This and that

Last week I saw a man with a cat on his head. He was standing on the corner of Vesey St. and Broadway in Lower Manhattan.  He just stood there.  Tourists would come up to him and ask to take a picture.  He would say yes and THEN once done he would ask for a dollar or two.   He was wearing a Harvard sweatshirt.  I wondered who went to Harvard, him or the cat.  I mean really. You went to Harvard and this is your career choice.  Of course, he could have just ordered the shirt on line, or gotten as a gift from a smarter family member. New York is a strange place.

The above painting was started about 3 weeks ago, but I finally got to finish it today.  The reference material was from a photo a classmate had.   Fruit-o-rama.  I enjoy most fruit.  When they are ripe, they can be as sweet as the best pastry.  I enjoy most pastry, but that’s another post.  The husband likes some fruit but will not eat -erries.   Any fruit that ends with berry or -erry he will not eat.  He will make the lemon face and turn his head.   When I showed him this painting he said “Yum,  except for the -erries.”   I explained that there were no -erries in this painting.  They were grapes.  Oh yeah,  he doesn’t eat red/purple grapes.   Sigh.   Next week….a painting of an orange and a banana.

The Country Road

I am finished with The Country Road.  Or it is finished with me.  I think the latter.  It chewed me up and spit me out.

Here it is, not looking ANYTHING like I thought it would. Oh well.  There are so many things that turn out not the way I think they will.  I need more watercolor practice.  I never quite know what I’m going to get when I start a painting and I have a sneaking suspicion that some of you actually know exactly what you’re doing!

C’est la vie.

I changed the name of the piece from The Road to The Country Road.  Why?  Because too many people were thinking it had to do with the book called The Road.  As anyone who has read The Road, the book written by Cormac McCarthy that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 would know,  this could never be a representation of anything in that book.   There are no colors in that world.  To quote myself, there are only 64 variations of Ash in a post apocalyptic world.

Speaking of a post-apocalyptic world, it must seem like that in Haiti, I cannot believe the destruction and devastation there.  Donations have been made, but it’s still so disturbing that so much help cannot yet get through.

Cathyann Burgess, an artist on my blog roll is selling a print and the proceeds will go to Doctors without Borders to help Haiti.  Why don’t you click here, check it out and submit a bid.

I am still sick, although much better then before.   But I’m still coughing, sneezing, wheezing…. And now my husband is sick.  I guess it was inevitable.   So I will take my tea, or my hot toddy, I’ll let you guess and go watch the golden globes under the covers.

Hic.

Bleech!

I’m sick.

Sick, sick, sick.

Coughing, sneezing, wheezing, bronchial infection, sinus infection and low-grade fever.

I DESPISE being sick.

I have had more tea and soup than I can shake a stick at.  (That is such an odd expression.  Why would I want to shake a stick at tea and soup?  But you know what I mean.)  My nose is raw.  My ribcage hurts from coughing.  I have squirted saline solution up my nose.  (Yes, Alice, Robert talked me into it and I have finally irrigated my sinuses and it DID work.)  I have taken Tylenol, Advil, Musinex and my temperature.  I have breathed in steam both from a boiling hot shower and from a small humidifier.  I have gone through boxes of tissues.  I did NOT sleep a wink last night.  My voice sounds like I have smoked a carton of cigarettes and drank a fifth of bourbon.

I wanted to finish THE ROAD today in class, but there was no way I was leaving my bed, let alone my apartment.

I finally DID leave my bed, mostly out of sheer boredom.  And I finished my latest knitting project which is a small baby blanket pictured above.  Why am I posting if I’m so sick you ask?

My computer was on the verge of dying.  The husband and I got a new one and he hooked it up this weekend.  I wanted to see how much stuff I lost, if any, and I have to say that my husband did an amazing job.  I am not technically oriented.  I cried the first time I got a blackberry.  If it was up to my, my version of having a blog would be mimeographing sheets of paper and snail-mailing them to friends.

New computer-wise, there are a few things we either can’t find or don’t know how to load, but I think I will ask my genius friends Sara and Tony to come over.  It’s great having friends like them.  Besides being super-duper smart, they are always so kind as to help their “older” friend with all her techno problems.   They are the best.

Ok,  I’m happy to see my blog is still here.   Now if  I can only find my address book and old mail for my nyc.rr.account…

Now it’s back to bed for me.

Happy MMX !

The Road – W.I.P.

Liz and Charlie gave me Roman Numeral Birthday Cake Candles for my birthday.  (There was no cake attached…clearly an oversight on their part. )

The tag line on the box was “party like it’s MCMXCIX”!

What is it about Roman Numerals that makes everything look a little classier?  You’ve built a building and want to put in a corner-stone?  Sure, you can put 1988 carved right there in the stone.  Or you can have it say MCMLXXXVIII.  Really, which looks better?

