Seasonal Straddle

It was warmer today, and we're in the last week of February.  

It's a miracle with promises of tulips around the corner.

Chicken Soup for the Bod

Hey all!  My "About Me" says I talk about food on this blog, but I've decided to stick to art and/or art inspiration on livedrawpaint.  If you want to see my foodie creations, jump over to my listentomypielady.blogspot.com for things like this luscious elixir below.

Nate Milton "Feelings" Video

Being a fan of celebrating the loveliness of little things in life, you'll understand why I am equally in love with this sweet video I found on Vimeo by Nate Milton called "Feelings." In his words, "For three weeks, I wrote down any thought, image or memory that gave me a tingly feeling. I animated the list, and what it accidentally became was…" Enjoy! At the end of the clip above, there was a link to another video. Here is a gem of sophisticated canine humor (a category I just made up, but in light of the upcoming Oscars tomorrow night, one that the Academy should definitely think of including!)--I was laughing out loud! I'm imagining he took inspiration from the film "Amelie" as the French narrator says things like, "Orson detests the rain. He enters it to spite it and to piss on it." "Orson is depressed. He's been painting morose watercolors (omg-love it!) and thoughtless still lifes." This Nate Milton is a genius!

Three Deer

Driving home a new way tonight, I saw a wondrous sight.  Three deer crossing the road in front of me.  Such a beautiful gift from nature set against Her less generous gift of cold winds and swirling snow.

Watercolor, Acrylic, and Ink

140 lb. Arches Watercolor

RIP Philip Levine

Goodbye, Philip Levine, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, and champion of the working class.

Quote from interview with the Paris Review:

"I realized that I wanted to enter my life exactly as I had the first time, but with one huge difference:  this time I wanted to love my life and myself."

And this beautiful line of observation from his poem, "The Last Shift" on the closing of the Detroit Packard plant (Hear in his own voice from the Detroit Free Press here):

"A police car dozed across the street, its motor running. I could see the two of them eating jelly doughnuts as delicately as two elderly women and drinking their coffee from little styrofoam cups."

When a writer or poet dies of such import--no, I will say of any import--I visualize their beautiful words, swirling around and within their souls, down into the ground, into the flames, into the sky, forever and always intertwined with their essence of existence and a gift to anyone--that number ever diminishing--who will hear and read them.

Click here for the NY Times Obituary. 

Click here for Comcast's Obit, which was very good, but which disappeared from the main page after just a few hours to be replaced by a star's 2nd pregnancy announcement.  For a reason such is this, I write this blog.

Any finally, this excellent clip of the film, "Packard:  The Last Shift."  Please watch, it's so good, haunting, moving.

 How he started.

Falling Hearts - SOLD

Falling Hearts

8" x 10"

140 lb. cold press watercolor paper

Acrylic, gouache, ink

Annie Lennox Put A Spell On You 2015 Grammy's

Annie Lennox SHUT it DOWN!  This woman had the entire Grammy's audience in the palm of her hand.  Hozier was lovin' it, too!  Here is true musical greatness!  The fireworks really start at 2:44.  Watch it and bow down to a master vocalist!

Annie Lennox (with Hozier) 2015 Grammy's

Here's the link.  

Let me just say, I was feelin' a little glum earlier in the day (see my prior post), but this performance, I feel empowered and ready to take on the world.  Thank you, Annie.  It will go down in history.

Here's this post from theremina on Tumblr:  Annie on Ageism:

theremina:

"There’s this youth culture that is really, really powerful and really, really strong, but what it does is it really discards people once they reach a certain age. I actually think that people are so powerful and interesting - women, especially - when they reach my age. We’ve got so much to say, but popular culture is so reductive that we just talk about whether we’ve got wrinkles, or whether we’ve put on weight or lost weight, or whether we’ve changed our hair style. I just find that so shallow."

–Annie Lennox (born 25 December, 1954)

Happy 60th birthday, you badass!

