Magic in Bedlam, Watercolor
5 x7
We’re headed over the mountain and through the woods to Bedlam Farm in a few minutes to enjoy the magic. It must be magic because what was originally predicted to be a rainy day is cool but sunny and glorious.
I will be selling prints of this watercolor at the Bedlam Farm Open House today, but if you can’t make it to Cambridge today, you can also buy prints on my Buy My Art page.
Puget Sound, Watercolor
5 x 7
I’m one of the guest artists at the Open House at Bedlam Farm this weekend and spent last weekend going through sketches and paintings to sell.
We spent about 10 days in Washington State, so there were a number of drawings from that vacation. It was fun – kind of like going through a scrapbook. This is a painting from one of those drawings at Puget Sound.
Magic at Bedlam Farm Watercolor, 8×10
This is the rain-soaked calm before a weekend long storm of activity. I’m looking at an action packed weekend of creative workshops, art, poetry, parents, theater and nine-year-old birthday parties.
I’m waiting for my parents to arrive so we can celebrate my Dad’s 75th birthday. Then I head to Pompanuck Farm in Cambridge, NY for a Creative Workshop engineered by author Jon Katz and his wife, artist Maria Wulf.
The Creative Workshop is the kick off of a weekend of poetry, art, and theater, of celebrating the anniversary of becoming a Mom a second time and feeling strangely optimistic about a future that includes a life as a working artist. And in the quiet of my kitchen, the only thing I can feel right now is incredibly grateful for this life. I’m even grateful for the rain.
The New Zucchini
5 x7
Watercolor
It’s about to be a good apple harvest. When I go out to the laundry line near our apple grove, the air is thick with the scent of ripe fruit, and the occasional boxes or laundry baskets of free apples alongside the road suggest quite a few other families are having the same luck.
Apples may be in danger of becoming the new zucchini.
The Honor Box 5 x 7, Watercolor
I’ve been stuck on this picture for a few days.
At first it was just a collection of memories of the Big Guy hopping out of the car on the way home for the last thing on our shopping list.
Now I realize I’ve been a using it to stay connected with our very small world, where people still leave doors unlocked, kids walk in the woods alone and people from completely different walks of life can solve the world’s problems over a heated discussion at the country store and still lock arms for a square dance at the annual ox roast.
They’re little things in the grand scheme of things like a sporadically imploding economy, violence and a deteriorating environment, but there’s something good in keeping the honor box healthy and being able to see the things that bind us more brightly than the things that can divide and destroy us. So when I paint the cooler with the brown eggs and the honor box over and over again, it’s not an escape. It’s an exercise in optimism.
The white junk that must not be named is coming, and I didn’t need any mystical signs to tell me so. It was actually a piece of calico covering the Fresh Eggs sign that hangs over the cooler – normally loaded with an honor box and recycled, fabric-covered cartons of large brown eggs – at the end of the town road that signaled that the town’s poultry population has moved into winter production mode.
Okay, maybe a fat quarter is a pretty mystical signal. Either way, it looks like S*%@ is coming.
The problem with kissing frogs is that you can actually get pretty close to a handsome prince and not even know it until you’re ripping the paper on your watercolor board because you couldn’t wait long enough for it to dry.
The other problem is that you get to like kissing frogs. So much so that at 1AM it’s really hard to decide if you have time for just one more smooch or if sleep is really all that necessary. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Storm over the Equinox Watercolor 5″x5″
Saturday, Thing2 packed up his origami books and I packed up my watercolors and doodles and drove over to the Harvest Festival in Arlington, VT.
We didn’t expect to retire on our earnings (there was a mega old-time fair in nearby Peru, VT on the same day drawing serious crowds), but it was the biggest craft market of the year in our town, and we thought we might be able to buy an ice cream at the Dairy Bar when the day was over.
So we setup the tent, hung a few paintings and magnets and origami swans and sat down to wait.
We didn’t sit for long or for long throughout the day.
I had hoped to sell a few magnets but was happily shocked when watercolors – even ones I thought were borderline duds (and had almost made into bookmarks) – started coming off the pegboards and out of the tent. T2, who was watching my sales closely, began mentally converting dollars to chocolate sprinkles and adding a bounce to each step.
I could do this, whispered a voice inside my head. Wait, I think I am doing this.
T2 must have a direct line to the chorus in my head because as I sat down for a break, he wrapped his arms around my neck and said, “Mom you should just sell your pictures for a job.”
You gotta love getting job advice from someone who hasn’t yet been told by the world (and he ain’t gonna hear it here) that you can’t make a job out of art or music or anything outside an office. It’s delivered with just enough conviction to make you realize that it may actually be happening.
I hugged him back and said, “That’s a pretty good idea, buddy.”
And that’s reason #5628 why I love that kid. I ended up taking them all out to dinner.
Take Me Home, Watercolor 12×18
A day of rest can mean a lot of things.
Around here it means inking a cartoon and finishing a banner for a website and a day of painting.
This is the final version of a painting that began with Kissing Frogs. One of the things I’m slowly learning is that you have to draw a line in the sand and tell yourself the work or painting is done – even if you think there are things you could have done better. It’s the only way to keep moving forward.
If you are interested in purchasing this piece, please leave a comment or message me at rachel @ rachebarlow.com
St James Harvest Festival, View from Burdett Commons
As TS Eliot once said, most of the stupid stuff in the world was done by bloggers with good ideas and not enough caffeine. Or something like that.
In my case, the good idea was consolidating my online split personality into a more cohesive unit under my own name. Yup, riding the high from a successful craft/art fair last night, I was ready to take all the stuff on these pages – the toons, the tales, and the ahtsy stuff – and call it put it all under the heading of My Sketchy Life (which is pretty accurate). And I got it all moved nicely to http://www.rachelbarlow.com.
You can still get to new Toons and Picking My Battles stuff from days of yore by typing http://www.pickingmybattles.com into your browser.
And you can click Home and look at Art (or Ahht if you’re from New England pronunciation of the word) or find a new HOGA pose (Thing1 and Thing2 were working on Brotherly Hoga last night).
But (here’s where the stupid stuff comes in) you might not get all the goings on in your inbox (hopefully you’re here anyway). As the caffeine left my system, I managed to remove the feed that sends this chaos to your inbox. Said feed should have redirected here, but if you come to this page wondering where the heck your next diet cartoon is, it’s here.
You just may need to re-enter an email address to get it in your inbox.
Management is having a good talking to with the webmaster this morning who has decided, after a night of good intentions almost gone awry, not to risk any further snafus and leave cleaning for another day.
The kids bring back all sorts of great things from school these days – new ideas, art projects, strep. Which is how I ended up on the studio futon snuggled under my official Full Moon Fiber Arts studio quilt with the studio cat showing me his best head butt maneuver. Once he had his fill of being petted, he joined me in an official studio nap. He apparently thinks that I should be doing way more cat doodles.
Picking My Battles 