Artist Obsession

 

Don’t let me alone in an art supply store. I am obsessed with any kind of paint, paper or canvas and will buy the whole store if I could afford it.

I am obsessed with experimenting with any type of creative painting endeavor; even if it flops I still try. I have had many flops, expensive flops, ugly flops and scratch my head wondering, what the heck is this flops?

My artistic inspirations have been an obsession for as long as I can remember; I sit with my pallet of rainbow colors and create series of landscapes, bouquets of flowers, girl’s faces and abstracts.

Sepia mountains, Mayan Blue skies, Green Gold stems, Bloodstone Genuine shadows, Aqua seas, Greens trees, Red sunsets, Orange lipstick, Yellow Moons, Indigo winter skies. The combination of colors and subjects is endless.

I wonder sometimes if I have selective obsessive compulsion with my own creative process and I get a visual high from completing a painting.

My art is an act of love and is an obsession I crave constantly.

Actually creating art is a positive obsession for me and fuel for my creative expression. It is a need, want, insatiable desire to delve deep into the watery abyss of my unconscious. As an intuitive artist I am lost in the process, loss of time and space, mysterious, in love and open to the entire vast universe and my muse.

Every sit down with paint and paper is an act of validation of the artist I am and will continue to be so. I find myself to be quite lucky to have this exceptional obsession of creating art. Every I look forward to learning something new through experimenting.

It is my deepest wish for everyone to find their own artist obsession and expression to bring about joy and self-discovery that art brings.

Georgia P

4.9.21

The Glory of that Garden

 

As I leave work tired, drained and famished from another day of work with the grammar school population, I start the uphill walk to retrieve my car.  I think about how much I love my job and I feel positive. Then, thoughts of home and the responsibilities of taking care of everything by myself fill my head and my mood starts a downward spiral.  As both positive and negative thoughts carry out a balancing act in my brain, I try to keep focused on the long walk to my car.

The next moment…there it is! The most beautiful rose bush I have ever seen in my life, dancing with the wind in the front yard of a garden filled with flowers of every color! The red and white swirl of each individual rose is an artist’s palette where colors are mixed gently until just right. How beautiful is this colorful mix of red and white in a common garden of solid-colored roses.

As I stop to admire the beauty of this moment, some of the flowers have become delicious candy canes with patterns of interchanging red and white. The same candy canes that I loved to eat and hang on the Christmas tree when I was a little girl.

I’m so drawn to this rose bush that I get up the nerve to stop and take a picture of it, even though I’m fearful that the owner of the house will come out and not be happy at all.  The beautiful red and white petals start calling to me, “Come back during the moonless night tonight and bring a scissor with you. Then you can snip some of our flowers and enjoy them at home. Not many people seem to notice or appreciate us, including the homeowner, so it will be alright if you sneak a few.

I continued in the direction of my car and actually toyed with the idea of waiting to nightfall to do exactly what that beautiful rosebush told me to do. Then, I asked myself, “Where in the world did I park my car?” Only to practically bump into it because of my fascination with artists’ mixing shades of red and white paints and candy canes at Christmas time. My next thought as I sat down in my car and put my key in the ignition was” wow, I think I’m definitely more tired and famished that I thought I was. It’s time to drive straight home!

Ellen G.

Blossoms Galore

  I am fortunate my home rests on a piece of land that measures 100 by 75 feet. It enables me to have gardens both in the rear as well as the front of the house. In the warm weather I maintain a variety of flowers in the front and spend much time working in the garden. Doing so has rewarded me beyond my expectations. When in the garden, a young man and wife together with a young child about 3 years old were walking in front of my house. I asked the couple if it was okay for me to give the  child a flower. The answer was in the affirmative, so I clipped a blossom and handed it to the youngster. The response was a large smile with the father asking my name and shaking hands by our rubbing elbows with each other. 

  Two blocks from my home, is a pre-kindergarten school. When the weather is warm, the teachers take a groups of children for a walk in the neighborhood. Occasionally they walk on my block and pass in front if my house,. It does not happen often and I may not be working in the garden when it does occur. When I am there, as they pass I ask the teachers if I am permitted to give each child a blossom. The answer is always, “Yes “ and  I clip a flower for each child who when receiving it, smiles and says thank you. It makes all my effort working in the garden well worth it. The children’s response for the blossom is for me a human blossom.  

Ben Haber

Writing Assignment: Personification

 This story is loosely based on 

Aesop’s Fable of the Fox and the Crow  

 

Once upon a time in a dense forest a fox was strolling around hungry, he had not eaten in a few hours and his stomach was rumbling. 

“I am hungry,” said the fox. He spotted a long-tailed swallow in the maple tree with a piece of fresh sausage he stole from the butcher in his mouth.  

The long-tailed swallow was struggling to balance itself on a slim brown branch.  

The fox looked up and remarked to the bird “Hello birdy, how are you today?” 

The bird looked at the fox but did not say a word because he didn’t want to lose his sausage. 

“Dear birdy you are so beautiful, I bet you have a heavenly voice, can you sing me a song?” crooned the fox. 

The bird said nothing because he knew not to trust a fox. 

“I bet you would love to be called the King of Long Tailed Swallow birds with that lovely voice you have,” said the fox. 

The bird wished so many times of being the King of the Long-Tailed Swallows and forgot about the sausage. He opened his beak to sing a bird song and the sausage fell on to the rocky ground and the fox quickly ate it up.  

“Yummy” said the fox. “Lovely song and delicious sausage.” And the fox walked off with a full stomach. 

Moral: Flattery can be a form of deception.

Georgia P.

4/2/21

The Taste and Smell of Covid

Weekly Writing Prompt:

All sensory experiences (not just taste, touch, sight) can fuel the time-machine that is our life.  Sound and scent are also powerful triggers.  Have you ever, for example, heard a piece of music, a popular song perhaps, and hearing it suddenly shot you back to another time and place when perhaps you first heard it, or heard it often, and thinking about it, you suddenly realized that the particular time and place when you were hearing that music was meaningful to you, or it is now, thinking back on it?   Have you ever smelled a perfume, or perhaps the fragrance of some food cooking, that did the same to you?  If yes, write a piece describing both the occurrence of the trigger and the time remembered. 

This is an interesting assignment; I caught Covid just about one year ago. It robbed me of my sense of smell and taste. From my doctors point of view it will eventually return. Covid caused nerve damage and this type of damage takes years to recover. My poor brain must be working hard to rewire my senses back to normal.  

Lack of ability to smell or taste has not stopped me from eating, I know what my body craves so I eat it. I am keenly aware that what my eyes are seeing are memory recalls of foods I have eaten in the past. That sounds strange but I am recalling the tastes and smells with memory. 

Sometimes I get so frustrated while trying to eat because I know I am not getting the full tasteful benefit of a meal. I confess that in moments like this I throw everything away.  

For many weeks now I have a constant strange smell and taste. It is unidentifiable. I can’t recall any smell or taste like this. In a word it is like spoiled peanut butter. A while back for many weeks everything smelled and tasted like Sulphur. The kind of Sulphur from onions that have been in a container for too long.  

I go to the gym in hopes that by keeping my bones moving and blood circulating these two senses will come back more quickly. It’s just my theory but I will keep trying.  

In the meantime, I will continue to cook and eat and wait for my recovery.

Georgia P.

3.26.21

Time for a Change

Well, I have come up blank for several days now in reference to our recent writing assignment. I had considered borrowing someone else’s life, remembering their experiences instead of my own but decided against this course of action, as being a desperate attempt at inspiration and in poor taste, also, probably a form of identity theft. As I stared blankly at the empty page before me, my eyes wandered to the rectangular lump sitting in my left front pocket. So, I have decided to take the radical action of side-stepping our literary exercise this week and instead drawing my attention to the entropic descent of my wallet into an abysmal black hole of financial chaos! I am not referring to bank accounts or savings but rather the poor condition of that leather file cabinet that sits in my left front pocket with its strong leathery smell of the disintegrating structure, bursting at the seams with all sorts of extremely important papers including my selective service card, just in case the federal government decides to draft 65 year olds! The stitching is in disrepair, the plastic credit card and picture holders are in a translucent rotting heap wrestling with each other, no longer able to properly display their contents. The change purse no longer cooperates with its only assigned task of snapping closed! The bill fold is still there, flopping over like a beaten down boxer no longer able to keep his head up. Inside this dastardly mess the bills are not in any proper order discernible to civilized man.

Inside this leather fighting cage, George Washington is standing on his head, his clones either face the leather exterior or appear to be facing each other involved in a sibling rivalry. They are torn, cracked, or in a state of disrepair. Abraham Lincoln is dog-eared, folded over on the corners and has graffiti on his saddened face in the form of a pair of drawn in eyeglasses as if holding the country together during the civil war were not enough stress for one lifetime, and afterwards being assassinated for his trouble. Alexander Hamilton is suffering from a fissure, scarring his face and has been taped back together at some time in his past with old yellowing worn out tape. It occurs to me that this is not a proper way to honor our Founding Fathers! These Presidents along with Andrew Jackson, courtesy of the twenty dollar bill, who was never very agreeably in life, all covet the position of Ulysses S. Grant’s representation on the $50 bill, in his clean crisp suit along with Benjamin Franklin on the $100. bill, both being treated with respect and saved in a drawer for special occasions like Birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, Confirmations or Weddings. Thomas Jefferson’s portrait on the obverse of the $2 Silver Certificate bill is rarely seen these days. As soon as this bill is found in circulation it is snapped up for a numismatist’s coin collection. Poor Thomas never gets to circulate and socialize, a monetary pariah locked away in stuffy coin collections.

 President William McKinley on the out of print $500. bill can be viewed at the Smithsonian Institution along with Grover Cleveland on the $1,000, James Madison on the $5,000, Simon P. Chase on the $10,000 and Woodrow Wilson on the $100,000 bill.

 The ladies of prominence in our history have also been completely neglected with the exception of Martha Washington who graced the reverse of a $1. Silver Certificate in the nineteenth century, but still required a chaperon by her husband George Washington. Harriet Tubman is still waiting in the wings to be honored for her courageous work with the Underground Railroad along with many other people who contributed to the tapestry of our history.

 

I digress, it is time to go get a new wallet.

 

Jim March

2021

Color of Sunrise

 

I get up early, 5 am or 6 am and in winter it’s still very dark at that time. Over the past three weeks when I got up it was quite light. However, with daylight savings time it is now dark again at 5 am and 6 am and that is fine with me because I get to see the sunrise every morning and admire how the earth changes its axis. 

Today’s sunrise was very clear with pink and orange and blue gray in the sky with long stringy dingy clouds struggling to pass by. 

Yesterday’s sunrise was light gray with tinges of blue and cloudy and breezy cold with rain sprinkles all day.  

One sunrise last week was made for vampires; foggy, quiet, dense, wispy white fog that is thick and cold. Since I live across the street from a very old cemetery I watched carefully to see if vampires might escape from the decaying mausoleums with broken windows. I didn’t see any but I did see burgundy and green gray geese flying by honking at one another. 

The smaller birds are still sleeping at sunrise. Brown sparrows, black with gold speckle starlings, royal blue shiny crows, golden brown peregrine falcons, multi colored pigeons and white sea gulls do not venture out of their hiding places until there is first light. This is when they gather on the overhead wires outside my window chirping for their breakfast.  

I tear up some white bread and my two cats are at the ready to watch and hope to catch a bird. My cement windowsill attracts quite a few brave birds while others will only eat from the bread on the sidewalk.  

Tomorrow is the Spring Equinox, the yellow sun will rise about 7 am and set around 7 pm which is quite nice for fragrant blooming spring flowers and sun showers, umbrellas being swept around in rain and fresh green buds popping off trees and bushes.  We are heading to summer with sunrises that will be earlier and sunsets that are later.  

As for me I will rise early and glimpse the sky with its rainbow of colors and welcome another warm, bird chirping, cup of tea with milk, full of life day.  

Georgia
3.20.2021