Blue Veins by The Raconteurs

The grey skies have got me down.  This song by The Raconteurs got me out of it.

Listen, I ALWAYS have music playing.  I don't just post songs to flush out my blog posts.  This is just how much music means to me and always has.  You ever hear of that theory that if you're feeling down, listen to something that correlates and it will bring you up?  I think it's true.  Anyway, I felt better after listening to this 12 times in a row. Ha!  Truth is, the last week and 1/2 I have been watching/playing on my computer, "It Might Get Loud," the 2008 film about music--the love of the guitar, mainly--featuring Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White.  Wait, what does that have to do with anything?  Oh yeah, there was about a 2.5 second clip on "Blue Veins" so I had to listen to the entire thing.  That's how I got here.  Glad I clarified that for myself!

Here's what I drew while listening to it.  I could have done something productive, like get my tax receipts in order, but, uh, no.  Not happening.  I suppose it might look scary to some, but you can't worry about that.  If I did, I wouldn't be drawing/painting anything.

The Grammy's are just under an hour away--hope you're going to be watching them with me.

Blue Veins - Raconteurs Live in Holland

This concert is phenomenal--thank you mlove87 for posting it!  

See my post on "Bang Bang" and/or "Ax Man" for another spectacular song.   

Wish I could have been there...

Smudge

Smudge

Ink and Charcoal

Jack Kerouac - The Haunted Life

I've been reading Jack Kerouac's The Haunted Life.  Did you know that Kerouac thought that he had possibly lost the manuscript in a taxicab?  Turns out that was not quite the case.

According to the Todd Tietchen in the book's introduction,

"The lost manuscript resurfaced as an entry in the Sotheby's auction catalog in June 2002, fifty-eight years after its disappearance.   The manuscript had been willed to the seller by his longtime domestic partner, who claimed to have discovered it decades earlier in the closet of a Columbia University dorm room. ...Kerouac had spent October 1944 living in Allen Ginsberg's dorm room at Columbia..."  

Tietchen continues:

"While the thought of his manuscript making the rounds of Manhattan's streets in the backseat of a yellow cab probably struck Kerouac as both poignant and romantic, the truth of the matter seems to be that he had left the manuscript in Ginsberg's room after accepting a berth on the merchant vessel Robert Treat Paine (only to jump ship in Virginia and head back to New York).  Why he subsequently lost track of the manuscript is impossible to say, though, true to its title, The Haunted Life eventually rematerialized in public sight like an apparition whose business in the world had been cut unexpectedly short."

Isn't that last sentence fabulous...rematerialized in public sight?  Let's luxuriate in the beauty of words.

Well, I don't know about you, but I also believe in poignant romance.  Here is my imaginings of Kerouac pounding the streets the NYC, desperately wondering which cab speeding by him carried the missing pages of his potential masterpiece.  Perhaps the sheets were flying out the window, taking on a further life of mystery, swirling through the air and absorbing more life than what already was contained on the page.

P.S.  I just thought of something!  Have any of you seen 2000's Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas and Robert Downey, Jr. and originally written by Michael Chabon in 1995?  (One of my top ten favorite movies by the way.)  There is a scene at the end of the movie where innumerable pages dance there way off into nowhere as well.  I'll have to watch that DVD for the 358th time.

February 7, 2015.  HEY peeps, here's an update, and it comes courtesy of Buzz Bain, a FB friend, from Oregon.  Check out the original blog post at www.potrzebie.blogspot.com   and check out the video of Kerouac's artwork from the New York Public Library's Kerouac collection.

Transcontinental Baby and Dog - For Sale

Transcontinental Baby and Dog

16" x 20"

I think you can actually see the shimmer in the background and the textured clouds in this shot.

Greeting from below.

Floating Features - No longer Available

Floating Features

I wanted to keep this loose, off-center--to allow the eyes and the mind to fill in curves and angles.

To see something from the center, left, and right, 

turning it around and around in order to open perception.