Three Cats Napping

 All three cats are not usually together, but today they are!

LaGuardia Dance Ensemble Performance

Daya performed tonight for a cancer benefit.

She's part of the LaGuardia Dance Ensemble, which is a select group of LaGuardia dancers.
They only take 15 kids and it is audition-based.

Here she is after the show right before we left. She was amazing and I am very proud of her.

Studio Progress

I got a LOT done in the studio clean-out.
I destroyed and discarded many, many old paintings.

For the ones I am keeping, some will go back on the wall but most will go into storage.

The top of my shelving is storage for things that should actually be stored.

Isis supervised the whole process.

The Cloisters in the Snow

We got SNOW!!

The pretty kind of snow!

I met up with Kedrin, Bitz, Kim, and Grace at The Cloisters and we had a lovely day.

I took a lot of pictures because I always do.

I painted over to the right yesterday in this photo.

This sheep is my new pet; I love him.

This doesn't photograph well, but the panes of class are all pale multicolor tints.

This is a fine example of medieval parenting.

I want to see the other pages in this book!!

The Cloisters Plein Air

My friends and I are going to The Cloisters on Sunday.
I didn't know where to go painting today, and I realized I haven't been up t Ft Tryon Park in way too long, so I decided to make a weekend of it.

Saturday painting, Sunday going to the museum.

This painting took about 4 hours.

It is 8x10 oil.

I met a lot of really cool people. Someone gave me a flower.  Another person came by and said "You sure picked the right place, it smells great over here!" but what they were smelling was my painting medium which is made with lavender spike oil.  It does smell pretty good.

This was a difficult painting but I think I have improved since Dec 2020 when I did the front of the building. (Which I need to go back and paint again.)

The initial drawing

The park was pretty.

Graphite and Cats

 Here's a quick 2 hour study of a Bouguereau painting, I'm going to leave it unfinished I think.

And the cats were snuggling in Daya's room.
I love when they snuggle.

Studio Cleanup & Other Stuff

 I have been s l o w l y been going through the chaos pile where my couch used to be.  I have old paintings that need to be destroyed and discarded, and I just need to get rid of junk in general.

So I have been working on the storage that's on the top of my studio shelving.

I threw away so much, it feels great.

In the midst of Really Old Stuff From Pratt, I found my Templeton animation cel that I thought missing for good since.... since my first apartment in Astoria!

Front

back

Full cel with production marks!

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Also while going through ancient archives, I found this historical relic handbook:

My mother and aunt were freaked right the hell out about Y2K, the disaster that never was!

Me? I couldn't care less. Like not even a little bit.

They annoyed me by sending me printed websites with paranoid fear-mongering information and also they thought it was fine to add my email to email lists without my consent.

So I got flooded with Y2K spam.

I also think "helping others understand..." if they think differently from you is a really arrogant and condescending mindset. Have your beliefs but stop trying to impose it on others!!

Religions can be like this too with their "think like we do" conversion mindset and this absolutely definitely applies in the case of my family. And if there is a fear bandwagon to jump on... they're right there.

It was very annoying.

I can't get on-board with paranoid hysteria.  I just...couldn't back then and I can't now.

This 72 hour checklist is pretty fantastic...

It lists, among other things, "stress relief" (do they mean alcohol, which is not listed?) and.... a hatchet, which I hope is not the intended stress relief item.

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Oh, ok, some art... I have been working a little in my sketchbook this month, face practice but I havent posted it anywhere.

Tonight I went to the Reuters art session and just did what they were doing since I didn't have something specific going on.

I don't think the photo we worked from is a good reference because it was all airbrushed out but whatever. Some drawing is better than no drawing.

Graphite

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And here are some cats: