Beautiful Distractions

So... I had big plans to spend lots of time in the studio today tidying up and starting some new artwork, but there are baby juncos outside. How is one supposed to stay inside when THIS is going on right outside the window??

Susan Branch made me feel a lot better with her post today. She was having the same problem. I felt a lot less guilty about my messy studio and lack of paintings, but then of course I started missing Cape Cod again (She lives on Martha's Vineyard and I've been having beach blues since getting back- more on the trip later!). I am loving her blog.

Engine had a far more productive day in the studio. He is Chief Hummingbird Swatter. He spends quite a bit of time staring at the feeder and jumping at the window. This is funny once. Well, ok, maybe twice.

I also did some reading with Bandit and Cinders (also known as "The Old Man" and "The C".) But I did not one thing in the studio. And I am forgiving myself for that- no, I am COMMENDING myself for that. It was a great day. And I do have something to show you that I just finished recently....

You can see my faithful subject asleep under the easel.

Almost finished...

A few days it was cool enough to paint outside. I liked the picture below because Bandit is sniffing the air just like in the painting.

And there it is...

I titled it "Stories Told on a Warm Breeze". A long time ago before I even had Bandit, someone at a park told me that you have to be patient while walking your dog when they constantly stop to sniff things. "It's their version of reading a book," he told me. I never forgot that.

Traveling with me...

I love Martha Stewart. I love her crafts, I love her magazines, I can't get enough. So of course, I am a frequent visitor to The Martha Blog. For about a year I have been thinking about how funny it is that she seems to do the same things I'm doing at the same time. Of course, not exactly in the same way. When Martha does things she is efficient, organized and she does things on a much grander scale. When I was visiting some local garage sales, she was hunting for bargains in Palm Beach. When I purchased and planted a couple of trees from a local nursery, she started a reforestation project. See? Same thing, just on a different scale. It's crazy.

A recent entry that Martha posted was titled “What It's Like to Travel With Me”. She starts out talking about how she met her hair stylist at 8 am AFTER a vigorous workout. Her housekeeper makes her a lovely breakfast while she has a cappuccino, and her wardrobe stylist packs her outfits. If you click through the photos, there's a picture of G.K. her Chow, who has been beautifully goomed for her departure. She leaves her property director with a list of things to do as she climbs into her brand new SUV where her driver will be taking her to the airport. Here she boards her private jet and flies in quiet comfort to her destination.

When I read this, I was in the midst of getting ready to leave for a week long trip to Plymouth and Cape Cod, and this is when I decided it was time to start posting my "Just Like Martha" series. Like most things that will show up in this series, traveling with me is a far cry from traveling with Martha, but I have fun making the comparisons anyway.

My travel morning starts out with me scrambling out of bed and scrubbing down my shower for our house sitters. I do this while showering to save time. Then I put new sheets on the bed and vacuum the house for the 14^th time in two days. It is still full of pet hair. I start some kind of petty argument with my husband because he doesn't seem to care that we didn't wash the windows or dust the piano, even though our house sitters will see this and know I am not Martha. Plus, I am really irritated that he is already finished packing. Maybe he has a wardrobe stylist that I don't know about! In between checking my list on the computer, I hop over to the Martha Blog to see what she's doing and I am surprised to see the travel article (even though it was reposted from an old entry, I still find this uncanny). There is no time to sit down for breakfast (even thought there WAS time to check the Martha Blog) and plus we are out of milk, so I eat a granola bar while I am unloading the dishwasher again for about the 4^th time in two days. I am still trying to figure out how two people generate so many dishes.

Dan complains that the only thing he didn't have time to do before the vacation was get his hair cut. I restrain myself from reciting the list of things I didn't get around to, only because there isn't time. We cram our luggage into our rusting Subaru that has recently begun making strange and unidentifiable noises. We do have new bikes that we are excited to try out, but the bike rack is designed for mountain bikes and may or may not hold them. We go ahead and strap them on hoping for the best. The car so full there is barely room for the dog, who did not get groomed before our departure. He is sporting a big yellow stain on his currently off-white coat where we gave him his flea and tick meds, and he appears to have small mop heads attached to his feet.

I leave a list of instructions for my aunt and uncle who very generously offered to stay at our home while we're away. My aunt is deathly allergic to cats. We have three. We leave an hour later that we were hoping to, and I realize about 6 miles from home that we forgot to bring something. But, we're on our way and we're not turning back. I prop my feet up on the dashboard because there isn't room for them on the floor, pull out the old lap top and start typing. Ah, Martha. Could we be related somehow?

If you should have a lovely garden....

This was taken about a week ago. I couldn't do this today because it's about a billion degrees outside right now. But it makes for a perfect excuse to stay in and catch up on blogging. The main purpose of this post is to share some pictures from the National Garden Festival in Buffalo, NY. But I'm also trying to make sure I post artwork here, too, even though posting artwork is MUCH more scary than posting pictures of gardens. So here was an afternoon I spent sketching in my own gardens (which, I might add, have finally filled out and started to impress me!). Cinders and Bandit were more than thrilled to join me.

If you love gardens and live near Buffalo (and it's not a billion degrees out), I would highly recommend a trip to the Garden Festival. There are gardens open all over Buffalo (city and suburbs) on Thursdays and Fridays and then a featured neighborhood open on Saturdays and Sundays all throughout the month of July.

Dan and I headed out last Friday and toured several gardens in the Buffalo suburbs.

There are "rules" to follow, like don't bother the gardeners if they're in the middle of something, don't touch anything, etc... I spent a lot of time walking around with my hands behind my back because it is almost impossible for me to not touch things in a garden. This was kind of funny because all of the gardeners were more than happy to take you on a tour and answer any questions. Not one of them was "in the middle of" anything, other than entertaining the visitors. One of them ripped a branch off her curly willow tree and gave it to me when I mentioned I loved the tree. She told me to just plant it in the ground and I should have a curly willow, too very soon. Another gave me a rock from his garden that I mentioned I liked. I could not have been more excited about bringing home a rock and a stick from the garden tour- Dan found this all very amusing.

I have also fallen in love with mini hostas. I was kind of interested before the tour, and I had purchased two this year, but I can't believe how many different kinds there are!

We stayed at a fantastic place called the Roycroft Inn in East Aroura. Saturday morning we went for a quick hike to the Eternal Flame waterfall, which was totally amazing. Then we headed on to Lancaster, the featured neighborhood for that day.

This is the garden of Two Chicks and a Rooster. A little sign in the back yard said "If you should have a lovely garden, you should have a lovely life". YES.

They had awesome gardens and free slushies, which can really contribute to the loveliness of life in the summer.

AND they had a man cave. And here's where I lost him.

Next we went to visit "Ron the Recycler" as he is known by his neighbors. He finds old things and turns them into something else, like this dog rock complete with a lump of coal nose and driftwood bone.

Ron sent us to his sister and brother-in-law's house where I found a new project for Dan. Isn't this a great potting shed?

There were lots more gardens that we toured, and I can not wait to visit again. Thanks to all the gardeners for opening up your homes and a special thanks to the ones giving out sticks, rocks, and ice!

It spoke to me...

This is the summer I am planning to really start focusing on getting my art "out there". I want to put more time into making paintings and learning how to market myself as an artist. All week I've been researching, sketching, planning out improvements to the Etsy store, the website and even starting up a Facebook page for Bad Cat Studios. So on this first day of July, I bought a piece of someone else's artwork. I've checked my plan over and over and that was definitely not on the list of things to do.

I saw it on Tuesday. I had just finished hanging some new paintings at Clear Lakes Animal Wellness in Skaneateles, a veterinary clinic where I display some of my work. I met Dan for lunch and then I planned to do a little bit of research in the Skaneateles galleries. I like to get pricing and framing ideas and I can usually get inspired to start painting by looking at other people's work. I had so much fun I decided to check out the Cazenovia galleries too. My last stop was The Gallery of CNY.

I was pretty tired by this time and I was only going to walk through quickly and head home. But just as I was heading for the door, I saw something that looked so familiar it stopped me right in my tracks. It was part of the road I grew up on.

The small oil painting by Linda Wesner was called Erie Canal 1, but you probably wouldn't know right away that the Erie Canal was part of the picture unless you knew this road. But I knew it. I knew it like a familiar friend.

This was the road where my family and I started our occasional Sunday morning bike rides to Erie Canal in the summer time. We would bike from there to Chittenango and have breakfast at Burger King (I know, it kind of defeats the whole exercise thing, but it was the 80's. We didn't know any better). There was the little white church and the barn that finally collapsed just last year. The longer I stared at that painting, the more I felt like the artist had painted it directly out of my memory. There was a tiny scrap of an old map showing Green Lake and Round Lake.

When my husband and I were living in an apartment, we had to keep our bikes at my parents' house and we would ride from there to the bike trails at Green Lake State Park.

And in the very bottom corner was a strange little pattern that at first seemed to be part of the road. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was the ghostly image of a canal boat. My grandmother used to take me for walks on the canal and we would look for the remains of the sunken barges that used to float along the waterway.

I didn't buy it right then. Like I said, this was not on my list of things to do. But three days later I had to go back. And now it's hanging in my studio. I spent my day unloading the dishwasher and then looking at the painting... hanging laundry, looking at the painting... weeding the garden, looking at the painting. I did this all day.