Liz and Charlie used to live on the other side of our brick wall.  Then they bought a house and moved around the corner.  Their new address is 92.   One night, as I walked around the corner to meet Charlie for the nightly dog walk, I noticed his new garbage cans were on the sidewalk for the next morning’s pickup.   He had labeled them with XCII.  Did Charlie think that on his new block he won’t get the noisy white NYC Dept. of Sanitation trucks to pick up his trash, but instead men on Roman chariots wearing helmets with a big red mohawk would be picking up his trash?  His new block was way fancier than the old one!

I have already woken up on the wrong side of 2010.   It started with my computer going berserk on New Year’s Day and went down from there.

The above painting is a work in progress watercolor of a road in a field.   We’ll see where this road takes me.

December 28th, 2009

December 28th is my birthday.  I am not 60.

If you are a regular reader you may remember that line from last year’s birthday when I wasn’t 60 either:  http://carolking.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/december-28th/

Last year I was in painting class working on a landscape from Istria.  This year I was visiting my two adorable little nephews Dean and Dillon (5 and 2 1/2 respectively). They are little germ incubators.   They coughed, wheezed, sneezed and almost barfed on me.

I love them.

The husband and I went to visit and give them their Christmas gifts. I’m sure we left with a cold, the regular flu, the swine flu, bronchitis, typhoid and possibly the Clap.  (OK, I’m sure if we got the Clap, it wasn’t from the nephews).  What is up with kids and germs?  They just spread them back and forth, from kid to kid.  As soon as they are old enough to go to school they are sick from September to June.   This is why I stay away from kids.  (Mr. Donald Mills has the right idea about anyone under the age of 21.) My niece Lizzy is a school teacher and she takes Airborne & EmergenC every day so she doesn’t get sick from her little germ-filled charges.  Licking a subway pole would probably spread less infection then spending a day with a 3-year-old.

OK, enough about germy kids, lets talk about me.

As I said, today is my birthday.  Feel free to send me a gift.   If  you will be mailing it,  may I suggest that anything valued over $100 should be insured.   My favorite color is jewelry.

The above painting is of a Japanese Maple path in front of my sister’s house.   They had some sort of Cootie lichen  stuff on them.  The trees line a lovely pebbled path going across my sister’s front lawn.  It is very Zen-like. This image is from the summer, and there was a blindingly bright shot of sunlight at the end of the path.  I saved the white of the paper for that.  When I was done with the painting, I went back with a bit of white gouache and hit some of the tree bark and some of the dappled light on the path, but still managed to keep that one section just the white of the paper.  I also used a wax resist for some of the dappled light on the path and the for the light between the leaves.

I wasn’t sure about the texture of the pebbled path.  I did NOT want to draw in all the pebbles, so I splattered and splashed and I think that worked in terms of texture.

Madonna and Child…with dog

To those of you who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas!

For those of you who don’t, Happy Festivus (for the rest of us).  If that doesn’t work for you then Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Winter Solstice (at least the days are starting to get longer).

I mailed out the above image on a Christmas card to family and friends.  Only to discover that I had sent the card TWICE to some friends (Kung) and not at all to others (Mary and Elise).  It’s probably because I did not make a list & check it twice.

I am not a list maker.  My husband makes lists all the time.  Then leaves them all over the house and forgets about them.  I try to keep all the information I need in my head, only to discover that, with all the other junk rolling around in there, oft times I forget what I’m supposed to remember.  (Or worse, I remember what I’m trying to forget.)

My sister used to be a very organized list maker.  To the point that one time she wrote a very long  list and then went shopping with it.  She got stuck at a store because she accomplished something on her list but didn’t want to cross it off said list because she DID NOT HAVE THE SAME PEN SHE WROTE THE LIST WITH.   Thank God she got over that stage of anal retentiveness.

I suppose lists are good.  Especially when sending out Christmas Cards.  I hope Santa has me on his list!  (Even if I have only been moderately good this year.)

So, to all my friends, family and blog readers.  If you got a card from me, yay.  If you didn’t, I meant to send you one.  If you got two, make sure you save it since I probably won’t send cards again for another 5 years.

Thank you for reading my blog and for all your comments on my paintings and my rants.  A special thank you to Leslie for photo-shopping this image of Madonna and Child…with dog.

Happy Holidays to all and Here’s to a Happy and Healthy 2010.

Carol and the Snowy Trees go to The Plaza

And we weren’t kicked out!

This past Sunday Matt and I were off to The Plaza “to celebrate Julianna Margulies, actress, Marc Platt  producer of  the Broadway musical Wicked and the new movie NINE) and 25 years of New York Stage and Film at the Winter Gala at The Plaza Hotel on Sunday, December 13.”

My sister Alice is on the board of directors of New York Stage and Film. (Alice is the overachiever in the family!)   She asked if I would donate an original watercolor for the charity auction, to which I replied “of course!”   I surreptitiously took this photo during the cocktail hour with my phone camera. Not the best photo, but I was too fascinated with the amount of make-up the women had on, the height of the heels (really, how do they walk on those things?), and mostly, the amount of “work” some people had done.

(If you want to see a better picture of the Snowy Trees please go here:  http://carolking.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/snowy-trees/)

At the end of the evening while we were picking up our swag (who doesn’t love swag?)  my sister saw the gentleman who bid and won my painting. She told me he looked THRILLED to have won it.   That was thrilling for me to hear!

Now, about the event…stars, schmars.  I’ve seen my fair share and must say I am probably a jaded New Yorker.  I couldn’t care less about seeing “Stars” except for the above mentioned fixation on how much make-up they have on or how much “work” they have had.   I would have been more excited to meet  Stephen Colbert (I LOVE HIM!), but I would be remiss in my reporting duties if I didn’t tell you who was there.  So here’s a list of some of the celebs at the Gala.

Juliana Margulies

Dana Delaney

Chris Noth

Christine Baransky (I love her!)

Terry Kinney who lives up the block from us

Carol Kane

Josh Stamberg

Peter Jacobson

and

Marc Platt

You know what amazed me the most????  It cost $65.00 to park the car!

Passing on

No, not me.  At least not yet.  I’m still here.

But I’m passing on the RA award since I’ve had it long enough and have gotten a tan basking in its glow.

Here you go.  The RA award is being delivered by dog to:

June Malone

and

Stephen Quirke

June,  because her blog, which as she describes, allows her to draw and paint out loud and motivates her to improve her skills as an illustrator.  And because she posts great paintings and humorous comments even though she struggles with ME/CFS.

Stephen, because he also does great paintings and has worked hard to finally achieve his very own exhibit.   He has shown me what one can achieve by working hard and having the dedication to go after one’s dream.

Way to go guys.  You have inspired me more than you can ever know.

Now here’s how it works:  The recipient passes this award on to another blogger in seven days and pledges to follow the new recipient’s blog.

(And a special thanks to Leslie, who photoshopped the above award photo for me.)

Shopping, weather and social commentary

I woke up to this today:

I would have rather woken up to this:

This was the view from my room in St. Croix looking out onto the beach.   I love how there are always bent trees in the Caribbean.  I miss the warm weather and the beach.    Especially when today’s wardrobe included a fleece pullover, coat, scarf, gloves and hat.  Brrrrr!

Jim recently changed my tag on his blogroll.  It used to just say Carol King.  Now it says Carol King- artist, humorist, complainer.

Complainer indeed.  I prefer to think of it as social commentary.

But “complainer” works.

This is what I am going to comment (complain) about today.  The price of kids T-shirts in these small stores in Park Slope.  I wanted a size 4T shirt for a friend’s kid.  I thought I might get a nice little “Brooklyn” t-shirt.    I found one.  It was $24.00.  SERIOUSLY.  For a t-shirt that the kid will grow out of in a few months????  And end up in a stoop sale selling for 50 cents or a dollar.  A size 4T shirt is about 6″ across.  I’ve seen men’s handkerchiefs bigger than that.

I indignantly marched myself a few more blocks down the avenue to the next kid’s store only to discover that in this store the price of a kid’s t-shirt was $32.00 AND the collar was frayed.   On purpose.  WHAT?  I’m now ready to buy a white t-shirt and write on it with a Sharpie.  Are these people insane?  Who are their customers?  The stars that NAME their kids Brooklyn and Bronx?   Cause it can’t be the people LIVING in Brooklyn and The Bronx.

Only in NYC can people making $180,000 a year be considered middle income.  http://envisioningdevelopment.net/map.

Charlie’s wife Liz told me she wanted to have a nice old fashioned Christmas and have everyone give a home-made gift.  Liz channels Martha Stewart and can make any dinner party elegant and wonderful.   Her friend to whom she made this suggestion countered with “how about an ‘As Seen On TV’ Christmas?”  Liz was outraged.  Charlie and I didn’t think it was a bad idea.   This did not go over well with Liz.

Ah, the holiday season is upon us and everyone is in a good mood.

Ho Ho Ho

Ra(h), Ra(h), Sis Boom Bah!

Well look what I got.

And boy was I surprised.    Especially since it was “hand delivered” by Leslie.

Check this out:  This painting was done by Leslie.  And she gave me the award “for my wit, wisdom and continued journey in art.”    She is too kind.

The recipient passes this award on to another blogger in seven days and pledges to follow the new recipient’s blog.

So, be on the lookout.  In a few days I will pass this award on to another fellow blogger.

And thanks again Leslie!  This was a wonderful surprise.