-washed it in our bathtub)
so that I will glance at it periodically,
till some idea comes as to what to make of the remnants.
It is a very nice OLD quilt.

Last night was the Symphony in the Flint Hills.
Each summer the Kansas City Symphony performs at one of the local ranches in the Flint Hills. This year we were very fortunate to have the performance just twelve miles from our home!

Week 19

My, time flies when one looks the other way. This blog jumped from Week 5 to Week 19 in no time at all!

Today I went to see Claude Monet's triptych: Waterlilies. This is a HUGE painting (rather, three panels of painting. Hence, the word triptych.) The three panels are owned by three museums in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Kansas City. This spring/summer, all three panels are exhibited in Kansas City. The Waterlilies painting was nice. It better be - it took M. Monet 11 years to finish it. I need to research his life. If it took him ELEVEN years to complete this work, there might be some obsessive/compulsive thing going on there.

This is one of the three panels of Monet's triptych, Water Lilies

The fun part of this museum jaunt was going with Grad Student Gillian. She is, after all, in museum studies. What a great companion for museum-ing! She has been behind the scenes in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and she has a wealth of knowledge about the part of a museum that we don't get to see. She told me about scientific practices used to identify materials...how an instrument they use identified what was thought to be glass beads on an antique Indian (as in India) necklace actually were rubies. Whoa. What a purchase! Like Let's Make a Deal: Museum Edition.

We lunched at the museum, which is always a treat. We also zipped around some other parts of the museum, including a photography exhibit. I will say, it sure beat the Warhol one I went to see a couple of months ago at the Beach Museum in Manhattan. My favorite photograph was a contemporary one taken of some US soldiers in Iraq just after the downfall of the Sadam Hussein regime. I am not sure why it called my name so, but I went back to it three times. I think I was intrigued by the soldiers, who very likely were Ft. Riley soldiers, from just down the road here.

And so with this post, perhaps now I have gotten back on artistic track, and will continue on through out the remainder of the year, doing the art thing I had planned to do all year long!

February, Week 5

I hauled this beginning
out of the mothballs recently.
I am spending more time staring at it,
and less time completing it...

Any suggestions?

January, Week 4

This week is a good week for arts and crafts inside the home! This morning we enjoyed a sunny 2º with a thick glaze of snow-covered ice. So I have spent quite a few hours in the art room playing with watercolors. Nothing to show just yet, since all I have been doing is playing with color and lines and such. If I were a more-advanced artist, I would say I have been been working on technique; but, no, I have simply been playing with color and lines and such.

One little watercolor exercise I have is a 365-page calendar of watercolor paintings that I am supposed to copy. Much like an daily paint-by-number except that it's paint-what-they-painted instead. It is oddly therapeutic for me...I can get lost in the painting.

Here is an interesting new site provided by the people at Google:

Art Project

We can tour museums around the world and view their art collections. This is pretty handy, especially for someone ice- and snowbound in rural Kansas. Here are the museums we can visit:

• Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin - Germany
• Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC - USA

• The Frick Collection, NYC - USA
• Gemäldegalerie, Berlin - Germany
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC - USA
• MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC - USA
• Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid - Spain
• Museo Thyssen - Bornemisza, Madrid - Spain
• Museum Kampa, Prague - Czech Republic
• National Gallery, London - UK
• Palace of Versailles - France
• Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands
• The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg - Russia
• State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow - Russia
• Tate Britain, London - UK
• Uffizi Gallery, Florence - Italy
• Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam - The Netherlands
  

January, Week Three

This week I worked on a knitting project. Nothing challenging (but for the completion of it), but it was fun to make this scarf out of some sort of wild and woolly yarn I picked up a few weeks ago.

This photo is of the scarf perhaps 3/4-done. Tonight, the scarf is completed and packed and ready to post to its unsuspecting recipient.

And thus brings an end to Week Three,

Art Dilly-Dallying.

And, no, the photo was not an attempt at an artistic statement: my lens thing won't automatically open/shut anymore. But, hey, it makes for some interesting photos.