And I realized that even though "buying a piece of fine art" was not part of my business plan, maybe it should have been. I had a fantastic experience meeting the gallery owners (if you are in Cazenovia you MUST visit this gallery). They were very down to Earth people that really seemed to love their jobs. They were excited to talk about the artwork, but they were not pushy at all. I felt like I could wander around and look at the paintings without someone hovering over me or watching me from the corner.

But most importantly, I got a reminder of why I want to do this in the first place. As an artist, I want my work to make people happy. I want them to hang it in their homes and feel joy when they look at it. I want them to buy a painting because they feel like that painting belongs with them. I kind of always knew this, but experiencing it for myself was the best inspiration I could have found.

Welcome Summer

Summer is finally here. The air outside last night was so thick and humid, you can see the haze hanging over the meadow. It was a nice night for a garden walk after the sun had gone down.

I can't wait to see this delphinium bloom. I just bought it this year at Baker's Acres.

The hummingbirds seem to really like the penstemon.

And here is one of our new babies waiting for his dinner!

The parents don't appreciate having their offspring photographed.

And finally, I think you'll have to open this picture to really see it. It's a time-lapsed photo of a firefly crawling up my arm. I had to hold very still and just as Dan clicked the shutter, a mosquito started attacking me. Not fun, but this photo was totally worth it!

Everson 60/60

Every June for the past three years I have participated in 60/60, an event at the Everson Museum where 60 local artists have 60 minutes to create or finish a piece of artwork to be raffled off at the end of the evening. It's always a great time, but I think it's the fastest hour I experience all year. I tried working from a blank canvas last year, but I find it's much easier to talk to people if I start my painting the night before and just finish it during the hour. This year I worked on a painting of a fox.

Here is the finished product! I titled it "A Sunny Corner in the Meadow". Below is a picture of all the paint pails that people can put their raffle tickets in.

Perfect timing

This weekend, Dan and I walked the Westcott Art Trail where about 25 local artists were displaying their work. It was a lot of walking, but really worth the time. Most of the work was set up under tents in front yards, but some artists had work set up in their back yards with beautiful gardens. I fell in love with this fat bunny sculpture by Candace Rhea, (you can see him in the bottom right corner) but I like to think about things before purchasing.

Dan found some artwork that caught his eye in Tim See's pottery booth. He bought a couple of very manly mugs , one of which appears to be made of metal. We had so much fun visiting all the artists and gardens that we didn't have time to see it all. We went back on Sunday to see the rest of the artists, and I was still thinking about the bunny. We stopped at Sabrina Nedell's booth (also know ad ADK Girl).

She had some fantastic ceramic pieces for sale. I bought a bird house and a feeder. I also really liked her fairy houses and mugs.

Right next to her booth, I ran into one of my "Squam Sisters", Linda. It was SO great to see an old Squam friend!

Then we went over to see my friend Jen Gandee who runs Gandee Gallery in Fabius. I've taken a few ceramics classes with her and I couldn't wait to see her new hypertufa art.

Dan was also very taken with the hypertufa gardens and ended up purchasing one made by Jen's daughter.

So finally it was time to go see the bunny and I had pretty much decided that if he was there, I'd bring him home. We headed back to Candace's backyard and there he was sitting on the deck. Then I made the mistake of stopping to say hello to Marley, the big gray poodle. As I was petting Marley, a woman picked up the fat bunny... and never put him down. “I've been thinking about him since I saw him yesterday!” she told Candace. So had I!!!

It was kind of sad and really funny at the same time. I asked the lady if I could take a picture of him, and I told her that she'd gotten to him just in time because I'd come back to get him too! She looked really sorry, so I told her I was glad he was going to a good home. She told me all about her gardens in her small city lot that she'd been working on for a long time and where she was going to put her new rabbit sculpture.

Candace over heard us talking and she said she had another rabbit down in the studio that I could look at, but he was very different. She brought him up and handed him to me. He was different, but totally adorable (AND quite a bit less expensive!!) so I was very excited to take him home. What perfect timing that all turned out to be!

And speaking of back home, we'd spent a majority of our weekend at the Art Trail so there was quite a to-do list waiting there for us. And there wasn't much left of the day. But every now and then, I think it's important to forget the to-do list and just be.

So, even though they're not all neat and tidy yet, here's a peek at what's coming up in the gardens, including some laundry on the clothes line... there is nothing like line-dried sheets in the summer!

While I was mulching the lilac garden, a Swallowtail kept landing on the leaves of the peony bush. It took me a while to realize that she was laying eggs! I don't know if you can make them out, but I put some circles around them to help you find the eggs.